View transcript: Heiner Müller in Time Flight

Running Text

Ovid’s Metamorphoses deal with transformations / Inexorable suffering compels gods and men to change their shapes / Heiner Müller calls these texts, in which Ovid describes the bitter fate of the defeated Trojans, dramatic / How does this strange contract between generations come about, making 2000-year-old texts relevant today?

Intertitle

Heiner Müller in the Flight of Time / The Contemporary Relevance of Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Kluge

Last time you showed me a book. Where did you buy it?

Müller

Yes, that was in Santa Monica. An enormously fat man who looks like a giant turtle sits there at the end of a long corridor in a used book store with a great selection, especially of old, very old books. This is a 1603 edition of the translation of Ovid by . . .

Kluge

Sir Golding

Müller

Sir Golding

Kluge

It’s in verse?

Müller

It’s in verse, and it’s also rhymed, rhymed alexandrines, an enormous feat. I actually only learned of it by way of Ezra Pound. He mentions it as the best translation in all of English literature. And Golding was apparently - that was the other thing that interested me - it was a source for Shakespeare. Shakespeare read that, and Shakespeare very much lives from Ovid, because they barely knew Greek literature, there was, I believe, no Greek literature at that time, it was only discovered later. They lived from the Latin, from the Roman tradition.

Kluge

That consoled you . . . That was at a time when you were dealing, psychologically, with your illness?

Müller

Yes. The illness was actually already gone in California. Of course not entirely gone, that takes a while. But it’s strange, often, when I wasn’t doing well, I bought myself books, old books. And nothing bothers me more than when books are mishandled. That comes from my childhood.

Intertitle

What’s contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

Kluge

What’s contained in Ovid’s Metamorphoses? That’s obviously a very thick book?

Müller

Yes, essentially it’s . . . It’s an encyclopedia of Greek myths, really, and it mostly deals with transformations. People are transformed into animals, plants, stones, and trees as a punishment or out of a need to escape. And it’s this motif of transformation that makes it theatrical. There’s this story of Niobe, who’s transformed into a stone after Apollo has killed all of her children. There’s the story of Philomena, who’s transformed into a nightingale after she’s been horribly abused, raped, maimed.

Kluge

The Dawn had a child, a son, who dies . . .

Intertitle

“Eos, the Dawn, had a child \-”

Kluge

. . . He’s killed, and she complains. And now, as a form of mercy from Jupiter, after her boy has been burnt on the funeral pyre, birds fly up out of the pyre.

Müller

And the birds wage a kind of war against each other.

Kluge

They start right away, form two parties, and start right away to wage war against each other and to maul each other. Just as the son was killed in a duel. So they repeat that every year, and it has an eternal life. So crows or ravens . . .

Müller

Yes. That’s really the invention of television, as a consolation, as a sedative.

Kluge

Ovid is a vicious author, isn’t he? Obstinate, vicious, rebellious?

Müller

Really, he’s considered a particularly lovely and elegant author on account of his other texts, for instance his The Art of Love, and so on, he even wrote a poem about cosmetics. He was a very courtly and gallant author, and in comparison to Virgil also one who wrote very easily and quickly. And then there was this scandal that has never been explained. Why he was banished has never been explained.

Kluge

He was banished to the Black Sea.

Müller

To the Black Sea.

Kluge

To the Black Sea, to a provincial city of the most remote kind. In modern Bulgaria, wasn’t it? And he suffered terribly, as an urban person.

Müller

He was in exile for ten years, that must have been rather hard for him.

Kluge

He tried to win influence by writing poems for people. He tried constantly to get people to intercede on his behalf by bribing them with poetry, but he died in exile nonetheless.

Müller

The thing I found interesting was that Orpheus, after his wife Eurydike has died from this snake bite, goes into the underworld in order to use his song . . .

Kluge

To win her release.

Müller

To win her release. And he succeeds at that, he is allowed to take her with him, naturally only temporarily, but he is not allowed to turn around, and of course they travel through the dark, and at some point he turns around, and then he’s pursued by Thracian women, these followers of Dionysus. That was in Bulgaria, in Thrace. You can still visit the river where that happened. They pursued him through the forest, and nothing that he had sung about could injure him. They threw stones at him, but of course he had sung about stones, and the stones danced around him. And branches, they hit at him with branches, but that also didn’t work, because he had also sung about trees. And nothing that he had sung about could injure him.

Kluge

Because his mourning was so powerful, the loss of Eurydike was so powerful, that the trees obeyed his song and formed themselves into ranks, the stones arranged themselves into cities, if you want to look at it that way. He was really a genius at bringing about civilization.

Müller

Yes, that’s a different story, that was Amphion, he built a city . . .

Kluge

Yes, but everything arises from mourning.

Intertitle

“The great works arise out of loss.” / Orpheus in Ovid

Kluge

. . . so the great works arise out of loss.

Müller

And then what I found interesting was, this is surely more my interpretation, I didn’t reread this: Orpheus came to a clearing while being pursued, and there were peasants there, they were in the process of plowing, and they ran away from these frenzied women, these women who had become wild. And then the women killed Orpheus with ploughs and hoes, with the peasants’ tools. Because he had never sung about them. He had never sung about labor. That was the interesting thing.

Kluge

He was killed with work implements, smashed to pieces, cut into pieces.

Müller

Yes, and then he was thrown in the river, and his head went on singing.

Kluge

That was the end, according to Ovid, there was no resurrection or anything like that?

Müller

No, no.

Intertitle

Klaus Heinrich’s Ovid Lectures.

Kluge

Klaus Heinrich held some very famous lectures, the only ones that resemble Adorno’s, and he analyzed this Orpheus myth, arguing that if the stones obey Orpheus’s lyre, born of his bitterness, his suffering, and become cities, if the trees obey and become gardens, the animals obey, and they create paradisiacal conditions, that is to say they get along with each other, all of this is destroyed again by labor and industrialization, and broken down into its parts, and he derives this from Ovid. So really from someone who prophesies a great misfortune in the most effortless hexameters or alexandrines that exist. Did he use hexameters or alexandrines?

Müller

Hexameters.

Kluge

A difficult meter.

Müller

At that time it apparently wasn’t. It’s difficult in German. They had a completely different way of counting, it was a matter of long and short, that doesn’t work in German. In German it’s a matter of accents. You can’t divide the language into long and short. And you know from Latin class that the meter is often given priority over the normal accentuation. The meter was binding, and to fit the meter words could also be accented differently than in everyday speech.

Intertitle

Ovid’s Cruelty - / “The Enslavement of the Trojans”

Kluge

And Ovid obviously, the way he describes the pillaging and enslavement of Troy. That’s gruesome, to some extent.

Müller

Yes, or for instance a description like this one. You know the Marsyas story? This singing competition between Apollo and Marsyas, in which Apollo, because the muses have been bribed, they vote for him, and hence he wins. And then he has Marsyas skinned. There’s this painting by Titian, that was a motif for many painters - Marsyas, this shepherd, who competed with his shepherd’s flute against Apollo’s lyre. After this defeat . . . the muses take a vote to determine who has won, and of course they vote for Apollo, and then Marsyas is skinned, his skin is pulled off, and that’s another motif. First of all, it’s described very sadistically, that’s true, it’s very brutal and anatomical. But these tales, these stories are always so expansive that you can pack an enormous number of new experiences into them. For example, what’s always interested me about the Marsyas story is that he then, of course, ultimately wins by screaming, no lyre and no music of Apollo can compete with that. That suddenly becomes a metaphor that’s relevant today, as well, and that’s always the case with these stories.

Kluge

He leaves the realm of art, and by that means he becomes overwhelming. And he’s punished for that.

Intertitle

How long does a contract between generations remain in force? / Are 2000\- year-old texts still relevant?

Kluge

How long does such a contract between generations actually last? So when you now buy yourself an Ovid book, it’s more than 2000 years old. So the man who didn’t pursue a bureaucratic career, because he, no matter what kind of briefs he was writing, they always came out in verse, right? A man whom some consider frivolous, but who is now considered profound, and rebellious and disrespectful towards the state. It’s as if he were your cousin.

Müller

Yes, the awful thing about that is really . . . Last night, because I couldn’t sleep, I woke up at some point and couldn’t fall asleep again, I pulled a book out from somewhere, it was a trivial book about cruelty and sexuality, the torture devices, methods of torture, and so on that have existed in the history of mankind, from the Persians to Rome to the present, and so on. It’s quite spooky, when you flip through something like that and see what all has been invented. And basically, all of that is already there in Ovid.

Kluge

In the friendliest of forms.

Müller

And very elegantly formulated.

Kluge

But without any reduction?

Müller

Yes, yes. And that’s quite strange, and it helps me to understand what Klaus Heinrich means, that Ovid wrote these Metamorphoses as an attempt at constituting, at founding a civilization. But that never works.

Kluge

He tried to found a civilization by calling to mind all of the preconditions for one that have been related in myths. There are, so to speak, converted into our pagination, over 1000 pages, so it’s a gigantic book, and insofar as he calls that to mind, from the beginning of history until the end of Troy and the beginning of Rome, he provides a kind of register of debts and of transformations. Really, it’s hardly a register of consolation. Because for the most part it’s not consoling, is it?

Müller

The consolation is the transformation. If you become a tree, nothing more can happen to you. If you become a stone, nothing can happen to you either.

Kluge

If you die, then nothing more can happen to you.

Müller

Nothing more can happen to you then, either. In any case we assume not, on the basis of our ignorance of the situation after death.

Kluge

Does the obstinacy that you sometimes have, the doggedness, also come from considerations like these?

Müller

That could be, yes. There’s a poem by Brecht that’s relevant in the context of Ovid and the Metamorphoses, and that also has a lot to do with Kafka in terms of its attitude. It ends with . . . The occasion was apparently a jealousy problem, so a woman . . . Brecht was very jealous, a woman took off with another man, and for him that was an experience of annihilation, of loss of identity. And the conclusion is then that he - I can’t recall the exact wording right now \- that he conveys that he now wants to be nothing but paper -

Intertitle

“Un-threatenable dust” / Bert Brecht

Müller

. . . on which something is written. And the goal is really to transform myself - and this is the exact wording - into un-threatenable dust. The only thing that can no longer be threatened is dust.

Kluge

That’s what you were talking about earlier: The actors are afraid, the members of the audience are afraid, the whole society is afraid, the succession of generations doesn’t function, and together, above and beyond the succession of generations, we could build rafts or rush mats that carry us.

Müller

Yes, but this transformation into un-threatenable dust, that has a great deal to do with Ovid, and that also has a lot to do with Kafka.

Kluge

And here now is the description of Troy. If you take the prose text, it starts here by saying . . .

Intertitle

Hecuba, the enslaved queen of Troy / Mother of Hector, Polydor, and of a final daughter.

Kluge

. . . the enslaved queen. The enslaved queen is the wife of Priam, she’s a woman who had many children, in a powerful Troy, the Pearl of Asia, or what is it called?

Müller

Yes.

Kluge

That’s a world that perished. Since then everything has moved towards the West, before that many things moved towards the East. Because human beings originated in East Africa and at first migrated to the East.

Müller

Yes, there’s an idea that the Celts were actually the descendants of the Trojans.

Kluge

Ah, driven from the city, and they never found a state again.

Müller

Yes, yes. Another version is the Etruscans, who are also a mysterious factor.

Kluge

They don’t found a state, either. Their defeat has warned them once and for all against becoming involved with a state. And the Trojans who escaped with Aeneas, they found the super-state Rome. That’s the schism in the world. Where do you belong? With those who belong to a state? Or with the Celts?

Müller

I think I’m very split in this regard.

Kluge

Like a Slav.

Müller

Yes, yes. Perhaps, I don’t know.

Kluge

So you do go to the state. But you don’t stay for long.

Müller

But on the other hand perhaps I need a state . . .

Kluge

In order to resist it?

Müller

As a foil, a resistance. I always work best when there’s a framework that I didn’t create, but which I then fill differently than it has been filled before. A framework like that is a great relief. What’s at the bottom of this is perhaps the fear of founding, the fear of having to assert something. I like it better when an assertion is already there, and I can assert something in response to it. But to have to assert something myself . . . As a child I once read a novel by Mirko Jelusich, you know him too. Those were novels about military commanders, Hannibal and all the others, and I was really struck by a sentence about Scipio or someone, he’s also a very interesting figure, a weeping victor. He had “the round chin of the commander.” Now I can’t claim to have a round chin. That really upset me, when I was ten years old, that I could never become a military commander, because I don’t have a round chin. That’s what I mean by the fear of founding, I think. But that also means that I’m dependent on art, on writing.

Kluge

But an expert on masculinity might say that that was a feminine way of reacting.

Müller

That’s completely right.

Kluge

Founders are different. Theseus, who slays the giants, founds cities, etc., that’s a founder. Jason, Perseus, they’re all founders. What does Claudius say? “My desire is to not be responsible.” That’s a group instinct, it’s something vegetal. If you were to describe your mother and you in this one picture. Can you remember this picture being taken? You have suspenders, and a sign, as was usual at that time . . .

Müller

Yes, I have lederhosen on.

Kluge

Yes, and you had lederhosen on, and your mother, very young . . .

Müller

And very authoritarian, in her gaze for example . . .

Kluge

Energetic.

Müller

Yes, yes.

Kluge

She has the soft chin of Scipio.

Müller

Yes, yes. On the one hand, it was her fear of being photographed, that’s where the stiffness in her gaze, in her demeanor comes from. But on the other hand it was also a gesture of power.

Kluge

She has power, a care-giving power.

Müller

Yes, yes.

Kluge

Are you her messenger?

Müller

Those are questions that are hard to answer. Shortly before she died, for example, I had a dream about her. She died half a year ago, and that was a strange dream, also really frightening. Admittedly, I didn’t know it was her. I dreamed that an old woman with white hair was coming towards me, in the shape of a fury. And when I woke up, I knew it was my mother.

Intertitle

“Troy, the Flower of Asia” / By way of detours, Troy triumphs over the Greeks

Müller

The interesting thing about the Trojan War is this strange detour of history. Troy is destroyed by the Greeks, and the survivor founds Rome.

Kluge

Aeneas founds Rome, which then conquers Greece. But Rome has a completely different spirit than Troy, and its spirit is also completely different from that of the Greeks.

Müller

Yes, clearly. But this need to eliminate descendents, families, is very statesman-like.

Kluge

And completely futile.

Müller

And futile, yes.

Kluge

Futile in a peculiar way, because Rome is the intensified form of Asia in this sense. Because if the Asian element is inherited from the Flower of Asia, as Troy is called - but Hecuba’s daughter is also called this - it returns with much greater strength and burns Corinth. Corinth is destroyed in exactly the same manner as Carthage, as Troy. But the Greeks’ extermination campaign proceeds rather harshly. Hector’s small son Astyanax is thrown from the tower. Nothing related to Hector may remain. The sailors say, though, that the wind is blowing, and we have to move on now. And when they get to Phrygia, Achilles comes out of the grave, like Banquo, and demands . . .

Müller

. . . that the final daughter be killed.

Kluge

And she now dies, really like a young Iphigenia, but more like a young lord who says “I will bring about my own death.” The only concession is that after this girl’s courage has shaken all of the spectators - the heroes and the sailors - the act of mercy really only consists in the fact that a spectator says that now they should not sell the body to her mother for gold, because she doesn’t have any gold anymore.

Müller

I also find another motif interesting. The domestication of women. In Asia women are not domesticated in that sense, in the Asia of that time, in Troy. The domestication of women was a precondition for the founding of the state, the founding of the Roman state. And for that reason then also . . .

Kluge

That means that the defeat destroys all of Troy’s advantages, and what remains is the institutional disadvantage that one develops brutal states that constantly oppress foreign peoples. So only half the principle remains.

Müller

Yes, and there’s also this strange side story that really runs perpendicular to the story of the Trojan War: the story with the Amazons. Something suddenly crosses the path of the story that comes from a completely different Asia, and that really doesn’t belong there at all.

Kluge

One-breasted women, like women who have undergone a mastectomy nowadays.

Müller

Yes, and another story, which I consider the uncanniest story about the Trojan War, is this play by Euripides, Helen.

Kluge

I don’t know that one.

Müller

It’s based on an idea that apparently really originated with Euripides, because it doesn’t occur in any of the other texts passed down from antiquity, so far as I know. Menelaus has Helen on his ship, and they make a stopover in Egypt, and the real Helen emerges from a temple, an Egyptian temple, she was in Egypt all along.

Kluge

She was not stolen by the Trojans at all\!

Müller

And the other Helen was a mirage, and it collapses into dust on the ship at the moment the real Helen emerges from the temple.

Kluge

So that the war was fought over a mirage . . .

Müller

It was a war over a mirage, yes.

Kluge

If you now take 1914, the outbreak of the war that really shaped our century from beginning to end and that at the earliest only ended in 1989, and hence can also not really have ended. That war was not fought over a kidnapped woman or anything like that, but rather there was really no sense to it at all anymore. Why wasn’t the labor movement able to prevent this war, when the whole pathos was that workers’ International would stop wars?

Müller

That was primarily a German problem.

Kluge

But in France the workers also did nothing to stop the war.

Müller

No, but I think that the situation can be best described using the case of Germany. If you start from the assumption that Germany’s last chance to belong to Europe was 1848, and the result of this failed revolution, which became caught up in opportunism, really, and what came out of it was . . .

Kluge

A special development.

Müller

. . . an alliance between the bourgeoisie and . . .

Kluge

reactionary military forces.

Müller

. . . the Junkers and the military

Kluge

The representatives of the past.

Müller

so really the German military machine, and this military machine also absorbed the proletarian, revolutionary energies.

Intertitle

What illusions underlie the First World War? / The German military machine

Kluge

And they resigned themselves in exchange for insurance.

Müller

And then in that sense there was . . . The enthusiasm for the war was so strange in Germany, no other country had the same enthusiasm as Germany. Perhaps that was something like the illusion of being led out of exploitation and back into an earlier condition, into the condition of a hunter. That’s also the significance of von Schlieffen’s strategic ideas about mobile warfare, encirclement without frontal attacks. And that strategy really only failed because of the material superiority of Germany’s Western adversaries. And once this movement came to a standstill, the war was lost. You recall the sentence by Korsch that Brecht cites in his work journals: “Blitzkrieg - bundled leftist energy.”

Kluge

Can you explain who Korsch is?

Müller

Karl Korsch was Brecht’s Marxism teacher, a revisionist with respect to party doctrine, who at some point was also expelled from the party.

Kluge

In 1919, he wrote the only coherent text on what state property should be, which is not really state property at all, but rather the real ownership of labor and of the means of production. He was then a minister in Thuringia for a time, a revolutionary in other words, a minister from the Communist Party, and then a left deviationist within the Communist Party, and then he emigrated to America. The most important non-dogmatic Marxist of the 1920s.

Müller

Yes, I would say that, yes. And the sentence “Blitzkrieg - bundled leftist energy” was his commentary on the Wehrmacht’s campaign in Greece, the attack on Crete.

Kluge

Now try to imagine that a bunch of German philologists and a few disguised Korschians had come as a delegation in the wake of the German troops, as far as Crete, what would they have felt? If you were supposed to dramatize that: a traveling group of schoolmasters, philologists, on a spiritual search for the land of the Greeks, follows the German troops into Greece.

Müller

Well, I think that the fact that the war in Greece was relatively bloodless has to do with the German nostalgia for Greek antiquity.

Kluge

No bombardment of Athens . . .

Müller

There was some kind of respect, and perhaps that was also a kind of aversion towards Rome.

Kluge

There is now information to the effect that during the conquest of the Crimea \- that was the same year, ‘41 - a delegation of classical philologists was flown in . . .

Intertitle

The Crimea, 1941

Kluge

. . . and they had a two-fold task, first to research antiquities, to discover the remains of Jason and Medea,

Intertitle

Mars 1941.

Kluge

and second to research the land of the Ostrogoths.

Intertitle

From Heiner Müller, Germania Magna, opera libretto

Kluge

When you, as a dramatist, imagine that, for example if you were supposed to write an opera for Boulez following the guidelines: Philologists in the Crimea. The New Argonauts. The Eleventh Army has encircled Sevastopol. Of the four locomotives that have driven down there, three have been destroyed by the cold, one is still functioning, partisans are on the move. And here you have Heidegger, who, coming from Freiburg, has just interpreted the sentence from Haraclites:

Intertitle

Heidegger in the Crimea

Kluge

Ta pantha keranos - “It is lightning that rules all things.” He wasn’t referring to the Blitzkrieg, but it’s an obscure sentence by the obscure Heraclites.

Intertitle

“Lighting, however, rules beings as a whole” / Heraclites, Fragment 64

Kluge

And Heidegger, with Heraclites in his suitcase, arrives in the supply area in the rear of the army, just as had happened to Jünger so often. Could you think your way into such a situation?

Müller

The strange thing was that the Georgians were removed from the category of the enemy. They were Aryans, in the view of the Nazis, and didn’t count as enemies, in part because of these reminiscences of antiquity.

Kluge

And the Crimea itself - a reminiscence of antiquity - was an area where one could settle fruit farmers from Tyrol, because if you look at it on a map, it looks like it must be suited for raising fruit, and so on. And hence a transformation, a metamorphosis of time, comes about. A period of founding appears to be possible. Every recipient of the Knight’s Cross gets a knightly estate on the Crimea, that would be the idea. So the same Crimea where a few years later the Yalta agreement will be proclaimed, which also governs Europe, is a center, so to speak, and a delegation with Heidegger and twelve other university professors is now there to check that everything is in order. What does Heidegger think? How would you write a drama about that? At first he sits in a room and is completely disoriented. He arrived by plane, because this one functioning locomotive couldn’t transport him, and at first there is no one else for him to talk to.

Intertitle

Goethe in Sicily

Müller

That makes me think of a digression . . . I just read a text by Norbert Miller about Goethe in Sicily. It was Goethe’s only contact with Greece, the Greek ruins in Sicily, and his concept of beauty changed. It was no longer Winckelmann, suddenly beauty was the enormous, the monstrous in Sicily. He writes about temples and ruins. He mentions two columns, for example, that are so enormous that they could support a gigantic building. It was more the Egyptian Greece that he suddenly saw there.

Kluge

The Roman - Winckelmann’s Greece is basically Rome . . .

Müller

Winckelmann is Rome, that’s the copy.

Kluge

Measured order?

Müller

Yes, yes, the sanitized copy. And there Goethe suddenly discovered the monstrous, really the Asian element, just as Hölderlin later discovered the Egyptian element in Greek culture when he was doing his translations of Sophocles. And perhaps Heidegger would also have discovered that, the Asian element in antiquity.

Kluge

And in the Crimea he probably would not have registered very much about current events, the murders in Sereropul, or the victories of the Eleventh Army, or the landing of the Red Army, but instead would have searched for this Asian element. Here in your theater, you’ve unleashed a great fanfare to the effect that an authentic expression of the East must take place somewhere, a distinctive expression, and that the East must have its own, authentic public sphere. What is that? What is this East? Is it something other than Asia that you mean here? It’s basically Meissen, it’s basically Schulpforta. Or what is it?

Müller

Not only those, I think, it’s something else again. If you think of Kleist, Kleist is half Asian.

Kluge

How so?

Müller

Well, there was always this really strange connection between Russia and Prussia. That starts with the shared drinking bouts hosted by the father of Frederick the Great, to which the family of the Russian czar was invited. They had huge binges in Königswusterhausen.

Kluge

In Potsdam they built entire Russian settlements . . .

Müller

. . . in Potsdam, exactly, and the German intellectuals had to perform there as clowns, in front of the Prussians and the Russians.

Kluge

East Prussia and the Baltic states, a long, stretched-out bridge.

Müller

Yes, yes. And Hitler had a problem, or the Nazis had a problem with their racial theory, how do they fit the East Prussians into it, and the German East in general? And they did this by inventing the Falish race, I think that was called the Falish race, because Hindenburg didn’t look very Nordic, and he also had to be included.

Kluge

With a broad build, Falish, standing sturdily on the earth and not light and striving upward.

Müller

I think there’s - it’s clearest in the case of Kleist - a connection with the Mongol invasion, a memory of that, a traumatic memory. And Prussia was perhaps more a movement than a structure, so . . .

Kluge

And did not belong, in the strict sense, to the German Reich.

Müller

It was always, I think, something like . . . What’s so interesting about the Mongols is that they never built cities. And they also never founded a state, it was always movement, it was always flight. I remember a really dumb anecdote that Katja Lange told me. She was in Mongolia for half a year, in the 1980s, I think. And she told me how she met a young Mongolian man there who had studied in Leipzig, and she asked him, if you look around here, a rather dead country, and completely dependent on Russia, and then you remember Genghis Khan, and that half of Europe and half of Asia belonged to him, how does something like that happen? And the young Mongolian said: He just wanted to get away. The Prussians also mostly wanted to get away. And there’s a kind of mental correspondence. And that was clearest in the case of Kleist, this wanting to get away, but without finding any place to go. He was a completely placeless author. His energy was placeless. And that’s probably also the problem now, how one puts these parts of Germany together. Really, Germany was never a place, it was always more in motion.

Kluge

In Latin, so in the Greek translation, that’s called . . .

Müller

Utopia, yes, yes.

Intertitle

Orpheus ploughed

Müller

Orpheus ploughed. Orpheus the singer was a man who couldn’t wait. After he had lost his wife by sleeping with her too soon after childbirth, or because of a forbidden glance while climbing out of the underworld after freeing her from death with his song, so that she turned back into dust before her flesh had become new, he invented pederasty, which spares the childbed and is closer to death than the love of women. The neglected ones chased him: with the weapons of their bodies, branches, stones. But the song protects the singer: whatever he had sung about could not scratch his skin. Peasants, frightened by the noise of the hunt, ran away from their ploughs, for which there had been no place in his song. Hence his place was under the ploughs.

Kluge

In what sense is that closer to death? The more detours I have to make . . .

Müller

Simply because it doesn’t produce any children, there’s no procreation. And basically it’s . . . you create a circle, and not a line.

Kluge

Do you think that the succession of generations, our 2000 years of which we have an overview, because we have writing, or 3000 years, or the 6000 years that we have if we include the Egyptians, and the 600,000, if we start from the invention of fire, that is to say, we actually have a number of contexts in which we are related to our ancestors and to our descendants, whether they die or not. Do you think that we really die, or do you think that that’s something that flows through us? That we really have something to do with all of that, it doesn’t have to be reincarnation, but rather . . .

Intertitle

“Immortal / Without Memory”

Müller

Oh sure, I believe that. It’s just that it doesn’t really benefit us much.

Kluge

No, it also doesn’t have to, I didn’t mean it as a source of pleasure. I don’t mean it as a source of meaning, or as a source of consolation. But how do you see it, actually, this river? If one were to represent it in a time-lapse, so using filmic means, using very simple time-lapse techniques, one would know that it’s a unity. Heraclites says constantly, forwards and backwards, that it’s a unity. That’s eternal life inside of an oven when one warms oneself. The philosopher had withdrawn into an oven, and then visitors came. And he said to them, you engage in politics, and I warm myself on the gods, by which he meant something that transcends the present. And there’s also this aspect, that we’re locked in cages between birth and death. That, he said, is not realistic.

Müller

Well, of course you always need someone who remembers in some form.

Kluge

And that’s not the person who has died.

Müller

Without memory there’s no continuity.

Kluge

Are the lines that you write a form of memory?

Müller

I think so, yes.

Kluge

You once wrote that the Roman cohorts, whose footsteps have disappeared, and the legions that stood watch on the Danube, have all perished. And the verses of Horace survive. At least one would say that about Ovid. When you compare Horace and Ovid, with whom do you sympathize, how do you weigh the two?

Müller

Well, I’m split. I’m sure that I have more in common with Horace, but I prefer Ovid.

Kluge

In what sense do you have more in common with Horace?

Müller

My demeanor is more like Horace’s.

Kluge

What kind of demeanor do you have?

Müller

A stoic demeanor. Simply because of the - he’s a disappointed or disillusioned republican who then makes his peace with the monarchy.

Running Text

Ovid’s Metamorphoses deal with transformations / Inexorable suffering compels gods and men to change their shapes / Heiner Müller calls these texts, in which Ovid describes the bitter fate of the defeated Trojans, dramatic /