Abstract
Hamletmaschine (1977), Heiner Müller’s second major rewriting of Shakespeare, was banned in the former GDR, a fate shared by many of his other dramatic works.1 In this play, German history is revisited through the lens of the equally historical engagement of German culture with Shakespeare. This chapter focuses on one of the motifs from the play, that of the prison which also functions as a safe haven. To do so, I concentrate on what is probably Müller’s specific material source for this image: the Berlin Wall, which in Hamletmaschine, I argue, takes the double function of prison and armour.
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Notes
All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. by Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: Norton, 2008).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1991), 308.
Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 265.
This paragraph roughly tracks Müller’s partly unreliable narrative of the events in his autobiography. For a biographical account of the same events, see Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Heiner Müller oder Das Prinzip Zweifel. Eine Biographie (Berlin: Aulbau Taschenbuch, 2003), 186–219. For a more thorough and academic account of the so-called Resettler affair, as well as for a collection of documents pertaining to these events,
see Matthias Braun, Drama um eine Komödie: Das Ensemble von SED und Staatssicherheit, FDJ und Ministerium der Kultur gegen Heiner Müllers Die Umsiedlerin oder Das Leben auf dem Lande im Oktober 1961 (Berlin: Chistoph Links, 1995).
Heiner Müller, Werke 9 — Eine Autobiographie, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Franklurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 131. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own.
Heiner Müller, Werke 8 — Die Schriften, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Franklurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 150–2.
Lawrence Guntner, ‘Brecht and Beyond: Shakespeare on the East German Stage’, in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, ed. by Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 109–39 (114).
See Heiner Müller, Werke 10 — Gespräche 1, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Franklurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 212.
See Müller, Werke 9, 141; Manfred Pfister, ‘Hamlets Made in Germany, East and West’, in Shakespeare in the New Europe, ed. by Michael Hattaway et al. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 76–91 (90–1);
Florence Baillet, Heiner Müller (Paris: Belin, 2003), 186.
Heiner Müller, Werke 3 — Die Stücke 1, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Franklurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 349. For a slightly ambivalent justification of the wall by Müller in 1985, see Müller, Werke 10, 393.
This coincidence of prison and armour was made explicit by Müller in an interview led by Alexander Kluge. In it, Müller compared revolution with a column of tanks, whose main characteristic was ‘protection in prison. That is, prison as protection and protection as prison.’ Heiner Müller, Werke 11 — Gespräche 2, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 643.
Heiner Müller, Werke 4 — Die Stücke 2, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 546. Quotations are taken from Carl Weber’s translation, with occasional silent modifications:
Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. by Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984). For this reason, in further quotations (noted parenthetically in the text with the abbreviation HM) the page numbers in brackets will refer to the German text.
The comparison was common in such contexts, so Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor tell us: ‘The concept of the whole state as a prison dominated a number of productions of Hamlet in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe during communist rule, most notably exemplified by the “Iron Curtain Hamlet” directed by Nikolai Okhlopkov in Moscow in 1954.’ Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, ‘Appendix 1: Folio-Only Passages’, in Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, ed. by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 465–73 (466n).
Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte und Hyperion, ed. by Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 2001), 425–6.
Müller, Werke 9, 286. Lawrence Guntner has made use of the same image: ‘The “material” Wall of bricks, concrete, and barbed wire soon became a “cultural wall” to keep unwanted cultural developments out and dissidents in line.’ Lawrence Guntner, ‘In Search of a Socialist Shakespeare: Hamlet on East German Stages’, in Shakespeare in the Worlds of Communism and Socialism, ed. by Irena R. Makaryk and Joseph G. Price (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 177–204 (181).
Jonathan Kalb, The Theatre of Heiner Müller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119.
Roland Petersohn, Heiner Müllers Shakespeare-Rezeption (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 93.
For an account of this production, see Wilhelm Hortmann, Shakespeare on the German Stage: The Twentieth Century. With a Section on Shakespeare on Stage in the German Democratic Republic by Maik Hamburger (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 428–34; Guntner, ‘Brecht’, 130–4; Guntner, ‘In Search of’, 193–6.
See Baillet, 190 and Pfister, 76–7. Müller says that this demonstration had actually been registered with the police and therefore, of course, with the STASI, so that ‘it was basically theatre, with a calculated outcome’. Heiner Müller, Werke 12 — Gespräche 3, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 486.
Heiner Müller, Werke 5 — Die Stücke 3, ed. by Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002), 255.
Quotations in English are taken from Heiner Müller, A Heiner Müller Reader, ed. and trans. by Carl Weber (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
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© 2013 Miguel Ramalhete Gomes
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Gomes, M.R. (2013). ‘IN THE FEARFUL ARMOUR’: Shakespeare, Heiner Müller and the Wall. In: Dente, C., Soncini, S. (eds) Shakespeare and Conflict. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311344_12
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