Rewriting, Violence, and Theater: Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken and Heiner Müller's Mauser

Abstract

Much has been written about Bertolt Brecht's extraordinary influence on contemporary theater. This tendency is perhaps best seen in the words ofKenneth Tynan who stated, in 1956: in a generation the world discovers a new way oftelling a story. This generation's pathfinder is Bertolt Brecht, both as a playwright and as a director (qtd. in RooseEvans 68). Brecht's newness—his pathfinding theories of acting and production—has influenced generations in Western Europe, the United States, and the former Eastern Bloc countries. Yet, to use him as a barometer, or as an aesthetic gauge tojudge the relevance and contemporaneity ofa dramatic work oftenfalls short ofits mark. Tfone makes the yardstick for what literature can accomplish today, writes Peter Burger in Theory ofthe Avant-Garde, Brecht himselfcan no longer be judged and the question whether the solution he found for certain problems is tied to the period ofits creation or not can no longer be asked (88). Burger sees that Brecht's works cannot be separated from history. Once they are removed from their ideological and historical contexts, his influential techniques and theories become mere influences or modes of style and imitation within theatrical convention, not avant-garde techniques which aim to undermine traditional experiences ofthe theater.1 There is another way to assess Brecht's work. For critic Martin EssHn, What distinguishes from his contemporaries [. . .] is the fact thathe was able to find a way out ofthe dead end of destructiveness for its own sake (558). In other words, Brecht's plays themselves are serious reflections that are resistant to nihilism. But what does this mean in the realm of contemporary theater? How can contemporary playwrights use without vitiating his project? Critics like Linda Hutcheon suggestthat earlier works can be reinvigorated parodically by contemporaryartists who use them as tools to critique present situations (57). In this critical vein, Heiner Muller uses Bertolt Brecht's play Die Masnahme (TheMeasures Taken) (1930) as the basis forhis playMauser (1970).2 Muller's effective re-writing of Brecht's play injects historical consciousness into perceptions ofthe course ofsocialist and communist revolution in the Eastern Bloc, which changed dramatically between the utopianism ofthe late-1920s and the uncertainty ofthe postwar period. This essay undertakes a comparative reading and analysis ofthe ways in which and Muller grapple with questions ofviolence, particularly when and where it relates to the revolutionary process. In an essay entitled Producing Revolution: Heiner Muller's Mauser as Learning