5 - Suicidal Voices: Heiner Müller's Hamletmaschine and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken

Summary

THESE TWO WORKS SEEM, on the surface, to counter my claim that suicide in East German literature of the 1970s and 1980s is primarily fictional and imaginative; both of them, however, are wildly transtextual. Moreover, they are an unlikely pair. Heiner Müller's play Hamletmaschine (1977/78) and Sibylle Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken (1981) are both inspired, in part, by real suicides. Although each of these two works is extraordinarily rich on its own, they also become even more interesting when they are placed alongside the other literary representations of suicide in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s. Both works also employ a large number of hypotexts that at times run counter to one another, and both use some combination of hypertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, and Kristevan intertextuality. Indeed, Genette's taxonomy of transtextuality, as useful as it is, is not entirely equipped to describe these two works. The wealth of transtextuality functions in both works to resist interpretation and simplification, constituting what Jeff Todd Titon calls “intertextual overload” or what Georgina Paul, writing specifically about Hamletmaschine, calls “cultural overload.” Whereas Plenzdorf 's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. and Wolf 's Kein Ort. Nirgends, for example, employ the trope of suicide to instigate a shift in literary historiography, causing literary heritage to be rewired, Hamletmaschine and Flucht in die Wolken shortcircuit the idea of literary heritage altogether. Muthesius's Flucht in die Wolken uses literary history primarily to cope with the loss of a loved one through suicide. And while Müller's Hamletmaschine alludes to real suicides, among many other things, it does not constitute a comingto- terms with suicide. Instead, it is a dramatic, comparative exploration of suicidal voices and various intellectual strands of self-destruction. In short, in Hamletmaschine Müller uses the theme of suicide in an attempt to explore the failures and impossibilities of co-opting literary heritage in the GDR, and in Flucht in die Wolken Muthesius uses allusions to literature in an attempt to make some sense of the author's daughter's suicide and the GDR context in which it happened.

Although no character in Hamletmaschine explicitly commits suicide during the action of the play, suicide and self-destruction are the primary themes in the work. Indeed, the play consists largely of a polyphony of suicidal voices. Scholarship on Hamletmaschine tends to fall into one of two categories.