View transcript: Portrait of Heiner Müller for his 60th Birthday

Intertitle

Portrait for Heiner Müller (for his 60th birthday)

Müller

And then there is an anecdote told by Jean Fawl about Peter the Great in London. I don’t know if you are familiar with it; it is also very interesting. He visited the fleet, the English fleet, with his retinue and said that he had heard about a particular kind of punishment for sailors, that involved getting the keel through the front, and pulling it through the ship and back up again aft, and whoever survived was lucky. He wanted to see a demonstration of that. The Englishmen told him that they unfortunately couldn’t demonstrate it at the moment, because they currently didn’t have any sailors who needed to be punished. Then Peter the Great said: Then just take one of my people.

Narrator

Heiner Müller, born on January 9, 1929 in Saxony, who lives in the GDR as an author of plays that are periodically published and staged only in the Federal Republic, is considered to be one of the most important German-speaking playwrights today. He is known for his preference for short, laconic stories. Critics emphasize the horror in these stories. He himself finds his stories funny.

Kluge

How did a typical school day go for you?

Müller

What do you mean?

Kluge

How did a typical school day in the forties go for you? You went in the morning; you wake up.

Müller

Yes. The school wasn’t very far away. You could walk there. It was a small town.

Kluge

What kind of house did you live in?

Müller

The house was an older modern construction from the 20’s, I think, approximately.

Kluge

What were your parents’ occupations?

Müller

My father was a salaried employee at a credit union–no, not credit union, it was… He worked in health insurance. That meant that he traveled through the county, and that was very interesting for him. There were land owners and day laborers and he had to always negotiate with the land owners about the health insurance for their day laborers and tenants.

Kluge

During the war as well?

Müller

I think he was there until ‘41 and then he was a soldier.

Kluge

And your mother?

Müller

My mother was - that will be a long story if we want to talk about it. The story begins in 1933, when my father went to a concentration camp [KZ]. They weren’t called that yet. I can’t remember what the term for them was at the beginning. In any case, according to these “protective custody” laws …

Kluge

prisoner in “protective custody”

Müller

He was a party functionary for the Socialist Workers Party (SAP) in Saxony.

Kluge

The Socialist Workers Party, a left-leaning communist party…

Müller

Left of the SPD [the Social Democrats], yes. And he was in the camp for a year or a year and a half, I think. I don’t know exactly. And then he came out on the condition that he would not be allowed to live in his neighborhood anymore. Today one would call that a kind of banishment. We lived in the home of his parents. It wasn’t very far away, 50 km, in another county. At that time he was unemployed until ‘36 or ‘37. And my mother worked in a factory as a seamstress, in a textile factory. Then he got work on the turnpike [Autobahn]. He had previously been a white collar worker and now was a manual laborer. He didn’t last for very long, I think a half year or so. And then the first offer came in that was approximately in the area that he had been trained in. The offer came from Mecklenburg, from the State Health Insurance [Landkrankenkasse] there. He became an employee and had this job as a representative for the health insurance company. Then he was briefly in jail because he made a joke at his office about the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact or something and then he served in a punitive battalion in the war, but in France.

Kluge

How many children were there?

Müller

Two, but my brother was much younger than I. I think he was born in ‘41. Yes, 1941.

Kluge

And then you were living with your mother?

Müller

Yes, yes.

Kluge

And now you get up in the morning …

Müller

Now I get up in the morning and go to school. The main event was actually the greeting regulations. The teachers were strange types. For example, one was a History and German teacher, in any case in the first classes, and he never said “Heil Hitler.” He actually managed to pull it off: he stood in the front, that was a ritual, that had to be done at the beginning of each lesson…

Kluge

There is a lectern in front.

Müller

There is a lectern for the teacher and the teacher stands next to the lectern and says “Heil Hitler” and all of the others do the same and then they sit down. And he was able to never say “Heil Hitler,” and I admired that. He always raised his arm in accordance with the rules and said \- I admire this man - and then he said: “Sit\!” The “Sluices of Epiphany,” that is the story of an Englishman, whom Peter the Great recruited when he was in London, an engineer whom he promoted to head engineer, the leader of a giant building project, the construction of sluices somewhere in Russia, the sluices of Epiphany. I don’t know if that town exists, but it can be assumed. It is strange, this allusion to epiphany. In any case, this engineer, who had many privileges and earned a lot of money, is always writing letters to his fiancé in England, and in the letters it becomes clearer and clearer that he understands less about Russia the longer he is there. It is an uncanny feeling that there is something there that he can’t grasp. At some point he misses a deadline due to sloppiness or sabotage, something goes wrong with the construction, and suddenly he no longer has any privileges. He is taken in chains - with him on foot and his captors on horseback\- to Moscow or Saint Petersburg, and is locked in a horrible cell there in the Peter-Paul fortress. He thinks it has all been a mistake, but there is no way to appeal to anyone, he only notices that the guard looks at him more and more compassionately. And one night the door to his cell is unlocked and a giant man comes in and kills him in an absolutely indescribable way, and this way is also not described. But it is clear from the story that it is Peter the Great himself. It was known that it was a hobby of his occasionally to appear himself as an executioner; he enjoyed it. That is a very uncanny story.

Kluge

When did Platonov write it?

Müller

That must have been at the end of the thirties. Of course it is a clear allusion to Stalin.

Kluge

Let’s see, you were 16 years old in 1945?

Müller

Yes. It was a great time. I was still in the Reichsarbeitsdienst for a half year or maybe only a quarter year, that was a military unit with military training and by the time the military training was somewhat completed the Russians were already in East Mecklenburg and we were on the east coast of the Baltic Sea, and then were ordered to march in a southwest direction, to reach the Americans. That was the main focus of our bosses, and there were really strange events on the way.

Kluge

Were you able to get through?

Müller

Yes, yes, I was then an American prisoner of war for two or three more days, and then I traded a can of meat through a fence for a worn-out civilian jacket, and with that on I walked out. I probably didn’t look that war-like anyway. I chatted with the American guard, he showed me photos of his family and children, I thought they were all very nice, and then I said good-bye to him and he didn’t even notice.

Kluge

Did you know English?

Müller

Yes, yes, a little. In any case, what I learned in school was enough. And then I was in a town near Schwerin for a while, which was occupied by the Americans, and then at some point I rode a stolen bike over the border, into the Soviet zone. That was all very exciting. It was quite chaotic, something was broken, and the next thing wasn’t there yet.

Kluge

There was actually no state.

Müller

That was the only time without a state, yes.

Kluge

You could make an exact differentiation: the others are not our state.

Müller

I remember, I was walking then - the Russians immediately took my bike at the border of course - and then we were transported for a short stretch - maybe 30 km - in a convoy with accompaniment, until dusk. And then they told us that we had to disappear from the street, there was a curfew, and then we had to make our way on our own. Everyone thought that they were going to be shot, there were already rumors on the American side that there were Germans who were shot lying beyond a patch of woods there, and one would be stupid to head in that direction. And then I went by foot, pretty much alone, for the next 100km.

Kluge

100 km?

Müller

Approximately, yes, but not in one day of course. And I was stopped twice. Once a soldier came out the woods, a Russian, and asked for my papers. I thought he meant my documentation, the only document that I had was a piece of cardboard, which was the remnant of an ID from a German rescue society. There was also a passport picture on it. He wasn’t interested in that, he rejected it and I kept going. Later I figured out that he was looking for cigarette papers to roll a Machorka. And then someone else came out of the woods with a machine pistol and asked me if I was Polish and I briefly thought about what might be the right answer, and then I saw out of the corner of my eye that there was barbed wire in the forest and thought it better to say no, at which point I was allowed to pass through. Otherwise I would be a Pole now. There is a scene in Shakespeare that I think is quite central, a son of Titus’s is sentenced to death, because he has been found guilty of a murder that he didn’t commit, due to the intrigue of a black man and a goddess. And the black man brings Titus Andronicus a message from the emperor that he will be pardoned if the Andronicus family agrees to sacrifice a hand. So Titus hacks off one of his hands and gives it to the black man. The man brings it back after an hour and says that the emperor doesn’t want the hand.

Kluge

And the son isn’t saved?

Müller

Of course he is executed. And I changed it a little by having the black man say that the emperor wanted the other hand; that one was the wrong one. Those are just great stories. And since you mentioned Hindenburg - that is actually my first memory of something like history, a hint of it. There was a small house on a mountain with tiny windows, built by my grandfather at some point, two floors, the toilets in the back, made of wood, and I was standing with the grownups at the fence bordering the neighboring property. It was a farm, the bells were ringing and Hindenburg had died. Everyone was standing at the fence listening to the bells. That is my first memory of history actually. Something happened then, you knew that.

Kluge

That is quite interesting. And Austria, annexation, can you remember that?

Müller

I don’t think that that interested anyone in the Erzgebirge.

Kluge

Describe your mother. What did she look like?

Müller

My mother, she is still alive. She grew up as the youngest child in a family with ten children.

Kluge

Is she tall?

Müller

No, no, she is even shorter than I.

Kluge

What color are her eyes?

Müller

Blue grey. And she was very impacted by this childhood, I think, that was connected to shortages and everything that goes with that.

Kluge

How does she walk?

Müller

Very small steps and very quickly. She is 82 now, but still very active.

Kluge

How does your mother speak? Quickly? Slowly? Does she tell stories, is she a person of few words?

Müller

No, she likes to tell stories and she also needs that now. She has even started to write since my father died. She had done it before secretly, now she is writing like that. Recently she called me up and said that she had found where she recorded the events in Waren and they were somewhere among some old laundry that she had found.

Kluge

Could you describe the space in Waren that you lived in? Where are the people standing in that space? Where are you?

Müller

It was a relatively small two, no three room apartment, three rooms and a kitchen. The most important thing was that there was also a tiny room next to the bathroom. That’s why I still dream about an apartment where I suddenly discover rooms that I didn’t know about before. That probably has to do with the fact that the first time I slept with a woman was in that room. That is a very simple context, that was this remote small room next to the bathroom.

Kluge

And how old were you then?

Müller

How old was I? I think 16.

Kluge

And was your mother in the apartment at the time?

Müller

No.

Kluge

How did you meet her?

Müller

She belonged to a family from Danzig. Her brother was a functionary in the SPD like my father, and we knew each other through that.

Kluge

And why do you talk about that room as something that one still has to discover, when you actually lived there for the whole time? It was sort of an extra room?

Müller

It was extra because it isn’t normal that a door leads from the bathroom to another room. That was the absurd thing about the apartment, actually.

Kluge

That was a small luxury, in a sense?

Müller

Yes, that was a very narrow room, maybe the length of a towel…

Kluge

What was it normally used for?

Müller

There was only a bed in there; nothing else would fit.

Kluge

And the bed was there for guests, or what?

Müller

That was primarily for guests.

Kluge

And now, what are the people there like? There are three people: your brother… or four people. With your father, without your father?

Müller

He returned from the war somewhat later. That was ‘47, I think. No, ‘46.

Kluge

That was the dethronement of your mother, when he came back?

Müller

I don’t think so, no. He was always traveling as a functionary. He was rarely at home.

Kluge

Can you remember the day when he came back?

Müller

No, not at all. I only know that from stories. Tantalus, the king of Phrygia, steals the food of the gods, slaughters Pelops, his son, and offers him to the gods. The gods recognize the meal, only Demeter eats from a shoulder. This is how they punish the theft: Tantalus hangs from a fruit tree that is growing below a floating cliff out of a pond in the triple-walled center of Hades, in eternal hunger among the fruits, thirst above the water, fear below the stone. The gods damned his tribe. Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, has twelve children. She brags to the gods about her fertility. Apollo and Artemis kill the twelve children with twelve arrows. Zeus transforms the crying mother into her own statue. In early summer the stone weeps. Thyestes, son of Pelops, breaks up the marriage of his brother Atreus. Artreus slaughters the sons of his brother and serves him their blood and flesh. Thyestes uses violence against his own daughter. Her son Aegisthus kills Atreus. Agamemnon, son of Atreus, takes Clytemnestra as his wife, his brother Menelaus takes her sister Helen. Helen is seduced by Paris, follows him to Troy, the Trojan War begins. An oracle names as the first war victim Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra resists, Agamemnon obeys, Iphigenia puts her neck under the ax. Clytemnestra shares with Aegisthus, the son of Thyestes and murderer of Atreus, power and bed. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill Agamemnon, after his return from ten years of war, in the bath with net sword ax. Electra, the second daughter of Agamemnon, saves Orestes, her brother, from the sword of Aegisthus and sends him to Phocis. For twenty years, maid among maids in the palace of her mother, she awaits his return. For twenty years Clytemnestra dreams the same dream: a snake sucks milk and blood out of her breasts. In the twentieth year Orestes returns home to Mycenae, kills Aegisthus with the victim-ax, and after him his mother, who stands in front of him with bare breasts and cries for her life.