Introduction

Summary

BORROWING THE WORDS of Rainer Nagele, “Zu sagen, dass Heiner Mullers Theater ein politisches Theater ist, mag als eine Banalitat erscheinen—oder als eine fragwurdige Verallgemeinerung” (to say that Heiner Muller's theater is a political theater may seem to be a banality— or a questionable generalization). Taken in his own right or, at the very least, given his generally accepted status as Bertolt Brecht's “most adept successor,” to think of Heiner Muller as anything other than a political playwright would do him no justice at all. But Nagele is equally right in finding the epithet of “political” both banal and too loose. Genia Schulz's assessment of Muller in 1980 as the “politisch wie theoretisch strengste und anspruchsvollste Dramatiker im deutschsprachigen Raum” (both politically and theoretically the most rigorous and challenging dramatist in the German-speaking world) gives perhaps some indication of why so much scholarly time and effort has been dedicated to the politics of Heiner Muller. Decades of research into Muller's works on the page and the stage has identified him as a major player in post-Brechtian theater, whose radical politics led him to experiment with theatrical forms that would both challenge the limits and find new ways of doing theater politically. But whether Muller's dramaturgical practice and philosophical outlook allow us to see him as a socialist playwright, or indeed as a communist playwright with conservative leanings, in the light of the differences between his plays and the changes in the political landscape to which he was responding, finding a single descriptor for his politics has not been quite so straightforward.

This book attempts to tie down the politics of Muller's theater. That is not to say that it argues for a static notion of what Muller's politics was. Rather, here I shall set out to describe Muller's theater as a form of democratic theater and shall argue that, even as Muller's practice as a playwright and director developed and reality around him posed new political questions, Muller's theater seeks to place the question of democracy in the foreground and to render the theater (including its audience) a democratic space.