View transcript: I Owe the World a Dead Person

Running Text

An opera libretto by Heiner Müller for Pierre Boulez bears the title Oresteia Digest/ The Oresteia is a shorthand report of an ancient Egyptian myth, which has been passed down in versions by Aeschylus and Sophocles /

Intertitle

Müller and Pierre Boulez are interested in the lacunae in the myth that have not yet been hopelessly stuffed full of actions, as well as in the “true place of the dead \-” “I owe the world a dead person—” Heiner Müller on his planned opera libretto.

Kluge

What do you mean by “Digest of the Oresteia”? What kind of a project is that?

Müller

Yes, it’s hard with these texts. For one thing, all of the translations are bad. I don’t know of a good translation. I would need a year to do a good translation. I don’t know if I still have a year for such a project. And the nucleus of the story is on the one hand well-known, but also unknown for precisely that reason. Because there are so many digests of the Oresteia and these are always abridgments and simplifications.

Kluge

What does one mean by “the Oresteia”?

Müller

The Oresteia is, to put it rather dumbly, using a cliché from the feuilleton that has been common since Stein in Moscow: “The Birth of Democracy.” And what’s interesting is what all has to be repressed in order to arrive at this formulation. For example this unimaginable murder of Iphigenia.

Kluge

The father wants a good wind so that his troops can sail to Troy.

Müller

The father wants a good wind and gives way to the pressure exerted by his community . . .

Kluge

. . . to kill his daughter. It’s a democratic pressure. The people want this.

Müller

Exactly. The people want it, and he gives way and has his daughter killed.

Kluge

What are some catchwords from the Oresteia? What does Elektra mean for us? What is her significance?

Müller

Well, we’ve all been a bit blinded by interpretations. It’s very hard to get back to the nucleus of the story. You have to forget about Freud. You have to forget all sorts of things in order to be able to think about it at all. But Elektra is, first of all, a daughter who is more attached to her father than to her mother, and who experiences her mother’s new marriage with Aegisthus as a betrayal of her father and herself. Who experienced her father’s murder, and now . . .

Kluge

. . . waits for her brother, first of all.

Müller

Waits for her brother, the avenger.

Kluge

So she acts through her brother, using him as an instrument.

Müller

Yes, but she is also déclassé, because of having distanced herself from her mother and her stepfather, or her new father. And in this sense she’s simply a metaphor for refusal, for refusal to adapt. And in this sense she’s also a signifier of rebellion, of feminist rebellion, which at first always appears as and articulates itself as refusal.

Kluge

Is that actually an Asian myth? Is it Greek, is it Cretan? Where does it come from?

Müller

It’s a kind of strange, intermediate stage. I believe that it’s not Asiatic at all. One can’t really say. But it’s also not yet European. It’s suspended between the two. Perhaps it’s Egyptian. And Egypt is certainly not Asia. Egypt is, however, also not Europe, it lies between the two.

Kluge

. . . and is older than either of them?

Müller

And is older than either of them, yes. And perhaps . . . if one assumes that Japanese or Chinese people probably don’t understand the Oresteia at all. And Europeans probably don’t understand it either. And between these two different types of not-understanding on either side lies something that we should try to discover in order to deal with the antagonism between Europe and Asia that, I believe, is becoming very relevant now. And in between lies a kind of unknown territory, and unknown region, and this is precisely where the Oresteia comes from. One notices this in translations, for instance. The translations tend to make the material rational in a certain way, and thus bracket so much out, so much material, so much reality, so much knowledge, that it suddenly becomes a completely transparent story, really a story seen through the eyes of the eighteenth century.

Kluge

This project of providing a shortened representation, a digest form, of the Oresteia, basically making a translation - if your life doesn’t last long enough for you to make a real translation - that’s a literary project. It doesn’t have anything to do with theater, at least for the time being?

Müller

On the contrary, it of course has to do directly with the theater. Pierre Boulez would like to have a libretto by me for an opera, he wrote an opera. I’ve been working on it for half a year. I’m not sure what I should write for him.

Kluge

Ah, so it’s an opera libretto by you, for an opera that Boulez will compose.

Müller

For now it’s still only an idea. And what interests me is the Oresteia as a skeleton, a framework on which one can hang different things. A hat stand on which one can also hang completely other garments. There was an earlier attempt at this kind of thing, Stravinsky’s Oedipus. That was really the same principle. With the text by Cocteau. The text is in Latin, but it was a kind of skeletonization of Oedipus. And that led me to this idea, because I . . .

Kluge

Because one, so to speak, fills the entire hat stand with these drapings. To put it differently, because one sees all of the structures of the Oresteia at once, and one does it as musical theater, it’s something different than if one splits it up over different nights at the theater and only describes the individual characters, the separate phases of this tragedy, of the sequence of the tragedy. One gets more breaks. Is that right?

Müller

Yes, one gets more breaks, because the music can naturally also be a condensation. It condenses things, pulls things together, that you can’t put together with texts, without becoming extremely detailed. But music can bundle things much more quickly . . .

Kluge

And for that you need shorthand?

Müller

For that you need shorthand, and music is a kind of stenography in relation to such material.

Kluge

Book-keeping figures always appear to be the same length. Like the cuneiform writing in Egypt, which also cannot be shortened. But fates and tragedies based on fate, one can shorten them and then recognize them in their shortened form. One could also play dice with them. They’re like bones. Originally, one played dice with bones.

Müller

It’s a matter of - it’s a stupid pun - but it’s a matter of the relationship between dice ([Würfel]) and vortex ([Wirbel]). Or I experience it that way. At the moment, we’re in a vacuum. And in this vacuum, vortices arise. And if one finds the right point in this vacuum . . .

Kluge

One has suddenly discovered gravity?

Müller

And out of this vortex, in which one discovers gravity, then one can make a die out of the vortex by using the gravity, and perhaps this die enters into a relationship with other dice. It’s almost like game theory. And it’s also rather arbitrary. It doesn’t work without arbitrariness. One has to start somewhere, arbitrarily.

Kluge

If you once again . . . in the eighteenth century, Goethe’s text about Iphigenia. There everything is dissolved into human relationships, highly civilized relationships. Even the barbarian is, so to speak, a compurgator and a witness and sets aside his egocentrism, his cannibalism, etc., so that everything changes for the better.

Intertitle

“Slickness is the first impression - \-”

Müller

Slickness is the first impression. Slickness . . . really as evidence for the fact that someone is lying, that someone is hiding something by lying, that someone is lying to hide barbarism and - yes, what you are describing - dissolution in . . .

Kluge

It’s easy to be a classic if the whole world remains harmonious.

Müller

Exactly. And, in contrast to that, there’s a strange statement by Goethe, which is cited by Eckermann. Goethe, after all, first wrote Iphigenia in prose. And then he converted it into iambs. This process, in itself, is already interesting, why does he do this? Obviously, because it wouldn’t be bearable in prose. Or because prose wasn’t adequate to suppress the barbarism. So these are the reasons it’s iambified. And then there’s this remark by Goethe that Eckermann cites: “The students in Jena are rebelling” - they must have had their reasons - “but I have to set Iphigenia in iambs.”

Kluge

Did he write that?

Müller

Yes, or he said it. Eckermann cites that. And the point is interesting. And one detects that in the iambs. The iambs tremble. The slickness is not a true slickness. There’s a pulse beneath this slick surface, and they constantly tremble.

Kluge

And Goethe’s heaven, with the gods. Where would that be found, for example in your shorthand report, in your network, if I can put it that way.

Müller

I’ll give you an example. In Iphigenia there’s this song of fate. And that begins . . . or no, there’s a text in the . . . I don’t know if that’s the beginning. It says: “Let the human race fear the gods” (“Es fürchte die Götter das Menschengeschlecht”). You only need to make a simple misprint, and it becomes much more modern: “The gods fear the human race” ([Es fürchten die Götter das Menschengeschlecht]).

Intertitle

“Let the human race fear the gods” / “The gods fear the human race”

Müller

That would be a misprint from Goethe’s perspective. And with this misprint, the piece becomes interesting. And this misprint is hidden under Goethe’s text.

Kluge

Ah, that’s underneath, that’s hidden beneath it.

Müller

. . . That’s an invention. And that’s why it trembles . . .

Kluge

That’s the parapraxis that’s waiting to occur?

Müller

Yes. The text trembles constantly at the prospect of this misprint.

Kluge

How many different Iphigenias are there, actually? First of all, there’s the Iphigenia in Aulis. That’s the story of how Agamemnon sacrifices Iphigenia to the gods. Iphigenia doesn’t get saved. Or at the end is abducted by the gods, is rescued from this barbarity, because such a thing must not be allowed to occur in the first place. Because misfortune consists in the fact that barbarism, once it comes about, will repeat itself perpetually.

Müller

On the other hand, you could also say that barbarism is perpetuated if one lies to deny its existence.

Kluge

That too. If it isn’t committed by barbarians. Because for barbarians it’s quite obvious that one doesn’t kill one’s children. That one doesn’t impregnate one’s sisters and mothers.

Müller

That becomes obvious. That first becomes a problem once an “order” exists.

Kluge

When I have to transport entire armies to Troy, then I have to sacrifice someone, so to speak.

Intertitle

The oath of Idomeneo.

Kluge

In Idomeneo - to whom it may concern—, that means, if I am rescued from drowning by the god Neptune, then I will kill the first person that I meet. And then, subsequently, I have to try to outwit the gods and deceive them. And the gods won’t put up with this.

Müller

Yes, that’s puzzling.

Kluge

That’s a common story.

Müller

Yes, but it’s completely puzzling. The normal thing would be that if I’m rescued from drowning, then the first person I meet . . .

Kluge

. . . I will rescue him in turn . . .

Müller

. . . I will crown him with garlands, or rescue him in turn . . .

Kluge

Do for him what was done for me.

Müller

Yes, exactly, so why does the opposite happen in this case? But perhaps that’s a completely different logic from ours. We have been completely corrupted by Christianity or our vision has been clouded by Christian thinking, which is really a departure from concrete or materialist thinking. If someone is rescued from drowning . . . I will try to think about this from the perspective of antiquity: I’m stranded at sea, so I’m destined to die or to sink. I get rescued. So now I’m obligated to see to it that my place as a dead person gets filled by someone else. So I have to produce a dead person. There’s a play by Canetti, the premise of which is that human beings are immortal. What happens then? A frightful chaos. That’s the absurd consequence, really, of the bourgeois attitude towards death: repression. One barely needs to mention that for Benjamin the main function of bourgeois society is to repress the reality of death. But if you start from the assumption that everyone who is born has his or her murderer. Only the insurance companies know this, however. You don’t know who your murder is, but he’s already been paid and set to his task by the insurance companies. You also don’t know the date when your turn will come. On the other hand, every murderer naturally also has his or her murderer. But the murderer knows who the victim is. The victim doesn’t know who the murderer is. That would be a kind of negative utopia. But such utopias only arise from the fact that one has lost the feeling that the world - to put it very primitively - is almost a diagram. And everyone has his or her place in this diagram . . .

Intertitle

Altruism in the British Empire around 1900 -

Kluge

It would be a modern view, specifically a British one from around 1900, that every person is responsible for the entire world. If everyone is responsible, though, then no one is responsible. Everyone is responsible for everything, but if everyone knew that, we would have paradise on earth.

Intertitle

“Everyone is responsible for everything / But if everyone knew that, we would have paradise on earth” Dostoyevsky

Kluge

And on the other hand you now say that the antique view is: Everyone is responsible for his place. In life and in death. And it becomes possible to express that in another way when Idomeneo is rescued from the shipwreck, then he believes, because he’s been rescued, that he’s the king that Crete really hasn’t needed for a long time. Because Crete lived for ten years before he returned home. And he really needs to demonstrate with an act of violence that the king has returned. He has to occupy his place. If I don’t occupy my place with sentimentality - like a British person who was involved in the slave trade and now leaves the slaves in the lurch - if I don’t occupy this violent position, I make myself culpable. If I do occupy it, I certainly also make myself culpable.

Müller

Those are two different legal conceptions.

Kluge

Completely different legal conceptions. And the only thing that modernity as a system adds, in the Luhmannian sense, is the fiction that a person could bear responsibility outside of his or her own place. Achieve something beyond the reach of his or her own hands. And that’s something that a person from antiquity, in particular a person from ancient Egypt, would not accept.

Müller

The other side is what Hegel says about Oedipus.

Kluge

What does he say?

Müller

Oedipus isn’t even guilty of anything in terms of bourgeois legal concepts. He didn’t know that it was his father. He didn’t know that it was his mother. He’s innocent according to our legal standards. This formulation is remarkable. But the Greek as a complete human being, a well-rounded human being who is responsible on all sides, takes the responsibility upon himself.

Kluge

It’s interesting, because nothing would be more absurd, as a farce, than to hire a lawyer from Breslau, circa 1910, to defend Oedipus. He would get an acquittal, there’s no doubt about it.

Müller

That’s clear. But that also makes life uninteresting. Life becomes obscene with this concept of law.

Kluge

So he goes, guiltless, into retirement. What would that mean, though, if you think about injustice in our century? If you represent it in antique terms?

Müller

Something very provocative, perhaps. This scandal over Bitburg. That really made me think. So Kohl went there quite innocently, and Reagan also . . .

Kluge

His advisors told him.

Müller

Or they didn’t tell him, for all I know. In any case the scandal was, that members of the SS . . .

Kluge

Waffen-SS

Müller

In the general sense, Waffen-SS, criminals also were buried there. In this case, there are these two positions, the position of Aeschylus and the position of Sophocles. Seven against Thebes, Aeschylus. There the ultimate solution is that the dead have equal rights.

Kluge

The unjust and the just have the same rights . . .

Müller

. . . have the same rights when they’re dead.

Kluge

And Antigone still dies for that principle.

Müller

Yes, Antigone dies for that principle in Aeschylus. But the ultimate solution is that she was right. In Sophocles, there’s a new definition of law. And that’s really when the state starts to interfere with the dead. The state takes possession of the dead.

Kluge

Only with permission . . .

Müller

Only with permission may one bury enemies of the state.

Kluge

Now it’s no longer the case that the dead are all equal, but rather the question is, can one, in order to bury one’s ancestors, successfully advance the claims of an old aristocracy against a democratic tyrant? Can the old law hold up against the new law? It’s no longer really the question of whether the dead are equal.

Müller

On the contrary, I think it is. For me, in any case. The problem is, so much guilt has been accumulated, so much consciousness of guilt, so much crime and awareness of crime, that that’s suddenly no longer possible. But I believe there’s no other option than to make that possible again, this Aeschylus position. In Paris I recently - a couple months ago there was a discussion about a film that they made about me - and Virilio was there. And afterwards I had a conversation with him, which I found really pleasant. In this discussion after the film a Bulgarian whom I’ve known for a long time and who works as a director in Paris asked me about my Stasi contacts.

Intertitle

Alliance of the Guilty / Oresteia Digest / The gods fear the human race

Müller

And Virilio told me afterwards that the only hope for Europe was an alliance of the guilty. Because there aren’t any innocents.

Intertitle

“I owe the world a dead person-” Heiner Müller on his planned opera libretto

Müller

And only when the guilty form an alliance and collectively admit their guilt . . .

Kluge

. . . share the guilt . . .

Müller

. . . and share the guilt, only then is there an opportunity.

Kluge

A constitution . . .