2 - Process and the Public Forum: Der Horatier, 1968–73

Summary

WHILE DER LOHNDRUCKER's PROTAGONIST Balke walks a fine line between hero and traitor, Muller places a wholly paradoxical being at the center of Der Horatier. Like Der Lohndrücker, Der Horatier explores questions regarding democracy, and attempts to make the audience members into a democratic collective in the theater; in the case of the former, this was necessary against the backdrop of the fortifying of a seemingly un-German socialist democracy, and in 1968 this problem had by no means gone away. Der Horatier appears to have been received without much enthusiasm in the GDR. Although a stage manuscript of the play for professional use was printed by the East German Henschel Verlag in 1969, it was another decade before its East German premiere at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater in Schwerin in 1979. Instead, it was first printed for a wider public in the theater program accompanying its premiere in West Berlin in March 1973, and had to wait to be published in book format, when it appeared in 1978, again in the FRG. The delay in the first GDR staging of the text does not, however, necessarily indicate that Der Horatier is critical of Eastern European socialist society. While, according to Muller, most of Der Horatier was written in August and September 1968 (W, 8:185), and therefore against the backdrop of the quelling of the Prague Spring, the significance of this historic moment and the text's treatment of it was not confined to the East. It is clear that Muller was reacting to the failure of the reform movement in Prague, which sought to carve out a new form of democratic socialism distinct from both Western democracy and traditional Eastern European socialist democracy. Accordingly, Der Horatier encourages audiences to question the prevailing interpretations of the relationship between the individual and society in both capitalist and socialist or communist social realities, and to consider further just what “democracy” could be and how it could work. This form of audience activity serves, in turn, to create a public space in the auditorium that looks very different to the one depicted on stage. Indeed, Muller had audience interaction in mind from the very beginning of his work on Der Horatier, and his appeals to aspects of Brechtian Lehrstücke are designed to invite the audience to participate and intervene in the process of public decision-making depicted onstage.