A Heiner Muller Reader: Plays, Poetry, Prose – by Heiner Muller

Heiner Muller was born in Eppendorf, Saxony, into a working-class family. His father, a socialist, was beaten, arrested, and lost his job during the Nazi regime. Muller too became a socialist and was a civil servant in East Germany and later worked as a journalist and technical writer for the East German Writers’ Union. He honed his skills as a dramatist working at the Maxim Gorki Theater in East Berlin in the late 1950s.

Muller wrote three plays with his wife, Inge Muller. The pair won the Heinrich mann Prize in 1959. Their collaborative work Der Lohndrucker (The Wage Shark, 1957) was a critique of working conditions in East Germany. Because the Mullers refused to whitewash negative aspects of the socialist state, their own government disapproved of their plays, but their works were more successful in the West. After the government forced Muller to abandon contemporary subjects, he began to write adaptations of classical works in the 1960s; however, he added his own interpretations to the plays of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and the Soviet dramatist Mikhail sholokhov. These adaptations finally brought Muller fame in East Germany: He won the prestigious buchner Prize in 1985.

Muller’s writing reflects a strong influence from Bertolt brecht. Although his dialectical dramas elicited official disapproval in East Germany, Muller’s work with classic dramas earned him widespread acclaim. His biographer Jonathon Kalb notes in The Theater ofHeiner Muller (1984) that Muller saw “that overvaluation of originality, the bourgeois-era cult of the absolutely new, was a factor in the devaluation of history (in the West and East), and responded with a string of texts that refused to treat originality with proper capitalistic seriousness.” He is also known for combining lyrical prose with poetry to create language in his plays. Muller frequently depicted the individual’s struggle with society, and his works address the causes of late 20th-century German angst.

Released: 2006