Conclusion

Summary

AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS BOOK I stated an intention to locate and describe a positive political program in Muller's theater. Instead of seeing Muller as merely subversive or oppositional in relation to the GDR's political situation or the status of civilization in both East and West, I argued that we might find a definition of Muller's radical program of inviting numerous interpretations in his work as both playwright and director in his understanding of what it is for theater to be democratic. In his assessment of Wilson's work in 1985, he speaks of theatrical performances that invite individual spectators to undertake their own interpretive work as both “democratic” and important. Notwithstanding the very real limitations on such a form of directorial and interpretive practice in the theater, at least from the late 1960s to the mid- to late 1980s, Muller speaks and writes of the theater as the ideal space for individual audience members to generate numerous interpretations of material and find their own ways of relating it to their external reality. As already cited in this book, while Muller's utterances on democracy are occasionally negatively colored, he regards democracy as the only political system capable of allowing for the generation of political alternatives—alternatives even to democracy itself. Outside the theater, that is, democracy presents the formal organization of a public forum in which ideas and ideals can be created. What follows from this is that if the audience within the theater becomes a democratic collective, then that collective is a space in which utopias can be generated. Of course, the role of the audience in finding new answers to the questions raised by political reality has been well established in Muller research to date, but in this book I have shown that Muller's work is underwritten by a political program of democratic socialism. That is not to say that he subscribes to the form of socialist democracy championed by the SED, nor to the form of democracy practiced in Western liberal democracies. Muller's theater sets out to create a radical form of democratic socialism, in which dissensus promises a form of public forum in which new directions forward can be found.