Staging Forgetting: How Botho Strauß and Heiner Müller Dislocate A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Abstract

Abstract: Comedy may well be the generic form most intensely tied to the contemporary. If contemporariness, as defined by Giorgio Agamben, is “that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism,” comedy stages this relationship by making such disjunctions the prerequisite of laughter while subjecting its protagonists to confusions and anachronisms, in the words of Shakespeare’s Puck, “that befall preposterously” (3.2.121). How, then, does comedy travel through time? How may its disjunctions be displaced to very different circumstances? And how, specifically, can it be rewritten so as to contest the pastness of the past? This article sets out to explore these issues through a reading of two little known, but highly resonant and symptomatic, German stage plays that engage, in rather different ways, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream : whereas Heiner Müller’s Waldstück (1969) relocates the erotic and political entanglements of Shakespeare’s Athens to a workers’ recreation home in the German Democratic Republic, Botho Strauß’s Der Park (1983) tries to reimagine mythic characters and their magic charm under conditions of West German banality. Both merit comparison and study as their project is less directed at remembering and retrieving powerful Shakespearean legacies than marking loss and making us forget their power—comedies which, in Agamben’s sense, hold their gaze on their own time so as to perceive its darkness.