Monatshefte

Hans Kruschwitz's edited volume offers selected and revised presentations from a conference held at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule in November [End Page 705] 2015. The titular "Ich bin meiner Zeit voraus" is a claim made by Fondrak in Müller's play Die Umsiedlerin, suggesting both the central place of utopia in Müller's œuvre and Fondrak's (and Müller's) Brechtian conviction regarding sensuality: "zuerst kommt das Fressen und dann die Moral." The sixteen contributions gather together seasoned Heiner Müller scholars (e.g., Frank Raddatz, Norbert Otto Eke, Janine Ludwig, Helen Fehervary, Florian Vaßen) as well as younger scholars (e.g., Johannes Stobbe, Hanna Maria Hofmann, Michael Wood). The mix suggests the ongoing engagement with the most important post-Brechtian, post-war dramatist in the German language as well as the gradual and welcome shift to the next generation of Müller researchers, building on the continuities over the past few years: the third edition of the Bibliographie Heiner Müller (Vaßen, 2013), the Aachen conference itself (2015), a Berlin conference in 2016 that yielded the volume Material Müller. Das mediale Nachleben Heiner Müllers (Pabst and Bohley, 2018), and the planned conference in Hannover under the title "KüstenLANDSCHAFTEN. Grenzen und Selektion–Unterbrechung und Störung" (April 2019).

The anthology focuses almost exclusively on Müller's dramatic texts, although the extensive footnotes in every contribution reveal the authors' familiarity with his autobiography (Krieg ohne Schlacht) as well as with the three volumes of his Gesprä che and the one of his Schriften in the Suhrkamp edition of the collected works. This also characterizes the tendency of many contributors to rely on Müller's hermeneutic authority as the best exegete of his own writings. A bibliography and name–title index for the volume would have enhanced usability and access for readers to the various references and approaches. While Kruschwitz is careful to include essays that cover the span of Müller's plays from Der Lohndrücker to Wolokolamsker Chaussee, the authors reflect a clear preference for those published from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, especially Hamletmaschine, Der Auftrag, and Quartett. These are the plays, of course, that articulate most clearly Müller's shift from the persistent hope of changing the status quo to a more resigned calculation that the only hope for change is to keep open the wound of memory that preserves a trace of the future by engaging in a "Dialog mit den Toten."

This short review cannot do justice to the rich material and diverse insights collected in the thick volume. Some of the essays derive from earlier publications (Müller-Schöll's contribution on Der Auftrag is the German version of a French article from 2001; Andreas Moser's discussion of cancer in several of Müller's plays comes from his 2012 dissertation; and Johannes Stobbe's analysis of Verkommenes Ufer likewise is adapted from his 2013 dissertation). There are also repetitions and redundancies among the essays, some of which, however, actually introduce thoughtprovoking interpretative differences that enhance the volume's value. For example, both Eke and Hofmann take up the motif of "Kälte" (in contrast to the "Wärme" or "Hitze" of the revolution). The former focuses on the physical chill as well as the cold heart in Der Auftrag, Quartett, and Zement, while the latter finds evidence of Müller's ambivalent attitude toward utopia in his recourse to Georg Heym's relationship to the cold in Germania Tod in Berlin and to Georg Büchner's relationship to heat in Müller's key essay "Die Wunde Woyzeck." Similarly, Moser examines Müller's use of cancer as a metaphor for the destruction of the utopian project in Hamletmaschine and Der Auftrag, while Wolfram Ette reads in the same plays the [End Page 706] metaphoric implication of cancer not as a deformed utopia but rather as the possibility of something new after the demise; in other words, it produces a utopian surplus.

Two aspects in general impress me about the essays in this anthology. First, the sophisticated theoretical apparatus of many contributions brings into play predictable names, often cited by Müller himself in his interviews and essays. They include Hegel, Marx, and Engels (but not Lenin), Ernst Bloch and Benjamin (but rarely Adorno), Freud and Bataille, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (but not Agamben), Carl Schmitt and Jacques Rancière (but not Ernst Jünger). The grid traced by these references situates Müller within a philosophical discourse of progress and loss that dogged the entire twentieth century. The attention to unresolvable contradictions, paradoxes, and inversions in Müller texts is balanced by the authors' insistence on grounding their interpretations in Müller's theatrical practice. The contested relation between renewal and resignation, which most of the essays explicate, suggests how work in the theater itself is situated at the intersection of utopia and art. This awakened in me the nostalgia of wishing that Müller were still around to comment on our current conundrum.

Second, I appreciated the attention to Müller's language in almost every one of the contributions, especially the fine-grained analyses of his dense metaphors, symbols, and motifs. Beyond "Kälte" and "Krebs" mentioned above, these range from Raddatz's comments on "Stiefel" as a symbol of violence, Stobbe's remarks on "Schiffbruch" and the ubiquity of wind as a metaphor for the promise of transformation, Müller-Schöll's emphasis on Rome as Müller's code for the modern state (and its catastrophes), Ludwig's focus on his Christian iconography, especially the stations of the cross, and Florence Baillet's analysis of not seeing ("Blinzeln") as the very practice of art and its sensual method. The essays assembled here demand some familiarity both with Müller's œuvre and the existing scholarship. They are a welcome addition to the discussion of an important dramatist's ongoing relevance in the German theater.