View transcript: Under the Sign of Mars

Running Text

to armor (panzern) = “To make oneself impenetrable to something” TANK (Panzer) = “A battle vehicle with armored plates and chain wheels” / Music Magazine with Heiner Müller and the Death & Grind groups ABHORRENCE, ACROSTICHON, TOXAEMIA and DISGRACE

Intertitle

UNDER THE SIGN OF MARS Character Armor and Mobile Warfare - “Frozen Laundry - \-” ABHORRENCE/ Disintegration of flesh “The brain in its bone armor \–” “Christmas in the heart, Attack of the advance troops” (1941) What is it about tanks that fascinates you?

Kluge

On the one hand you have the tractor as an invention, a caterpillar tractor and a towing machine. It can drive cross-country and level trenches: it can handle the earth in a particular way. And secondly a shooting stand, an artillery position that can also be driven. And thirdly: armor. If you could talk about the components . . .

Müller

The problem is: why am I so fascinated by it? It is a question that I ask myself. Why am I fascinated by the word and idea of tanks.

Kluge

And also workers who build them, who can be totally fascinated by it.

Müller

That’s right, by workers who build them … yes, true. And that is definitely related to - perhaps this is too much psychology - a need for armor, with a subjective need for armor. That is why the tank is also an ideal.

Kluge

That is why it becomes even heavier. The first tanks are always light.

Müller

The other point is speed. By now that is no longer true of course, but in World War II it was still an image for speed.

Kluge

It could go 60-80 Kilometers per hour.

Müller

I personally never had anything to do with it directly. I had military training, but the war was nearing the end. And we had so-called enemy contact only once, that was with Soviet tanks, but already on the way to American imprisonment, because our officers understandably wanted to be captured by the Americans rather than the Russians. That is why we marched from Wismar towards Schwerin. We had bazookas and relatively old weapons, they were practically Norwegian muzzle-loaders.

Kluge

Could you shoot a bazooka?

Müller

I learned how to.

Kluge

What is a bazooka?

Müller

If only I still knew that. I have repressed that. That is strange. I had a complete so-called “Werewolf” training too. We practiced with bazookas. It was the mother of the Molotov cocktail, actually.

Kluge

It was a canon, a rocket gun.

Müller

A canon, yes.

Kluge

And in the recoil direction you couldn’t …

Müller

You could learn it relatively quickly. It was relatively easy to handle. But I can’t describe it to you. It is so repressed.

Kluge

Did you ever shoot with it? Practice shots?

Müller

Only practice shots.

Intertitle

Music: ACROSTICHON/ Dehumanized

Kluge

What is it about a tank? The speed? A race car is fast, isn’t it? Bernd Rosemeyer …

Müller

There are maybe three things: Speed, protection and imprisonment. You know what the foot soldiers said about tanks. Right from the very beginning there were canned human beings who sat in those things, always with the potential …

Kluge

Of roasting.

Müller

Of roasting. Because there are the three things: speed and protection, which is the same as incarceration.

Kluge

If you were to think of Rome or Shakespeare in this regard. Where is there something similar?

Müller

Coriolanus. Coriolanus is a tank. A tank - as a man. Yes, yes.

Kluge

It is actually the commander and his bodyguard… and then indeed the turtle as well, the shields that combined create a tank.

Müller

But what is unusual in Coriolanus for example is something that Brecht never came to terms with in his adaptation. He actually wanted to write a play about Stalin. A play about the necessity and superfluity of the hero, the protagonist. That was his image of Stalin. That is Stalin - this great definition by him of Stalin as the well-deserved murderer of his people.

Kluge

Did Brecht write this down?

Müller

He didn’t write it. He just said it. But I think there is a note in the archive. And that was meant very ambivalently. With “well-deserved” he meant . . .

Kluge

He didn’t mean well-deserved" ironically?

Müller

He didn’t mean it ironically at all. He also meant “murderer” very seriously. And in Coriolanus there is this unusual part that he couldn’t comprehend, that this Coriolanus could be broken by a speech of his mother. There is of course something to that. The tank - no woman could have invented a tank. The tank is a completely masculine assertion of protection.

Kluge

Why do you say that?

Müller

You know, I don’t think that if there were something like that, maybe it doesn’t exist yet, but women do not need a tank.

Intertitle

Prototype of the tank Little Willie (1916) Successor of Little Willie “Mother” (1917) German soldiers are chased by Russian tanks (1944) Heavy Tank (“Tiger”/ 1943)

Music

TOXAEMIA/ Who Dies “Iron Coffin” Test-drive/ special wheel suspension/ “Race car of the war” - (1928) Guderian’s Light Tanks cross a causeway-\- (1938) Tank “Mother” (1917), with wheels that are supposed to make steering easier - Stalin’s tank from 1929 (Renaults) and the later T 34 with the diesel motors from 1944 - T 34

Music

DISGRACE/ Debts of Gods MARE “The Triumphant Return of the Tanks” (1917)

Music

ABHORRENCE/ Pestilential Mists/ Holy Laws of Pain

Running Text

to armor (panzern) = “To make oneself impenetrable to something” TANK (Panzer) = “A battle vehicle with armored plates and chain wheels” / Music Magazine with Heiner Müller and the Death & Grind groups ABHORRENCE, ACROSTICHON, TOXAEMIA und DISGRACE

Intertitle

UNDER THE SIGN OF MARS Character Armor and Mobile Warfare -