My Rendezvous with Death - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: My Rendezvous with Death

Running Text: Heiner Müller describes a dramatic intervention in his life: The removal of his esophagus / A person who undergoes such an operation must relearn how he wants to live / “Learning with half the machine,” says Heiner Müller / A field report
Intertitle: My Rendezvous with Death
Kluge: You had your papers with you there. A Christian would have brought his cross, but you had a folder with poems.
Müller: Yes, with poems and other texts. Simply because that’s an old superstition. For years, I never got on an airplane unless I had an unfinished manuscript with me, because then I assume that I’m destined to finish it. And if for some reason it doesn’t work or it doesn’t happen, then it’s not my fault. Really, I just wanted to deflect the responsibility.
Kluge: Make sure that you’re working, right? Remain at work so long that it’s actually unfair.
Müller: Certainly, yes.
Kluge: You’re speaking in a whisper. Do you only have one vocal chord?
Müller: One vocal fold, I was told, was paralyzed by the operation. I need a couple of months of logopedics, exercises, so that the other vocal fold can take over. The most difficult thing is to produce the vowel sounds in isolation. “A,” for example. The exercise consists of making a sound chamber in your mouth, as large of one as possible, laying your tongue on the bottom of your mouth, and attempting, in this sound chamber, to produce the initial sound, the vowel, as cleanly as possible, without a consonant in front of it. The consonants are the crutch, it’s easier to say “ha” than “ah.”
Kluge: Really, you’re doing something that an actor does.
Müller: Learning to speak, yes, I have to learn to speak. A vowel is very difficult. “Ah, ah,” I can’t do that yet, I can only say “ha,” but that’s the mistake. “Ha” is easy, but “ah” is very difficult. Clearly, one needs a limber vocal fold in order to pronounce vowels correctly.
Kluge: And “o” and “u”?
Müller: It’s the same thing. With “i” it’s also the same. “I” is perhaps somewhat easier.
Kluge: At least vowels don’t occur by themselves in language, or only very rarely occur by themselves.
Müller: But they often occur as the beginnings of words.
Kluge: Describe for me the situation the evening before such a procedure. How is one prepared for such a radical operation?
Müller: Basically, it’s the case that you know that you can die any day for some reason or because of some accident. But the situation is naturally different when you know that there’s a date on which you will either die or survive, that’s a new situation, a new experience. And that interested me as an experience. I have to admit that I constantly suggested to myself that I was going to survive. And that kind of thing is also important, it helps of course. A lot depends on your willpower. What do I mean by willpower, perhaps it depends more on your imagination than on your willpower, and this new experience . . . Beforehand, of course, you’re not really informed about what’s going to happen.
Kluge: But it’s also a little like a legal proceeding.
Müller: It is. One can empathize with the situation of someone condemned to death, who knows when he’s going to be put on the electric chair. That’s clear. But that also has something do with . . . By chance, I was reading a not very good espionage thriller during that period.
Intertitle: A poem was quoted in it, one that, I believe, we haven’t been able to find yet, by an American poet from the First World War.
Kluge: From the Battle of Ypres.
Intertitle: Battle of Ypres.
Müller: About the Battle of Ypres, yes. This poem contains the line:
Intertitle: “My rendezvous with death takes place on a barricade”
Müller: My Rendezvous with death takes place on a barricade.
Kluge: And then you wake up the next morning?
Müller: I woke up . . . Do you mean before the operation? Yes, you wake up, and you barely have time to think about it. Everything occurs in a very routine manner.
Kluge: The lights go on, so to speak, in the entire hospital, is that right?
Müller: I don’t know. I don’t think so.
Kluge: A cock doesn’t crow.
Müller: A cock doesn’t crow.
Kluge: Socrates sits on the eve of his death, and they sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of health. Is that an important moment?
Müller: There’s a modern equivalent. Naturally, there’s a modern equivalent for that. You have to pay beforehand, of course, for your stay in the hospital, and basically you have to make a down payment on the execution. You know very well that you won’t be killed for free, you have to make a down payment beforehand. To that extent, it’s a secularized form of sacrificing a cock.
Kluge: And, what occurs on the morning of the operation? You wake up? It’s really the morning before the battle, if you want to look at it that way. What does it say here: “The battlefield has been surveyed.”
Müller: Basically, the whole top part of your body has been shaved. For this operation, the whole body is needed, the whole front surface. And then you’re wheeled in, of course.
Kluge: Although, generally speaking, they operate in a mechanized fashion, using automation, that is to say that they no longer need to open everything up, but rather they can operate subterraneously, so to speak?
Müller: Very little, very little.
Kluge: So they still use the old butcher’s knife?
Müller: Yes, basically. They do a lateral cut through the body and then a vertical cut, and then another cut here on the throat, so that they can reach through and pull the stomach up. As far as I know, the operation lasted six or seven hours, four surgeons work on you simultaneously. I found the terminology interesting, although I first heard it afterwards. I asked one of the doctors who was there about the course of the operation. And he said: Well, first we make these incisions, and then we represent the stomach. This vocabulary is interesting, the representation of the stomach. That means that everything is cut away that could obscure the view of the stomach. That’s called representing. That really reminded me of Liebermann: “Drawing means leaving out.” That’s definitely an art.
Kluge: Just as there are particular pieces for piano by Beethoven that are particularly difficult for pianists to play.
Müller: That’s a difficult piece for piano, yes.
Kluge: That’s a difficult piece for piano. The operation on the esophagus is, I think, one of the most difficult. And seven-hour operations are difficult in any case.
Intertitle: “Does the body remember pain?”
Müller: You don’t really notice it until afterwards. There’s a kind of postoperative trauma. But you notice it primarily at night. You wake up between . . . You sleep for two hours, or three or four, and then you wake up, and then you can’t fall asleep again.
Kluge: Is it similar to an anesthesia?
Müller: It’s similar to an anesthesia, the body remembers the pain.
Kluge: It’s as if a body could cry, so to speak. There’s fluid on the spots where the body was most abused, where it was dissected.
Müller: Well, the fluid is primarily between the lung and the pleura. And that’s a reaction to a stimulus, that’s also an aspect of these operations. When they last a long time, it’s as if the body is boiling, it gets hot, and there are almost burning processes, and to counteract these the lung produces this water to extinguish the burning.
Kluge: To extinguish the burning.
Müller: To extinguish the burning.
Kluge: And then for weeks after that one actually has to . . .
Müller: Yes, and it’s a problem, a problem to get rid of that water again.
Kluge: That’s a capacity for memory on the part of the body . . .
Müller: Yes, yes.
Kluge: And you don’t know if you’re going to wake up again?
Müller: The strange thing is . . . No, you don’t know that. But I also can’t recall the moment when I got the anesthetic. There’s no longer a memory of that. That’s already disappeared into the black hole in my memory.
Kluge: And the other way around, when you wake up again . . . after the operation?
Müller: I don’t remember anything about the operation, about the anesthesia.
Kluge: You can only detect it in the delayed reactions of your body, which are, however, very reliable and very long-lasting?
Müller: They’re long-lasting, yes.
Kluge: So if you compare it, Russia is now still . . . reacting to 1812.
Müller: Postoperative trauma.
Kluge: Postoperative trauma exists for peoples, displaced over a hundred years.
Müller: Yes, definitely. It was also . . . this is just a digression, but it interests me now, because I’m working on a text. The real shock in eastern Germany prior to the Russian occupation or the Russian conquest was the memory of the Mongol invasion, because that memory was suddenly reawakened.
Kluge: In the twelfth century. How much did they actually tear out of your body? A sixth?
Müller: I didn’t keep a tally. I only know that the esophagus was removed, except for a stump to which the stomach is attached.
Kluge: And the stomach has been pulled upward?
Müller: It’s been pulled upward, yes.
Kluge: That means that when you eat now, you actually have to relearn how to swallow and digest.
Müller: Swallowing, swallowing is something that one has to learn. At first, this wound here was still open.
Kluge: On your throat. That one is kept open artificially.
Müller: There are tubes in there, they have to remain open.
Kluge: So that they can check, full of distrust, like Doubting Thomas, if it’s supplied with blood?
Müller: I don’t know exactly, apparently those are left over from this opening that they used to reach through the lung and pull the stomach up. And in the first weeks the problem with eating was that the food sometimes came up here. That was fairly unpleasant. And then you have to learn how to swallow, you can only swallow slowly at first. And that causes a sore throat, which lasts about five weeks. It’s already better now. But you have to relearn everything.
Kluge: You call that “learning with half the machine.”
Müller: Yes. I don’t know if that formulation is correct, but in any case it’s a reduced machine. I once had a way of imagining that, or an image for that - you’re living in a high-rise, and there’s an elevator, that was the esophagus. And now only the cable is left, and you have to make do with the cable.
Kluge: You climb hand over hand, up and down?
Müller: You climb hand over hand, up and down.
Intertitle: Impressions from the Intensive Care Unit.
Müller: It was interesting for me in the intensive care unit, I wrote in my head there, and also made notes. And it’s interesting that . . . or during particular procedures that were performed repeatedly and that cause pain, I kept trying to cling to my own texts as a means of fighting the pain. That really only works, though, with very dense texts.
Kluge: Rhetorical texts.
Müller: That doesn’t work very well with prose. It only works with . . . it has to rhyme, and it has to be very dense or very highly formed, then it helps fight the pain. But it has to be very highly formed.
Kluge: You maintain, so to speak, an island inside of yourself, don’t you, and this island was also protected by the anesthesia, and this island concerns itself with books, with texts, and denies that you’ve been so severely reduced physically. Because it also resembles the collapse of an empire, when you’re operated upon. And then there are libraries inside of you, and they are exactly the same - they function just as before?
Müller: I’ve often reflected on a sentence by, excuse me, Ernst Jünger. In the first polemic against Jünger, which was conducted by Wolfgang Harich after the war, calling him a “pre-fascist” and so on, Harich cited a sentence about the Battle of the Somme, claiming that it was particularly objectionable and that it was proof of Jünger’s inhumanity. I thought of this sentence in the intensive care unit. The sentence goes: “In an operation like the Battle of the Somme, the attack was like a form of recovery, a sociable act.” You understand that in the intensive care unit, that sentence, because it’s completely correct. And you also develop an understanding - which I really also view very skeptically myself - even for the contempt for democracy exhibited by people who return from an event like the Battle of the Somme.
Kluge: If you could describe the topography of an intensive care unit like that: What do you actually see there?
Müller: First of all, there are the power struggles between the attendants and the nurses. And then there’s the economic aspect. For example, there was . . . In the beginning a Spaniard was lying next to me - it was a two-bed room in the intensive care unit - and he was perhaps my age or a little bit younger. He was apparently a former officer. And the television was running constantly, because he wanted it that way. That didn’t bother me, I don’t have to watch it. After a while, though, Brigitte came for a visit and turned the television off, because it got on her nerves. Then he protested loudly and said: Do you realize that I pay eight marks every day for this television? In a week that’s . . . I don’t know the number any more. I won’t turn it off for a single minute.
Kluge: What kind of equipment was there?
Müller: Primarily the drip. And there are stages to that, for example the drip in the vein, and then in the nose, so total parenteral nutrition for a while . . .
Kluge: So that’s nourishment, that goes into the nose . . . and the nose gets really big, almost Renaissance-like.
Müller: Yes. And the interesting thing is that one starts to dream about food. My first wish-dream was: exactly five drops of red fruit juice.
Kluge: You’re not allowed any fluids at first.
Müller: That was a real dream, just five drops. Then at some point the guy next to me got a piece of bread with strawberry jam on it. I’ve never eaten anything like that in my life, but suddenly strawberry jam was a dream. That was an aspect of it.
Kluge: Jam?
Müller: Yes.
Kluge: So in the beginning you basically get nothing at all. You’re maintained like a cosmonaut, really?
Müller: Yes, and you also get cosmonaut food.
Kluge: Yes. For a dramatist, are these dramatic events?
Müller: You don’t necessarily experience it as dramatic.
Kluge: But you can turn it into literature, you can write about it?
Müller: Yes, perhaps you can write about it. The interesting thing is really just the extent to which your body becomes an instrument or a vehicle.
Kluge: A vehicle? And it transports . . . You say that the question “what for,” for what has one survived, flows very quickly from your pen while you’re writing, but it’s a very sticky question.
Müller: Yes, yes. As long as you’re sure that you have enough substance, that you can survive, the question is theoretical and sounds good and interesting. It becomes somewhat less attractive when it becomes concrete, when you don’t know what will be left of you after the operation, after the convalescence. And the question isn’t completely answered, it’s always somewhat open, how diminished life will be afterwards. I constantly have to occupy my thoughts with something. If I don’t have anything with which to occupy them . . . One reason for this illness is in any case, I think, that for years I haven’t seen any possibility of writing a play. For me, that’s simply a vital function, to write plays, and when that’s interrupted, something is missing, a motivation is missing.
Intertitle: “In the Mirror my Dissected Body” / A New Text by Heiner Müller
Müller: In the mirror my dissected body / Divided in the middle by the operation / that saved my life, but what for? / For a child a wife a late work / Learning to live with half the machine / Eating and breathing forbidden, the question what for / That passes too easily through the lips, Death / Is the simple thing, any idiot can die
Intertitle: “Theater Death” / A text by Heiner Müller, written just before the operation
Müller: Empty theater. On the stage an actor / Dies according to the rules of his art / A dagger in his neck. Desire exhausted / A final solo that woos applause. / And no hand. In a loge, empty / Like the theater, a forgotten dress. / The silk whispers what the actor cries. / The silk turns red, the dress becomes heavy / With the blood of the player, which slowly drains. / In the brightness of the chandeliers, which bleaches the scene / The forgotten dress sucks the veins of the dying man / Dry, who now only resembles himself / And no longer the delight nor the terror of transformation / His blood is a colored stain that will not return.
Kluge: If someone were to call you an actor, would that be hurtful?
Müller: No?
Kluge: That’s part of the profession?
Müller: That’s part of the profession, yes.
Kluge: The dramatist himself is actually an actor?
Müller: You have to perform everything that you make the characters perform.
Kluge: Performing is actually just another form of acceptance, of empathy.
Müller: Yes, and everyone is right in a drama. Otherwise it’s not a drama.
Kluge: And this isn’t at all your opinion in life? But on the stage . . .
Müller: On the stage - absolutely - everyone is right.
Kluge: Everyone is right, yes.
Running Text: Heiner Müller describes a dramatic intervention in his life: The removal of his esophagus / A person who undergoes such an operation must relearn how he wants to live /