I
throw open the doors, to let in the wind and the cry of the world. -
Ophelia
 |
Ophelia, John Everett Millais
Image by Barnaby Thieme |
While
not well known to English-speaking audiences, Heiner Müller is
considered by many Germans to be a leading dramatist of the twentieth
century. Many of his plays rework classical myths or stories in a
struggle to make sense of the collision between mythology and
ideology in post-war Eastern Europe.
His
Hamlet Machine is a
postmodern masterpiece and a harrowing portrait of life under
totalitarian rule. Much of the complex play consists of dramatic
monologs, dense with allusions to Shakespeare's play and other works
of European culture.
The
Hamlet-actor begins in Brechtian mode, aware of his own role in the
ensuing drama, announcing: “I was Hamlet. I stood at the shore and
talked with the surf BLAH BLAH, the ruins of Europe in back of me.”
(1) These lines echo the Fisher King of T. S. Eliot's "The
Waste Land," who “sat
upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me”. (2)
Like
Eliot, Müller also presents “a heap of broken images,” where
mythological symbols flail like broken engines, gesturing wildly
toward inhuman meanings.
In
Shakespeare's play, it will be recalled, the hero's father fell
victim to murder at his uncle's hands, abetted by Hamlet's complicit
mother. Hamlet Machine describes the funeral thus: “The bells
tolled the state-funeral, murderer and widow a couple, the councilors
goose-stepping behind the highranking carcass' coffin, bawling with
badly paid grief”. (3)
Müller's
inspiration for Hamlet's father was Traitscho Kostoff, a Bulgarian
communist who was executed in a Stalinist purge. (4) Contemporary
audiences may sooner think of the bizarre state funeral of Kim
Jong-Il, but the subject of the allusion does not matter. Different actors play the parts, arriving on cue for their prescribed
roles, but the historical drama does not change. Hamlet reflects:
The set is a monument. It presents a man
who made history, enlarged a hundred times. The petrification of a
hope. The name is interchangeable, the hope has not been fulfilled.
The monument is toppled into dust. (5)
History is fixed by a small number of possibilities, pre-determined by
unpersuasive narratives that bind action to violence and oppression.
Even the utopian visions they nominally serve have lost their power to
persuade or animate. One thinks of the technocrats of
Müller's East Germany, tunelessly singing Marxist-Leninist hymns.
As
the play proceeds, the Hamlet-actor tries to reject the role to
which he has been consigned, refusing to go along with this
murder-drama. The dramatic action breaks down, and a political
demonstration explodes onto the stage, suggesting the 1967-8 student
protests in Berlin.
The
Hamlet-actor is swept up in the angry mob and pushed to the police
lines, where, in an arresting image, he confronts his own reflection
in bullet-proof glass, and sees himself facing himself from the
opposite side of the line.
 |
| Heiner Müller |
I look through the double doors of
bullet-proof glass at the crowd pressing forward and smell the sweat
of my fear. Choking with nausea, I shake my fist at myself who stands
behind the bullet-proof glass. Shaking with fear and contempt, I see
myself in the crowd pressing forward, foaming at the mouth, shaking
my fist at myself. (6)
He
responds with rage to his own complicity in totalitarianism, then goes home to watch television, “at one / with my undivided
self.” (7) In Shakespeare's Hamlet, inaction is a fatal flaw, but
when all courses lead to murder, inaction and action
both mean self-betrayal, and purity is found only in death, or, in
its political equivalent, television.
***
“I
am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep.”
Ophelia
chooses suicide instead of murder. Like Nietzsche's ascetic, her
violence turns inward, sublimating her will to power. Her character
represents a type for Müller, a woman whose inflexible moral
code renders her capable of anything.
She
is the “woman dangling from a rope,” suggesting the far-left RAF
terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, whose strident critique of hegemonic
capitalism ignited a series of bank robberies and murders. (8)
Eventually she was captured, and hung herself in her cell.
Müller's
Ophelia would also choose death as a way of dismembering the
mechanisms of oppression:
I smash the tools of my captivity, the
chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home.
I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the screams of the
world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos
of the men I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the
chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. (9)
In
his autobiography, Müller comments “Lenin always said revolution comes
from the provinces, and women are the provinces of men.” (10)
***
Born
in Eppendorf in 1929, Müller spent his childhood under the
shadow of the Nazi regime. In "The Father," an early
autobiographical prose-poem, he describes being woken from sleep when
he was three years old:
In
1933, January 31 at 4 a. m., my father, a functionary of the Social
Democratic Party of Germany, was arrested from his bed. I woke up,
the sky outside the window black, noise of voices and footsteps. In
the next room, books were thrown to the floor. I heard my father's
voice, higher than the other voices. I climbed out of bed and went to
the door. Through a crack I saw how a man was hitting my father in
the face. (11)
Two
officers of the Nazi SA, the predecessor to the notorious SS, took
his father to a concentration camp, where he was held for over a year
for his socialist activities. Müller was shunned as the son of a
criminal, and other boys in his village were not allowed to play with
him.
After
he visited the camp with his mother, he was haunted by the image of
his father diminished behind the wire mesh fence, and later, by
memories of walking for hours in bitter cold to meet his father upon
his release.
 |
Flandern (detail), Franz Radziwill
Image by Barnaby Thieme |
I
wish my father were a shark
Who tore to pieces forty whalers
(And
in their blood I had learned to swim).... (12)
In
these early memories, we find the germ of his later political views.
Müller would remain a socialist for the rest of his life, though
he appears to have been deeply demoralized by Stalin's tyrannical
abuses. He was tolerated as a high-profile artist of the GDR, but was
also a fierce critic of his country. Hamlet Machine was banned
in East Germany until its final days. (13)
Perhaps
in these early memories, we also find the seeds of his feverish,
fragmentary style. Hamlet Machine resembles the disjointed
impressions of a child-dreamer, woken from sleep by disturbing events
for which he has no context or compass.
Perhaps
Müller seeks to bring his audience to that moment of his
childhood, to share with them his epiphany of chaos. It may be the
only truth of which he was certain.
***
“One
can make many things of Hamlet Machine,” Müller said.
“First of all, its unperformability certainly stands for
stagnation.” (14) And the play is indeed notoriously difficult to
stage. The playwright Tony Kushner notes:
Certainly
the most immediately striking fact of Müller's dramaturgy, of
all of his dramatic texts, is that they were written intentionally to
resist production, to make of their production an act of
appropriation. When one first encounters Müller's plays one
worries how they 'should' be done, one searches in vain for the key
to their staging, assuming that the author has hidden such a key in
the text or that it may be uncovered through some sort of
anthropological investigation. Research, and learning, is required;
but ultimately, familiarity with the plays' referents and antecedents
will not reveal how they are to be staged. Eventually any
theater artists intent on doing Müller's works will find
themselves faced with a heady and alarming freedom, for the key to
the staging must, to a far greater degree with Müller's plays
than with any other major body of dramatic work, be invented upon the
occasion – by the historically informed, politically engaged
imaginations of those doing the staging. (15)
This
may gives a clue to the title of Müller's play. It is sometimes
taken to refer to the author himself, i.e., Hamletmaschine (HM) = Heiner Müller (HM). The author himself “carefully
disseminated this interpretation.” (16) But I
prefer to think of the play itself as a meaning-making machine, powered by its interpreters, directors, actors, readers, and audience. All are free to move among its fragments, and to create something for
themselves.
Heiner
Müller's play Hamlet
Machine is available
here
(English, PDF), und hier
(auf Deutsch).
Mesocosm
is a writer and researcher in intellectual history and mythology. His
blog is http://mesocosm.org.
References
1)
Müller H. ed. Carl Weber. Hamletmachine and other texts for
stage. Performing Arts Journal Publications. 1984. p. 53
2)
Eliot T. S. "The Waste Land," lines 423-5, from The
Complete Poems and Plays; 1909-1950. Harcourt, Brace, &
World. 1971. p. 50.
3)
Müller, 1984. p. 53
4)
Müller H. Krieg Ohne Schlacht; Leben in zwei Diktaturen.
Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 1994. p. 292
5)
Müller, 1984. p. 56
6)
Müller, 1984. p. 56
7)
Müller, 1984. p. 56
8)
Müller, 1994. p. 294
9)
Müller, 1984. p. 54-5
10)
Müller, 1994. p. 295
11)
Müller H. A Heiner Müller Reader. The Johns Hopkins
University Press. 2001. p. 14
12)
Müller, 2001. p. 15
13)
Müller, 1994. p. 296
14)
Müller, 1994. p. 295
15)
Kushner, T. "Foreward," from Müller, 2001. p. xvi
16)
Müller, 1984. p. 51
