View transcript: “Wastage” of humans / Comrade Mauser / “Victim of History”

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“Wastage” of humans / Comrade Mauser / “Victim of History”

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From a conversation with playwright Heiner Müller 1991 / texts by Carl Schmitt / Liberation as “Redistribution of power” / Chaos as hope? / Look back to 1990 / “The need for violence grows –”

Heiner Müller

Just recently there was this murder in Italy. A boy, I think 15, 16, together with his friends – they went to the movies, came back, masked, stabbed the parents to death, he himself stabbed his parents, assisted by his friends, three or four of them … and he had two sisters that they wanted to stab as well, but they came home too late. The friends had to go home and didn’t even try very hard to hide anything, they were caught the next day and confessed everything right away, but without any regret …

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What was your main activity 1989/1990 - - ?

Müller

My main activity from September till March was this production of “Hamlet” plus “Hamlet-Machine”. And it was pretty interesting, because it happened simultaneously to the events in the streets and everywhere. And it was like – there’s a phrase by Carl Schmitt, you know it – the intrusion of the time into the play. It’s a pretty interesting thought, I think …

Alexander Kluge

From the political theorist, Carl Schmitt …

Müller

Yes. There’s this book about Hamlet he wrote: “Hamlet or Hekuba. The intrusion of the time into the play”, where he says that … you can’t make up tragedies or tragic material, they are myths that you use, change, whatever, but you can’t just make them up, and for him the only modern tragedy was Hamlet; and that one became a tragedy through the intrusion of the time into the play, which means, Shakespeare started to write that play under the rule of Elizabeth – the Tudors – ; and then the Stuarts came, Jacob, the son of Mary Stuart, and there was a rumor that Mary Stuart had married the murderer of her husband. Suddenly you had the material for Hamlet. It gave the play a sudden urgency that was unbearable, the theater became political, and Shakespeare had to obscure the play and entangle it.

Kluge

Oh, and that’s why Hamlet …

Müller

And that’s how it became a tragedy.

Kluge

That’s how it became a tragedy and that’s how … otherwise it could have been a boulevard play, or a recreational play, or an action piece …

Müller

Yes. Or simply a revenge drama …

Kluge

Revenge drama, yes. And it loses its innocence …

Müller

…through this intrusion of the time, and that’s how it turns into a tragedy.

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Mary Stuart, execution of the Scottish queen

Kluge

New Year’s Eve. What did you do 1990?

Müller

I remember that pretty well, I think, I did … It was always my dream to spend New Year’s Eve alone, with all that noise, and to work, and that’s what I did, I think.

Kluge

And what did you work on?

Müller

I was writing something, I don’t remember what it was …

Kluge

And what did you write?

Müller

I don’t know. But it was pretty much one of the quietest days for me, one of the few days I spent on my own, because everyone else was busy partying. That had always been my dream, not to spend New Year’s Eve with other people, but to be alone and do something.

Kluge

Are you still awake at midnight?

Müller

Yes.

Kluge

Earlier we talked about Carl Schmitt. If you could explain to our viewers: Who is Carl Schmitt anyway? Schmitt is a relatively normal name, after all, spelled with two “t” …

Müller

Yes, yes. Originally, for me he was … or at first, he was the author of a text about the “Theory of the partisan”, you know what I’m talking about. And for me, it was a very important, I don’ even remember …

Kluge

A late text, an extremely late text.

Müller

Yes, yes, I know. That was the first text I read. I only read the Hamlet text later. And for me that was an incredibly important text, because ..

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Carl Schmitt about: industrialized brutality, French Revolution, and the total enemy image

Müller

…so this conservative view on the revolution, the problem of revolution; the idea that only with the French Revolution, with the concept and the reality of a peoples’ war, the necessity of a total image of the enemy emerged.

Kluge

Brutality emerges.

Müller

Yes, yes. That was very important for me.

Kluge

Industrial brutality.

Müller

Yes, yes.

Kluge

When did you even first encounter him? You know quite a lot of his texts after all …

Müller

Yes. I think, only in the eighties, the mid-eighties. The first was “Theory of the partisan”, and then there were several others.

Kluge

What does he say in “Theory of the partisan”?

Müller

The main argument for me was the connection between revolution and the image of the enemy. The image of the enemy is a main category for him after all, basically the political category …

Kluge

Politics is the exact definition of the enemy.

Müller

Exactly. And in this text the main argument is basically that with the revolution, the French Revolution, the peoples’ war, the difference between civilians and military disappears. Before …

Kluge

Because the entire nation is militarized!

Müller

Exactly! Before, war was like a duel, and that concept disappears with the French Revolution; and with the revolution, with the concept or the reality of civil war, the necessity of a total image of the enemy emerges. And then there are no civilians anymore and the distinction disappears.

Kluge

And now: What’s the consequence for the partisans?

Müller

In this text, the consequence is basically that … in a modern, technocratically defined structure, the partisan is something like a dog on a highway. That’s the pretty merciless consequence. And with the possibility of a nuclear war: the total enemy image. The enemy has to be an enemy of humanity, so that you can use this technology, these weapons against them. You have to turn them into an enemy of humanity or you can’t use these weapons.

Kluge

These weapons are so unusually brutal that you couldn’t justify them with the ideals of the French Revolution, the emancipation, on the one hand. And a particularly high level of morality would have to be so brutal that peace treaties would not be possible anymore, right?

Müller

Yes. I think what’s also important in this context is … Flusser, do you know him?

Kluge

Yes.

Müller

… simply this phrase: that you can’t explain the Bolshevik revolution with the French Revolution. But you can explain the French Revolution with the Bolshevik one.

Kluge

How’s that? I never understood that.

Müller

Yes. I like it because he assumes a different concept of time. It’s not a linear concept of time, and you understand the French Revolution only if you have the Bolshevik revolution in mind.

Kluge

So the future explains, or even makes the past only possible.

Müller

…makes the past possible, yes. I think Lenin was much more pragmatic …

Kluge

But Lenin doesn’t care about the poor …

Müller

…much more pragmatic and much more cynical.

Kluge

Well. He may have been interested in power, but if he cared about the poor or not, I don’t even really know.

Müller

No, I don’t think so.

Kluge

And what the poor are in Russia, we don’t even really know. There are so incredibly many in 1917 …

Müller

There is a book – this is off-topic, but – by an Italian, whose name I’ve forgotten, of course, but maybe you know the book “The Silence of the Body.” I don’t know the name of the author. It’s a collection of strange aphorisms, and one of them is: “The Russian people with their deep instinct for endless suffering chose Lenin over Kerenski.”

Kluge

That’s in there?

Müller

Yes. I actually kind of like that.

Kluge

Could you describe Kerenski? He’s the dictator of the revolution in February 1917, which at first fills everyone with euphoria.

Müller

Well, it was probably the attempt to catch up with the European development, but not in one step.

Kluge

No. The attempt to introduce the French Revolution in the form of the French Republic in St. Petersburg, so to speak. And at first that causes euphoria, because now democracy rules instead of the tsar.

Müller

That was Kerenski, yes.

Kluge

Very fast they have to change into the The Bad Person of Szechwan, because the whole thing doesn’t work at all. It’s freedom, parliamentary freedom, there are difficulties and now a dictator emerges, a kind of Bonaparte, without there even having been a French Revolution, right?

Müller

Kerenski was the attempt to recreate the results of the French Revolution in Russia, and Lenin was the attempt to reenact the French Revolution in Russia. And that’s how I understand Flusser.

Kluge

And if we stick with this for a moment: Kerenski does what the French, the French patriots did. They are completely indifferent towards the war, that means, they empower it. Now the war really starts. That’s the thing with Kerenski: the war doesn’t change in itself, but it is organized democratically. It’s a different form of administration. An administration over the “noveaux riches”, the new-rich, the new ones, the new-poor. And in contrast to that – and you can call that idealistic fifty times, but definitely for Rosa Luxemburg and for the Kienthaler Circle in general – Lenin is the protest against the slaughter of Verdun. He really gets them going. And the April Theses are basically about the fact that the war has to stop. Is that mere strategy or their core?

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The either/or of the World War I massacres: “Socialism or barbarism”

Kluge

The world war, that’s barbarism itself, for everyone involved. And now he is self-righteous enough to say: We are in a position to develop a concept of humanity that works differently, so that it doesn’t lead to war. At least this one principle he and his followers followed. They didn’t start wars.

Müller

Only the total civil war.

Kluge

Okay. What is the total civil war, what does that mean?

Müller

Well, I think Lenin’s brilliant idea was that you can win over the masses only with this attitude towards the war. No one wanted the war anymore, everyone wanted it to stop. That was the brilliant idea. And that’s how you could win over the masses.

Kluge

And now, voluntarily or involuntarily, a civil war begins?

Müller

The civil war resulted just from …

Kluge

… was forced upon them at first …

Müller

… no, emerges from a situation of underdevelopment. And forced upon them from outside, that’s true.

Kluge

There are a lot of different powers …

Müller

… and I believe that one should take this thesis of Toynbee seriously, that …

the industrialization of Russia was only possible with a Western ideology. And Marxism as a vehicle of early capitalism in Russia.

Kluge

Well, and we don’t even know why agricultural countries …

Müller

.. should be industrialized, of course …

Kluge

… should be industrialized …

Müller

But Lenin didn’t know that. I think there is … Lenin’s last telegrams are quite beautiful, for example when he simply says in one of them, just before he died, that he knew Europe, he knew German philosophy, he knew Marxism, but he didn’t know Russia. I think the point is simply: Lenin’s real mistake was that he couldn’t even imagine that things in Russia might go very differently. He didn’t realize the potential of slowing down.

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“Lenin, the eternal emigrant, realizes too late how little he knew about Russia –”

Müller

And always with a view to the West, basically from the perspective of the underdeveloped’s inferiority complex.

Kluge

How could it have gone in Russia?

Müller

I have no idea, but there is this one point in Solschenizyn that I find pretty interesting, as questionable as all of this is, but as a follow-up to Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky always had this big fear of the West, if the West would come to Russia. In Carl Schmitt’s “Theory of the partisan” for example, there is this quote. So for once: Russia is ready for a social revolution. The worst that could happen to Russia is an academic Pugatchev. That is a great phrase, I think.

Kluge

A great phrase …

Müller

And of course Lenin was the academic Pugatchev – for Schmitt, too.

Müller

Now you can understand what the Italian said about the instinct for endless suffering.

Kluge

Instinct for endless suffering …

Müller

Yes, yes. That the Russian people with their instinct for endless suffering, for endless suffering, chose Lenin and not Kerenski.

Kluge

But how do you understand “endless suffering”? Would that mean that the suffering becomes less?

Müller

No, but it’s connected to Russia’s history. That was the third Rome. Byzantine was the second, Moscow, Russia …

Kluge

The third Rome …

Müller

…The third Rome, yes. It’s not that simple, because there is this strange text of Foucault’s – do you know it? - “On the Light of War” …

Kluge

No, what does that mean?

Müller

A script of a lecture where he tries to … outline European history, and describes the two main story lines: one is the Jewish-Christian-Messianic one …

Kluge

That one is well known, right.

Müller

You know that one. The other is the Roman-National one. And the last two forms or manifestations of the Jewish-Christian-Messianic line are National Socialism and Bolshevism.

Kluge

A provocative thesis!

Müller

No, it’s not that provocative, because if you remember, the Nazi terminology was all Jewish. The 1000 Year Reich, and then there is this strange attempt by Lyotard to explain why German antisemitism was so particularly brutal. Because for the Teutons … the missionaries came from Rome, the main Teuton tribe was the Francs …

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A thesis of the French philosopher Lyotard, who continues a claim of the theorist Foucault - -

Müller

… and the missionaries explained to the Francs: You are the leading nation of the Teutons and you are the chosen people and that’s why you have to be the first to accept the cross. And the Francs accepted the cross, and with them all Teutons, because they were the chosen people. In the Middle Ages there is suddenly another chosen people: The Jews in Europe. And there can’t be two chosen people, that’s the sole conflict, and it comes deep from the subconscious, from history, this deadliness of the conflict.

Kluge

There’s a saying: Socialism or barbarism. It’s a phrase by a French woman, but Rosa Luxemburg picked it up, and this phrase refers exclusively to the 1st of August 1914; and it’s the potential of protest that says: this form of barbarism on European soil, to start wars that in the end don’t decide anything, and secondly to organize a slaughtering, the industrialized death … this form of war, be it a civil war or a foreign war, has to be avoided, or the 20th century will go to hell in a handbasket.

Müller

But that’s the problem. During the Iraq war, the first thing that came to my mind was how much this one sentence of Hitler’s still dominates the history of this century. In the speech in front of the industry club – you know the one - where he says that the living standard of the white race can only be maintained if the standard of the other races is kept low, and political and economical means are not enough to guarantee that anymore, now you need military means. And that’s the question … and the other thing is – I can’t support this with numbers right now, but I think there is a calculation, I don’t know how correct it is – that for a while now the number of the living has been higher than the number of the dead in the history of mankind as far as we can see. That’s an entirely new situation. So far the dead have always been the majority …

Kluge

…always the majority …

Müller

…and now they are the minority …

Kluge

Aha…

Müller

So they have to … this minority has to be strengthened. There are too many living people, that’s the new situation. And they cannot all live, to put it very barbarically.

Kluge

And the concept that the French Revolution is the basis of the Russian Revolution, the Russian Revolution as confirmation, as belated justification of the French one, in order that there be resources for any possible number of people.

Müller

Yes. But there aren’t …

Kluge

And that would be the utopia?

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Tolstoy’s position in regard to the end of humanity - -

Müller

And he simply said that after all, the dinosaurs are extinct too. That’s one way to look at it.

Kluge

It wasn’t a reason for him to change his behavior …

Müller

No, not at all.

Kluge

… although he didn’t assume that humanity automatically has to die out because the dinosaurs became extinct, but that he wouldn’t behave differently …

Müller

…no, but he didn’t think it was more important …

Kluge

…he didn’t think it was more important.

Müller

The question is if – but this is … absolutely theologically-anarchistically speaking – if the difference between life and death isn’t overestimated …

Kluge

Because for the individual it’s an overestimation …

Müller

Yes, and because … if this development continues, life becomes more and more unlivable and less and less valuable …

Kluge

…And the administrative implementation of life wouldn’t be what evolution gives a meaning to.

Müller

Yes, exactly.

Kluge

And what would you say?

Müller

I can only give an absolutely subjective answer. When I drove to the airport this morning, I felt very sick, because I had barely slept, because of yesterday. I only got home after 1 am, because there was an event at the academy, and I’m 62 years old, so I have to somehow live with the fact that I’m going to die someday, and I realize more and more that I don’t even care all that much anymore, I’m not scared anymore. Okay, that’s a question of age, you can just blame it on that, but I think there’s more to it. That … for many people life becomes more and more obscene, and death loses its obscenity. It’s a reaction to what you mentioned about World War I. Something started back then, a process started that is affecting us even now, and has an effect on our individual behavior.

Kluge

And Verdun, a gas war, could repeat itself just because of the narrow-mindedness of old age. Even life turns into static warfare.

Müller

Of course, I mean … all life forms are militant now, and you’ve heard this stupid calculation about how many car accidents there were in the former GDR, and that it’s completely disproportionate to the people who died at the Wall. Whatever was missing was made up for, and the process continues.

Kluge

If you – there’s this Marxist term “living labor”, “dead labor”, so dead and alive, it’s a recurrent theme in his entire work. Could you tell me: What exactly would life be, the living? If it were not to insist on being administrated existence? What would playwrights say, so to speak, about what he says – it’s a fling, it exists, that’s what being alive is about ?

Müller

For me personally it’s like this at the moment – this is a very naive answer – when I get up in the morning, I already know: I won’t have time that day for what I actually would like to do. I will have to do things that I’m not really interested in doing. That’s how life time is wasted that I’d rather spend doing something else. I would rather write something or put something on stage that has to do with reality only in the sense that it is a design of another reality. I realize how the situation that I am in now takes away the time for those things, and life becomes more and more empty time. Last night, for instance, there was an event at the academy featuring a very talented, young man from Leipzig, basically a clown, who has had a solo gig for years, a program about time and current issues, but he does it very well. It was a bit of everything, from Karl Valentin to whomever. I’ve seen him before. Yesterday I was pretty sad because I suddenly realized that there is something happening that confirms that saying of Baudelaire’s: “Boredom is drawn-out pain.” That’s a basic experience nowadays, I think: the increasing boredom. Being bored with life and the pain that is connected to the withdrawal from life and that can only be experienced as boredom. Now there’s empty time, only empty time.

Kluge

It’s the opposite of life.

Müller

Yes, empty time is basically the opposite of life.

Kluge

Could you bring yourself to call fulfilled time life?

Müller

I think so, yes. And the really bad thing about it is, if you think of this chapter in Solschenizyn, 1914 …

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Alexander I. Solschenizyn, August 1914, Novel

Müller

… where the … I don’t know the name – this officer rides across a battle field and thinks of his wife in St. Petersburg, I think, and suddenly he has the feeling that he doesn’t need a wife, he doesn’t need a life, war replaces everything. A time he is not responsible for anymore, a process he is not responsible for anymore. He is relieved of all that, of all his responsibilities, all ties, and he doesn’t need any of this anymore. And war is the actual empty time, the fulfillment of empty time.

Kluge

That would be August 1914. That’s the title of Solschenizyn’s novel after all, and I believe that it’s our fundamental trauma: If you have the answer to the 1st of August 1914, you also have the answers to the 20th century, the answer to love stories.

Müller

Yes, yes.

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“Men and women of the Russian Revolution –”

Müller

Men and women of the …

Kluge

…Revolution…

Müller

… Russian Revolution. And my first reaction is basically: I know some faces, but it’s not important anymore. You can see that it’s always people who have something to do with me, or with you, who have something to do with us …

Kluge

…who are young…

Müller

…who are young…

Kluge

…were thinking something…

Müller

Exactly. And those are our fathers who didn’t have time to father us and our mothers who didn’t have time to give birth to us. And that’s the strange thing about it, this rift. That people wasted their lives, often very early, for something that doesn’t exist anymore or exists only as an idea. And that’s the phenomenon of wastage. All the things that are wasted for a goal that is never reached …

Kluge

Although the good will is worn down more than the weak will. I don’t want to say evil, that’s not the direct opposite …

Müller

…Hm, okay…

Kluge

…but the opposite is simply the indifferent will. That one doesn’t wear out at all, but is evolutionary, so in the Darwinian sense incredibly successful.

Müller

I wanted to tell you a story in this context that just comes to mind when I see these photos. Once in GDR-PEN, after I got accepted as a member, there was a ritual where every new member had to read something. There were cookies and tea and it was very aesthetic in the sense of Heine, and I did – that was ten or twelve years ago – read a text of mine that I’m sure you know: “Mauser”. It’s a variant of Brecht’s “The Measures Taken”. I read that and there …

Kluge

What kind of person is someone like “Mauser” again, for our viewers?

Müller

Yes, well, it’s the story of a man. The material is actually from … Sholokhov, the “quiet Don”, a man who is assigned by the party to lead the Revolutionary Tribunal during the civil war.

Kluge

That’s why comrade Mauser…

Müller

…and he has to shoot people.

Kluge

Because the Mauser pistol was the pistol of the revolution …

Müller

Exactly. And he does it and at some point he starts to enjoy doing it, because only this way it’s bearable, and then he has to be shot. That’s basically the story. So the wastage of a person for duty …

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“Wastage” of humans / Comrade Mauser / “Victim of History”

Müller

… and whatever you think of the necessity, but he needs to be relieved because he enjoys it. And then in the discussion period following Peter Hacks said something to the effect that it was totally uninteresting, that it was all about the guilt issue, ‘68 and such; and another, Wieland Herzfelde, said it was Stalinism. And then – that’s what I actually wanted to tell you – Eduard Claudius spoke, whom you might not even know, a writer from the Bund Proletarischer Schriftsteller (League of Proletarian Writers) before 1933. Certainly not a great writer, but the only one who served as a soldier in Spain, and he wrote a few good things during the GDR. Of course literature isn’t very interesting there. And he said that unfortunately he would have to leave, because for the first time he had gotten a visa for Paris, and he always had been denied entry to Paris, because he was in this concentration camp in Southern France, in Lagnes, and now he has to leave. He only wants to say that he doesn’t understand any of this, or the discussion about it; but that it reminded him of a situation he got into in Spain, after the battle of Teruel, where the Reds had won, and then they saw all these dead Moroccans, these beautiful young people who basically didn’t even have anything to do with the battle, and they were so beautiful and dead, and that’s why he remembered it.

Kluge

This is Anselm Kiefer. Could you explain what you see in those pictures? For example, this

is “Lead airplanes.”

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Lead airplanes by Anselm Kiefer

Kluge

What do you make of Anselm Kiefer?

Müller

The first advantage is that this plane can’t fly. That’s very important. Something that is lethal when it moves is put out of service, is fixed. That requires an absolute decision for unethical behavior. If you become moralist as an artist, you just confirm the system. The only thing you can do is to enjoy what happens and you can create art only out of an acquiescence, and, to formulate it very brutally, but I’m assuming Kiefer would agree that some planes are killing machines. Out of this acquiescence he makes this. And creates something else out of it …

Kluge

… That means they are an antidote because he understood what it’s about …

Müller

Yes, yes, he turns it into something else, yes. But without this acquiescence …you can’t make anything out of polemics. I believe there is a connection between … there is the mechanization of killing that becomes increasingly abstract, the pilot, even in the Stuka. gets controlled and directed …

Kluge

… is now with radar, so to speak … [unverständlich]

Müller

And that’s like a video event or at the penny arcades, and the pilot doesn’t have any concrete connection to what he does anymore, he just presses random buttons and there is a video screen and music to go with it, and it’s a completely abstract killing that doesn’t have anything to do anymore with the person, the individual, no connection to what he kills, and that’s why it’s an abstract job.

Kluge

This on the one hand … and on the other hand?

Müller

… and this abstraction … yes, this abstraction. And on the other hand, because of this, the need for entirely individual physical violence or use of violence probably grows, and this story in Leipzig is one of many stories: 20 young people from Leipzig attack a home for asylum seekers at night, the asylum seekers are all sleeping, Turkish, Pakistani, Indians, whatnot, Vietnamese, and attack them with iron rods and spades and send them into the hospital. And this kind of thing becomes more and more common, and with the increasing abstraction of war, of killing, the basic need for immediate killing. And I mean, I’ve been thinking recently about the term “liberation”. After all, liberation is nothing but a redistribution of power. And how do you escape from that? I don’t know …

Kluge

What’s the dramatic about it?

Müller

The dramatic, I think, is that it becomes increasingly undramatic. It turns more and more into a mechanism. And drama is not mechanical, drama is a duel, and duel means that there are still possibilities and there is a range of possibilities, and that range is shrinking, becomes narrower and narrower, and with it the drama disappears, is going to run out …

Kluge

When you were writing plays, how did you do that? Is it a motor process, is it an epic process, is it a thought process?

Müller

I think it’s mainly a motor process.

Kluge

What was your speech as Kleist prize winner about?

Müller

It was basically the attempt to draw a connection between Kleist and this concept of order in regards to German reunification. It was meant to be an order, but turned into chaos. And that is a hope for both sides, I think. At the moment, it is felt particularly desperately in the East …

Kluge

Unhappiness is experienced as open bond … is an open bond …

Müller

… is an open situation. And there is a chance for – something that fell away because of the speed and the way this colonization happened is that any of the chances the East might have had to influence the West, were radically curtailed. And this division is not going to hold up much longer, I think.

Kluge

What’s your profession? What would you call it?

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K.H. Bohrer about Heinrich Heine

Müller

Well, my job is basically … to upset, to confuse, to disturb; to disturb the common sense.

Kluge

So, not a chronicler?

Müller

Not at all. Maybe I could be a chronicler, maybe I am, but only in the sense that, whenever I communicate something as chronicler, at the same time I want …

Kluge

…artiste-démolisseur, destruction artist.

Müller

… to destabilize the image of what I’m telling them.

Kluge

…so a destruction artist…

Müller

… and to allow for other images of what I’m telling. Whenever I produce something, I want to destroy something at the same time. Otherwise I can’t produce anything at all.

Kluge

Aha, aha.

Müller

And that’s what I found interesting about Kleist: he can’t help it either. If you don’t destroy something, you can’t produce anything. Because, I mean, destruction means to allow for production, a different production than the one given ….

Kluge

So you are not sentimental in regard to the fate of the new German states, like it happens right now?

Müller

Not at all. I think it’s all totally okay, because I believe that – okay, maybe it’s an exaggerated optimism – but I belive that … from this momentary destruction memory accrues. At first it’s from a political perspective, sure … at first all the energy, the criminal intent moves towards the right, of course – and the criminal intent, or the anarchistic force, is what this is about, after all. But I believe that would be a very short-circuited conclusion, if you think that’s all …

Kluge

How do you understand criminal intent?

Müller

Well, criminal intent develops when you are not protected by a social net anymore. That’s happening right now to millions in the new German states: that’s how criminal intent develops. At first, the result is that people commit suicide, that the aggression erupts within the family, in the tram, the subway, etc. There will be a long period of time when that simply …

Kluge

By the way, these are the trains that should have lead from Berlin to Minsk to Kasan, a broad-gauge railway, so more or less gigantic trains …

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Christmas 1990 / Heiner Müller about Carl Schmitt: Industrialized brutality and French Revolution: “All life forms are militant nowadays” / Has the line between life and death been crossed? / A black discourse

Kluge

… and on the way back they should bring all the loot, the grain, the loot of the East, back to the Reich. That was the basic idea of World War II, so to speak, of the East War. This is the railroad civil servant who invented the Reichsspurbahn.

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From the “Thorough conversation with Heiner Müller 1991”