Epic Theater & Post-heroic Management

View transcript: Epic Theater & Post-heroic Management

Running Text: In the final months of his life, Heiner Müller was fascinated by a little book from the Merve publishing company: Postheroic Management / Organizations, it says there, “are collections of solutions in search of problems, a jumble of topics and feelings” Müller saw the raw material for new forms of drama in the crises of modern business concerns - -
Intertitle: Epic Theater & Postheroic MANAGEMENT / Interview with Heiner Müller “Make more mistakes and make them faster\!” “How else are you going to learn?” The cooked FROG / Dirk Baecker, Postheroic Management, p. 50
Müller: The cooked frog: “One of the stories that management consultants and management philosophers like to tell over and over again in order to make clear how hard it is to get an organism or a business to learn is the story of the cooked frog, which Charles Handy made into a parable. Anyone can imagine what happens if you throw a frog into very hot water. It tries to get back out as quickly as possible. But what happens if you set a frog in lukewarm water and then very gradually raise the temperature? Surprisingly, nothing happens. The frog shows every sign of contentment and starts to be cooked alive without even noticing it.
Kluge: They apply that to organizational theory, a business?
Müller: Yes, yes. It’s not only true of businesses, you can also apply it to the state, to everything. I think it’s really good. It’s similar to what I . . .
Kluge: That’s what you’re reading at the moment. Postheroic Management by Dirk Baecker. What about heroic management?
Müller: Well, apparently that doesn’t work anymore, heroic management.
Kluge: That still was able to believe in something?
Müller: Well, it’s like this. The title interested me, of course, in relation to my work here in the theater, where one constantly discovers that human beings are the real source of irritation, and one can’t deal with human beings heroically. Because human beings aren’t heroic, but rather it goes against their nature to be heroic.
Intertitle: “Epic” / “Dramatic”
Müller: As described in the story of the cooked frog. It’s not a dramatic occurrence, it’s rather an epic occurrence or an occurrence that can be described epically, because consciousness is lacking. The frog doesn’t know what’s happening, what’s happening to him. Because if he knew what was happening to him, then it would be dramatic. But if he doesn’t know what is happening to him, then it remains epic, an epic material. What I find really essential is the cynical point of departure here in the text “Deadlines for Team Work.” I find that really good, because certain values that are still considered sacrosanct, the individual or the personality and so on, are simply assumed here to no longer be given. I consider that another essential point. I’m sorry, I don’t have my reading glasses, and increasingly I need my reading glasses, that’s why I always take them off.
Intertitle: “Management as a form of the art of living” / “A Vedemecum”
Müller: For example, a couple of . . .
Intertitle: “We know more than we know how to say–” “The superfluous is not superfluous \–” Richard M. Cyert / James G. March
Müller: Yes, it deals with building teams, what one needs to consider while doing that: “First, call the group a team, but treat its members like individuals. Nothing more reliably hinders the development of a shared sense of responsibility.
Kluge: I see, that’s something one shouldn’t do.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: So the normal West German manager is inclined to . . .
Müller: It’s describing the mistakes that one ought to avoid.
Kluge: . . . call the group a team, right, but give instructions directly to and communicates directly with the individuals.
Müller: Yes. “Second, remain vague about the allocation of authority over the group and within the group, because then anxieties sufficient to hinder group work develop. Third, overestimate the group’s capacity for self-organization and neglect to indicate clear limits to the tasks, the resources, and the available time. Because then the group is so busy defining its task, struggling for resources, and searching for the goal of its task that correspondingly little time remains for anything else. Fourth, give the team a clear task, but neglect to provide organizational support.” One can . . .
Kluge: That strikes me as if an ancient author were writing a satire about the art of living, have I understood that correctly? Because I asked you, you instructed me urgently, by way of a messenger, to read that and prepare myself, you wanted to talk about it. Naturally I don’t then read it from the perspective of organizational theory or of management, but I read it instead under the assumption that something about it must interest you.
Müller: At night sometimes, yes. And in taxis, too, it’s good reading material.
Kluge: In what artistic form could one write about something like that? Could one write poems about it?
Müller: I think that if one could write anything, it would be poems. I would also find that interesting, because I think it’s rather senseless to write plays about it. I don’t think that would work.
Kluge: In the Third Reich there were plays, dramas, originating in the Finance Ministry, in which Account One, or whatever, does battle with the loss account. The balances appears as the choir. Heavy industry versus agriculture. That is to say that macroeconomic problems are dramatized. I think, though, that it’s nothing that . . .
Müller: There’s also a play by Malaparte in which he attempts to dramatize Capital. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. But it’s rather unreadable and unperformable. I don’t think it works.
Kluge: It’s unperformable.
Müller: No, no. If you start from this assumption, this tenet held by some American theoreticians that one now needs a Hippocratic Oath for computer specialists. What’s important in the universe is not organic life, but rather information. If it turns out that computers, that machines, are better than humans at transporting information, that human beings are no longer an adequate vehicle, then the computer researcher or specialist will have to contribute to the annihilation of mankind, so that computers can take over the information, the transportation of information in time and space. I think that’s a very moral consideration. One can be alarmed by it, but . . .
Kluge: That is to say, not the computers, he doesn’t have to swear a Hippocratic Oath that he, as a computer engineer, will never employ computers against human beings . . .
Müller: On the contrary . . .
Kluge: On the contrary.
Müller: . . . will always support the computers against the human beings if . . .
Kluge: The defense of human beings must not lead to a devastation of the world of computers.
Müller: Yes.
Intertitle: “What is the natural form of knowledge?”
Kluge: If something like the story of the frog triggers a déjà vu effect in the observer, so that there’s suddenly a recognition of how dangerous gradual developments are.
Intertitle: “Human beings have the astounding capacity to deal with poorly defined systems”
Kluge: You can compare that to the decline of an empire, the collapse of an empire, you would notice the same thing . . .
Intertitle: “The frog has to learn to let itself be irritated” Postheroic Management, p. 26.
Kluge: Bathing in lukewarm water leads to collapse without anyone really noticing it. What kind of artistic form does knowledge have? What can one do with it? One knows how a dramatic conflict and climax function, a stretta and a finale, one knows that. What is the natural form for knowledge? In which one so to speak . . . the arts could deal with these questions, which are important enough. They’re also funny. Really, they’re more interesting than love stories. And there are more rules. For example, “Organizations as Garbage Cans.” “We don’t have too many problems, but rather we have solutions. And an organization is really a garbage can, a collection of solutions in search of their problems.”
Müller: In search of their problems, yes.
Kluge: That’s expressed very cleverly and also seems to be correct.
Intertitle: “A cage in search of a bird-”
Müller: There’s a formulation like that by Kafka, maybe that’s an example. Literature can only capture that metaphorically, I think. And in Kafka, I’m not certain if the word order is right: “A cage in search of a bird.” Yes, I think that’s how it goes, right. And that’s a really good way of formulating that.
Kluge: The environment that corresponds to the experience.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: And sometimes there’s . . .
Müller: But the essential thing, I think, is that with literature you can, how should I put this, capture it metaphorically. That is to say that the reader must arrive at the insight for him or herself. And that the way to knowledge . . .
Kluge: . . . Can’t consist of a demonstration.
Müller: . . . not of a . . . yes, exactly. One can’t simply deliver a result, because that doesn’t benefit anyone, that’s not knowledge at all. If one simply presents an apparent or . . . simply says “it’s exactly that” with the solution or simply presents a so-called truth as a result, then no one gets anything out of it, because one has to experience it, one also has to walk the path to that point in order to know what one has found.
Kluge: So if I’m always within a hair’s breadth of something that I consider to be the truth or that I consider worthy of being communicated, that I consider to be an experience when I’m up close to it, then I do what Punch does in the puppet show, he just moves around from one error to another. It’s almost boring when he does something right. And that would be a form. In a sense it would be dramatic sabotage as a form. The sabotage of experience leads to everyone in the audience becoming uncomfortable, and it would be an interesting form, or whole odysseys of errors. It says here in the book, “Commit errors, commit them faster, have a higher turnover of errors, because how else are you going to learn?” It states that here as a principle of organization. These aren’t jokes, but rather it could be an artistic principle, it could be a new type of play. Fundamentally . . .
Müller: Although maybe that’s really not so new at all. It once again reminds me immediately of Japanese theater, or Asian theater. For example - we’ve already talked about this many times before - Bunraku. That’s based on the separation of elements. There are these marionettes that are not quite life-sized, they’re about three-quarters life-sized, with the puppeteers, one, two, or three.
Kluge: Who are also visible.
Müller: According to the . . . the hierarchy.
Kluge: I, as a spectator, see the puppeteers as well.
Müller: Yes, yes, one also sees them, they are shrouded entirely in black. And then on the side sits a narrator or two narrators who are at the same time singers, and they do the dialogue. And the marionettes are moved in an absolutely naturalistic manner.
Kluge: The puppeteers don’t sing?
Müller: They’re silent.
Kluge: The puppets don’t sing either, instead there are specialists for singing, and they’re busy with the breathing apparatus.
Müller: And they sit, visibly, on the side, with instruments too, and sing and speak the marionettes’ dialogue. And by way of this separation one experiences more than one would if everything were done by way of one figure of an actor, a performer.
Kluge: Let’s say, here where we are, the Berliner Ensemble, is on a street called “At the Circus” (Am Zirkus).
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: There’s also a square, here in front, over there, where Brecht’s statue is standing. Theoretically, you could also erect a tent here, and once a year, let’s say in the summer, you could invite or create a circus.
Müller: We thought of doing that, yes.
Kluge: You could do it.
Müller: Yes, yes. It’s just that it’s very expensive, a tent like that.
Kluge: Yes, but if the practical questions . . . you’re also a business that has solutions, so to speak, and that is in search of problems. And this used to be a theater for comic opera, could one say that?
Müller: It was originally a musical theater, in any case. The premiere of The Threepenny Opera ([Dreigroschenoper]) also took place here, did you know that?
Kluge: In here?
Müller: Yes. That’s why Brecht wanted to have this theater, because that was his first success.
Kluge: This original beginning - the words “Am Zirkus” next to the statue very much reminded me of Brecht’s most basic instincts. After all, he constantly tapped into the circus and the cinema and all sorts of other forms that run parallel to the theater. And with Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera he really started the century of the brassy operetta. He tried to develop iron, that is to say, tough, combative musical forms. If one were now to imagine that there were forty, eighty, a hundred plays of that type, then one could say that here you have the possibility of a genre of musical theatre that’s halfway between François Villon and the circus, that’s far away from German classicism. Because Friedrich Schiller doesn’t fit with François Villon, and the circus doesn’t fit with Goethe or Lessing. Could one say that? I’m not certain in Goethe’s case.
Müller: Not like that, you can’t put that so generally.
Kluge: Masquerade fits, processions fit, carnival fits.
Müller: Goethe was just as fascinated by puppet shows . . .
Kluge: That’s true.
Müller: . . . from his childhood as Brecht was fascinated by the funfairs in Augsburg. Schiller is perhaps somewhat different.
Kluge: An inflation of the problems would mean mixing genres arbitrarily.
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: An inflation of the basic patterns on which one can make art, can express oneself. Everyone is allowed to print, so to speak. The emergence of occupational freedom in the arts, a departure from the framework of guilds within which you, among others, have been prevented from working.
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: What does it mean if you, like Freiherr von Stein, allow occupational freedom in the theater, what are the different ways in which one could imagine that? So first of all economic plays, the importation of the whole theory of organizations, of management philosophies into the theater. You could fill the whole canteen with that, you would need more space.
Müller: There are . . . You probably know more about this than I do, I only know it as information, as a report, that theater is used as one of the teaching methods in management schools or courses in Switzerland and Italy. They have to perform plays, really in the sense of Brecht’s theory of the learning play ([Lehrstück]).
Kluge: Self-experience groups, learning plays. Those are basically Brechtian learning plays, aren’t they?
Müller: Yes, yes, that’s the same principle. And the learning play really assumes the suspension of the distinction between the professional and the amateur. And that’s something else that Brecht constantly attempted, he tried to break that open. There’s a perhaps somewhat anecdotal example: He was looking for an actor or a performer who would seem particularly proletarian for a production of The Mother, I think for the scene with the flag, the demonstration. And a repairman came to him, he was from East Prussia, he was the size of a house, six feet three or four in height, a real bear, a heavy man. And he said: Herr Brecht, I’d like to become an actor. And Brecht said: Well, then prepare something, and we’ll take a look. How much time do you need? And he said: Four weeks. After four weeks had passed, all of the assistants and Brecht got together. Then the repairman came to him and said: Herr Brecht, I need another two weeks. Brecht said: Good, two more weeks. So after six weeks the time had come. Everyone sat below the stage, full of anticipation. The actor, the repairman, came onto the stage with a chair. He set the chair down and said: “Have a seat, little mama\!” And Brecht hired him on the spot. An actor would never have been able to do that as well. When you do something professionally, you’re blind to possibilities. That’s the problem with solutions. You always have solutions for everything, an actor always knows how to get his back to the wall in any situation. But for that reason the walls no longer move. It’s the problem of solutions in search of problems.
Intertitle: “Theater as a Detective Agency-” B. Brecht
Kluge: So let’s imagine that Brecht was sitting here with us, as a wise spirit, as Banquo. And he would say that this theater is really a detective agency for the investigation of real conditions. All of the actors must first go out into the surrounding area and bring back news from outside that somehow forms raw material for future plays, but really we’re a detective agency. We are investigators of reality, we turn the whole of sociology inside out. Brecht once expounded upon this at length to Adorno. Adorno had doubts, he wanted to play the piano, he was impatient, he had this stress, that his strategy was different, he wanted to rescue the new music. But perhaps there could have been a way to rescue the new music by way of the unmusical Brecht. Because the idea of this theater as a detective agency is brilliant.
Müller: Yes, there’s another story about Brecht, it was told by Palitzsch, and I always thought it was really good. He was standing with Brecht in the middle loge, I don’t know which performance it was. He saw the audience arriving, and Brecht said to Palitzsch: Look, Palitzsch, that’s the problem with the German theater, they always come in pairs, penis/vulva, penis/vulva, penis/vulva. That’s . . .
Kluge: That’s what Brecht says.
Müller: . . . that’s the point with the brothel, what you were saying, the theater as a bordello, but it’s a substitute for a bordello, because it’s become a social event. And from that point on it’s no longer a bordello. And Tragelehn conducted an experiment in Düsseldorf, and again in Hamburg, for his performance of Waste Shore ([Verkommenes Ufer]), this Medea story. There are two . . . it’s a kind of circus ring, the stage is lower than where the audience sits. And on one side sit the men, on the opposite side the women. They’re divided, and that results in a completely different theater experience for both sides.
Kluge: That would also be really interesting if one were dealing at some point with an erotic topic, or with a contemporary topic having to do with relations between the sexes. And then one would have a segregated audience, like in a puritanical church. There would be a polarization.
Intertitle: Theater as a repair shop.
Kluge: The Berliner Ensemble as a repair shop. Trashy plays like The Beggar Student ([Der Bettelstudent]) or the Fledermaus are brought in, or what other plots are available? The Marriage of Figaro. And then they leave again as good as new, they’re once again roadworthy. That would really be a conception of the Berliner Ensemble, here at the Friedrichstraße train station, that I would find very appealing. And it would also highlight the concrete, hands-on aspect of Brecht. The fact that he says, new production, that’s not appropriate to our time. We’re not a classical time. Everything moves too quickly. We repair. Would he find that strange? I never saw him, but you knew him. Is he also a guild member? For example, when he says, “but the shoe must be respectably made.” Or is he someone who would say that in an emergency you have to modify the concept “shoe?” The felt boots used during the war in Russia were very beneficial, but they didn’t look like shoes?
Müller: I once happened to hear an old recording of Old Heidelberg [Alt-Heidelberg] featuring Max Pallenberg and his wife. I’ve now forgotten the wife’s name, although she was at least as famous as he was. And there’s this duet between the crown prince Karl-Heinz and the maidservant Kathi, with whom the crown prince is in love, and naturally nothing can come of it, it’s a misalliance, and there’s a sad farewell. And there’s a duet where she sings: “I’ve always loved only you, Karl-Heinz.” And he sings: “I’ve always loved only you, Kathi.” And then she says once again: “Karl-Heinz.” “Kathi.” That’s done in an incredibly heartfelt manner. And that’s the model for this duet between Macheath and Polly in The Threepenny Opera, not only in terms of the music, but also in terms of the inflection. “Do you see the moon over Soho?” “I see it, beloved.” When you hear that it’s clear right away that that was the point of departure and the model, it’s based on the most primitive longings and desires, the dreams of servant girls. And The Threepenny Opera is built around these dreams of servant girls. And that’s what gives this play and this opera its real power to penetrate and its explosive force.
Kluge: That’s why it belongs in the Berliner Ensemble, to a certain extent as a case of making something new out of something old, all these old stockpiles of junk, these old tools of the golden operetta, the silver operetta.
Müller: Certainly. Clearly. One of Brecht’s first projects when he came here was to work up As Once in May ([Wie einst im Mai]), I think that’s by Künneke. There was also a . . . in any case Paul Dessau had already gotten money for that, to re-orchestrate that. And that was one of the first projects, nothing came of it. And I think that’s still the problem, you have plans, primarily plans that aim at the use and destruction of clichés, and then at some point you run into the constraints of production, and the plans evaporate. You don’t get to it, but you have to keep trying to get to it.
Kluge: That would be an example of the problem of management, wouldn’t it?
Müller: Yes, yes, clearly.
Kluge: The fact that you say, we have solutions, yes. Brecht had them already. The actors who are sitting here can do that. For Schleef, that wouldn’t be at all unusual, those types of thought processes. And now the problem is the fact that Old Heidelberg is one of the most frequently performed operettas, but in the form it’s in, no young singer can be proud of himself for singing it again. Even the best plays of the twentieth century and the best ideas would only just barely be good enough for the whole vast influx of musicians from the Eastern Block who now have to earn their money in the West.
Intertitle: The Compulsion of the Repertoire
Müller: The problem is the compulsion of the repertoire, of course. It’s madness, there’s a senate mandate that the theaters in Berlin have to account for three hundred performances a year, and really three hundred sold-out performances. No theater in the world can do that. That’s complete madness caused by the financial crisis. And one has to undermine that. And naturally one way of undermining it is by using junk and making junk productive for the other thing, for experiments that don’t initially have an audience.
Kluge: When you stage Wagner, do you think it would be possible not to use an orchestra but instead to use recordings? Would that be a way of performing parts of it here?
Müller: It’s certainly possible, we did that in the Ui performance. Admittedly, we used it very cynically in the finale, because I couldn’t think of an ending. The play is written with an open ending, because the events Brecht was referring to were still in progress, and the only possible conclusion was this almost moralistic appeal. You can’t use that any more now, it doesn’t make any sense now that there’s a historical overview of what happened afterwards. And for that reason it occurred to me that we could simply do an opera finale with everyone on the stage, and everyone would say one more thing from the play. And so it’s an opera finale, and it includes part of Tannhäuser. I think it was music from one of the newsreels in which Wagner was used for ideological purposes. But one could also do it differently. One can definitely . . . I think, for example . . .
Kluge: The beauty of Wagner, because he was also a commercial composer after all. That always comes to the forefront when you perform selections from the gigantic works.
Müller: I don’t think, for example, and this is again based on my experience . . . we have often tried to create incidental music for a performance, new music. It almost never works. I’ve actually reached the conclusion now that one has to use music that already exists, parts of it, that’s much more feasible and also much more functional than creating new music. It obviously takes much longer for music to take hold. And for that reason old music, music that already exists, used in combination with new texts, is always more interesting and fits better than making new music, because it then takes another ten years, twenty years before it becomes old music and before one sees the context.
Kluge: Here’s a fragment of yours, “Quadriga. Germany, a Giant Woman.” It’s actually a very short text, and strangely enough it appears after . . .
Intertitle: Father & Son / Hitler / GERMANIA / 40 Bicyclists / Props, Materials
Müller: . . . “Battle” [“Schlacht”].
Kluge: “Battle,” yes, a very decisive, major text. And I’ve always thought that there was a connection there.
Müller: That was conceived as an intermezzo for “Battle.” But it’s never been done, because it was really written so as to be impossible to perform. It’s impossible to stage it the way it’s written.
Kluge: That makes me think of Richard Wagner.
Müller: It’s possible in the circus.
Kluge: It’s possible in the circus. And if you think of Wagner’s Rhinegold, where you have the Rhine daughters, then those are some of the elements of the stage technology that you would also use here to let Hitler float, to set the grand piano in motion, to set father and son in motion, and forty cyclists dressed in yellow jerseys are nothing Wagner would have considered expensive.
Intertitle: Excerpt from: “Reich Chancellor Pop,” a text by Heiner Müller Forty cyclists in yellow jerseys come on stage ringing and honking / Germania hacks the grand piano to pieces Hitler is transformed into an angel, who circles farting over the audience / Hannelore Hoger as GERMANIA
Müller: For me it was the peace ride, a kind of GDR ritual. But you can also relate it to six-day races. No, at that time I always had the idea that the Volksbühne . . . in every theater you sooner or later get the feeling that there’s no point anymore. You have to do something different. And that’s how I got the idea that the Volksbühne, which has such a beautiful flat roof, that one could . . . the hero at that time was\- of the peace ride, and of cyclists in general\- the hero was Gustav Schur. Maybe you remember him. He was the greatest cyclist of the GDR. And I had the idea . . .
Kluge: Up on the head of the theater, so to speak, you constructed a kind of racecourse . . .
Müller: The idea was for Gustav Schur to ride around in a circle up on the head of the theater.
Kluge: With the necessary lighting effects, those were big floodlights, they then shone on the cyclists . . .
Müller: Yes, yes. Really it’s a play that can’t be done in a theater, it can only be done making use of the theater. There was a precedent that I really liked. At some point I for some reason wrote a short dialogue called Heart Piece [Herzstück]. Perhaps you remember that. And they performed that in Bochum, Langhoff and Karge did, on New Year’s Eve. It started at midnight, there was a platform in front of the Schauspielhaus in Bochum, on the square in front of the Schauspielhaus, there’s a rather spacious square there. A grand piano stood on the platform, and an actor sat at the grand piano, he could also really play piano. And then a city bus came, and the second actor got out with a violin. He could play violin. And he got up onto the platform, and then they competed against each other playing the dialogue, and in the end the violinist was slaughtered by the pianist on top of the grand piano, and the pianist removed a bloody brick from the violinist’s breast. One of the spectators fainted. That was the greatest success of this performance, but it was also something that wouldn’t have worked in the theater, it could only work in the space around the theater. That was then performed again in front of the Gedächtniskirche for the Theatertreffen. And that’s a dream of mine, that one also has to occasionally use theater as a backdrop. It’s just a building, and it exists, but you can leave the building, and the building is only a backdrop, a pretext to do something outside. What’s interesting is that a dismantling of people always takes place on such occasions, and of human bodies as well. Someone’s head is taken off or knocked off and then put back on again. It’s interesting that the absence of language apparently leads to this kind of body language or anti-body language. I think it would be impossible to imagine this text without a symbolic castration. But it all depends on the absence of language. And in the lack of language or through the lack of language, through the refusal of language, of text, a potential for destruction is unleashed that language otherwise covers over and white-washes in a civilizing manner.
Kluge: Covers over. It’s seemingly covered over, while everyone is actually waiting for something to happen.
Müller: For something to happen, exactly. Yes, yes.
Kluge: So really you would say that all of these people possessing the faculty of speech who watch the bourgeois theater are really waiting for a fire to break out in the theater.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: The iron curtain as the most important performer. When it rattles, the event is there.
Müller: Yes, yes. One of the most beautiful theater utopias is the one by, I think the man’s name is Rossanov, a Russian, at the beginning of the century, he translated Nietzsche, his texts are kind of half-essayistic. And he describes an evening at the theater - and the gist of it is: The spectators applaud and the performers bow. The spectators leave, leave the auditorium, go to the cloakroom, the cloakroom is empty, the coats are gone. They leave the theater, and the city to which they want to return is gone, there are no longer any houses. That’s a beautiful theater utopia. The theater exists independently of what happens outside.
Intertitle: Theater Unleashed / Montage of the Attractions
Kluge: What was it that they called “unleashed theater” in the Soviet Union, in the early period?
Müller: I think that had a lot to do with the circus. There was this term, I think it came from Meyerhold: montage of attractions.
Kluge: Montage of attractions?
Müller: Yes. A performance as a montage of attractions. And naturally that comes from the circus. And the essential element is danger. In the circus one waits for someone to fall off the trapeze. And that’s what maintains the suspense.
Kluge: The dramatic suspense.
Müller: Yes, yes.
Intertitle: What is dramatic?
Kluge: What is dramatic, really, according to your definition?
Müller: One can of course say that the basic element of theater, and hence also of drama, is transformation, and that the final transformation is death. So the only thing one can use to unify an audience, that allows an audience to be unified, is the fear of death, because everyone has that. That’s the unifying factor. And that speaks to everyone. Otherwise people have very different interests, very different needs, desires, ideas, and so on. But that’s the only commonality. And the effectiveness of the theater depends on this one commonality. To that extent, theater always involves a symbolic death. And then the critical question is always, and I also wrote about this once, but that’s the problem of theater. Mauser, for example, in which a man is executed. That was once performed, I think, in Argentina, in a penitentiary, by murderers who had been condemned to death. There were only murderers in this prison. And they performed Mauser. Unfortunately, I only heard about this, I wasn’t able to travel there, I heard about it too late. And that must have been an amazing performance. Because in that situation, of course, there’s a completely different relationship to death on the part of people who are just waiting for their time to come. But if one imagines what it’s like when the border between theater and reality is transgressed by the fact that a man who is condemned to death is killed in a play. That’s what . . . that’s the . . .
Kluge: It has a dramatic value and also a completely unique exhibitionary value. It’s more than a circus, it’s basically like the unknown girl of the Seine. It’s now a work that’s moving because it’s authentic. It’s something altogether different. It’s like being in a morgue. It’s knowledge.
Müller: And I fear that the . . . In Shakespeare’s time the theater’s biggest competition came from these bear fights, bear hunts, and the insane asylums, which were open to the public. That’s why there are so many scenes of madness in the plays of the time. Because the theater had to compete with these other attractions. And gladiatorial battles are, of course, a natural extension of the theater.
Kluge: If you take Alban Berg’s play, his adaptation, he started, in 1914, to compose to Wozzeck. That’s music that has to do directly with the war, and specifically with these very gruesome battles around Grodek, where Trakl’s texts also take place, and how an entire, gleaming, non-industrialized Austrian army was decimated within a few weeks. And this ritual sacrifice, so to speak, that’s the heart of this pub scene in the opera, and so on. What is it that makes Wozzeck so immediately moving, isn’t it actually a criminal case?
Intertitle: “Death Kitsch in Verdun–” / “Wozzeck is the open wound”
Müller: What you’re saying now about Alban Berg reminds me: I was just in Verdun to visit these battlefields, and a couple of things really struck me. First of all, the kitschiness of the monuments. They’re really like a caricature of what most people think of as Socialist Realism.
Kluge: That’s where that comes from?
Müller: It comes, I think, from the bad conscience of the survivors. That’s where kitsch comes from. Kitsch for the dead, motivated by the bad conscience of the survivors, and also out of helplessness in the face of death on such a massive scale.
Kluge: Legitimating kitsch.
Intertitle: Epic theater & postheroic MANAGEMENT / Interview with Heiner Müller
Müller: Yes, legitimating kitsch, exactly. And the other thing was, we were in the Fort de Douamont, and in every one of the larger rooms there are from sixty to one hundred twenty dead people behind the walls, under the floor, and so on, whose lungs simply burst when a mine happened to hit.