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Attentate auf die Geometrie : Heiner Müllers Schriften der "Ausschweifung und Disziplinierung"
 Ort: Berlin
Verlag: Alexander Verlag
Jahr: 2009
Autor(en): Kristin Schulz
Autor der Rezension: Robert Blankenship
ISBN: 978-3-89581-203-3
Umfang / Preis: 404 Seiten / EUR 29.90
 Heiner Müller is most famous as a (post-dramatic) playwright. His body of writings, however, is far limited to theater plays, dramatic or otherwise. He also authored poetry, prose fiction, conversations, and, well, a bunch of other stuff. This heterogenous menagerie of other stuff is the topic of Kristin Schulz’s monograph Attentate auf die Geometrie: Heiner Müllers Schriften der „Ausschweifung und Disziplinierung“. As my clumsy appellation of this part of Müller’s oeuvre as „other stuff“ indicates, it is difficult to define. Schulz, however, navigates the treacherous waters of genre paradigms admirably but settles on the pragmatic point that her task is to examine the texts that are located in the eighth volume – loosely labeled „Schriften“ – of the twelve volume Werkausgabe (complete works) edition of Müller’s works edited by Frank Hörnigk, a project with which Schulz assisted. Included in these texts are reviews, essays, letters, speeches, obituaries, and so on. Schulz’s monograph is original because it tackles these texts on which so little has been written. Even the otherwise comprehensive Heiner Müller Handbuch, contains little information about these texts. David Bathrick’s insightful monograph The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR, furthermore, which has much to say about the dissenting nature of Müller’s plays, hardly mentions these “Schriften.”
Schulz begins by citing a passage from the beginning of Jean Genet’s posthumously published memoir about the Palestinian Revolution Prisoner of Love, in which Genet, in an ethnographic theoretical moment, describes true experience (of the Palestinian Revolution) as being located in the white space of any written history, between the lines, between the words. On this motto page, Schulz then cites Müller reminding us of his interest in explosions. Müller himself cites Genet, as Schulz points out, in order to explain the function of his notion of the textual explosion. Müller indicates that ideas, when translated into images (or written texts), either skew the image, or the ideas themselves explode. Müller, of course, prefers the latter. Schulz points all of this out in order to provide a framework for Müller’s „Schriften,“ which, like Genet’s Prisoner of Love, are primarily non-fiction, yet make use of a wooly bunch of genres in order to explode ideas, that is to break down ideas with progress in mind. Such destruction of forms and ideas is, furthermore, indicated through the title of Schulz’s monograph, “Attentate auf die Geometrie” (attacks on geometry), a quotation by Müller, in which he describes the havoc that dreams can wreak on space and time. Müller’s explosions, his acts of terrorizing geometry, thus allow for history writing that avoids the impossible and hypocritical illusion of objectivity. If all of this sounds like Walter Benjamin in his critique of Leopold Ranke’s „wie es wirklich gewesen“ or in his elegaic essay on the storyteller, it does so for good reason: Müller was influenced by Benjamin, and Schulz points out this influence several times in her monograph.
Schulz structures her monograph into six chapters: I) an introduction, in which she describes Müller’s work in terms of explosions and Genet’s Prisoner of Love, II) a genre-navigational chapter, in which she defines her topic, III) a chapter, in which she gathers scattered statements by Müller on his poetics, IV) an examination of four collections of Müller’s „Schriften,“ V) a chronological review of Müller’s „Schriften“ broken into four periods (1950-1961, 1961-1975, 1975-1989, 1989-1995), and VI) what Schulz herself calls an attempt at a conclusion. There is a bit of a caesura between the first three chapters and the final three chapters in that the first three deal with the explosive, genre-warping poetics of Müller’s „Schriften,“ while the fourth and fifth chapters explore two different methods of sorting through Müller’s „Schriften.“ The first three chapters lay out what is described here in the previous paragraph.
The fourth chapter compares and contrasts four collections of Müller’s „Schriften,“ which appeared before the twelve volume Werkausgabe, and none of which are as comprehensive as the eighth volume of the Werkausgabe. Rotwelsch (1982) contains mostly „Schriften“ and conversations from the mid-1970s that interact with French theory of the day. Explosion of a memory. Heiner Müller DDR. Ein Arbeitsbuch (1988) is the most comprehensive of the pre-Werkausgabe collections, and it is an Arbeitsbuch (workbook) in the sense that it includes secondary literature or rather opinion pieces about Müller’s works by writers and theorists. With an apparently unsystematic ordering of the texts accompanied by images, Explosion of a memory is exactly what the title indicates. Heiner Müller Material. Texte und Kommentare (1989/1990), which coincides roughly with both Müller’s sixtieth birthday and the fall of the Berlin Wall, contains texts by Müller that were previously unpublished in East Germany as well as secondary literature of a rather celebratory nature by Germanists from around the globe. Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen. Eine Autobiographie (1992, and an expanded edition was published in 1994) contains, in addition to Müller’s autobiography, biographical documents as well as texts by Müller that contain autobiographical value. The second edition addsState Security documents to this section.
The fifth chapter sets up a periodization of Müller’s „Schriften.“ The early „Schriften“ – those written between 1950 and 1961 – include primarily journalistic works and literature reviews of an explicitly political nature. A caesura appears in 1961 –the year the Berlin Wall was erected – largely through Müller’s texts Grußadresse an eine Akademie and Selbstkritik Heiner Müllers an die Abteilung Kultur beim Zentralkomitee der SED, in which he engages with criticism by the SED of his play Die Umsiederin oder das Leben auf dem Land, a play that led to his expulsion from the Schriftstellerverband. From 1961 until 1975, Müller produced few „Schriften“ but many plays. In 1975, Müller traveled to the United States where his play Mauser made its debut at the University of Texas in Austin. Impressed by landscapes of the United States, Müller began thinking more in terms of space than in terms of time. Around this time, Müller also began to ignore concerns about reception, writing instead plays for himself. And this is the time in which he began to deal with both dreams and the postmodern. Schulz does a particularly good job here of describing and comparing two of Müller’s speeches: “Die Wunde Woyzeck” and “Shakespeare: eine Differenz,” both of which deal with metaphorical open wounds. 1989 and 1995 are rather obvious caesurae in Müller’s oeuvre: In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and in 1995, Heiner Müller died. In the early 1990s, Müller’s took up administrative and regisseurial roles and beganto generate administrative texts. Schulz contrasts Müller’s administrative texts with those of Kafka. While Kafka’s administrative texts provide an underbelly to his literary works, Müller’sdo not. In this period, Müller also participated in conversations with figures such as filmmaker Alexander Kluge and leftist politician Gregor Gysi.
Forced to find a weakness in Schulz’s monograph, one might point out that there is hardly a sharp, overarching thesis that runs throughout the book, a matter that is frequently insisted upon today, at least in American scholarship. The allusion to Genet and the titular talk of attacks on geometry are abandoned early on. However, a sharp thesis is does not seems to be Schulz’s aim, nor does it impede her from making a major contribution to Heiner Müller scholarship. Schulz herself declares at the beginning of her final chapter „Versuch einer Konklusion“: „Nach dieser exemplarischen Exkursion in die Textlandschaften in den Fallstudien der fünfziger bis neunziger Jahre fällt auf, dass sich weder ein einheitliches Bild (etwa einer glazialen Serie zusammengehöriger, da gleichermaßen bedingt entstandener Elemente) noch eines der zwangsläufigen Entwicklung gewinnen oder gar rekonstruieren lässt.” Schulz’s project, it seems, is rather to survey the heterogeneous and largely yet to be received body of “Schriften” by Heiner Müller. And Schulz, as director of the Heiner Müller Archive in Berlin and former editorial assistant on the twelve-volume Heiner Müller Werkausgabe, is without doubt the right person for that job. With her monograph, she surveys Müller’s „Schriften.“ She defines them. She describes how they have been juxtaposed. She periodizes them. And as the archivist that she is, Schulz also cites Müller often, giving the reader a feel for Müller’s language. Her monograph may be a catalyst for other work on Müller’s „Schriften.“ Furthermore, the monograph might be used as an aid for those who are writing about Müller’s plays, prose, or poetry, who want to know what Müller has to say about his own poetics, or who want to couch Müller’s literary text in a historical (or new historical) context.
The monograph includes a bibliography and over a thousand footnotes. However, there is no index. The table of contents provides enough information so that it would, in most cases, be possible to find specific information without too much trouble. Nonetheless, an index would have been a useful tool. All in all, the monograph is a welcome addition to scholarship on Heiner Müller.
Diese Nachricht wurde redaktionell betreut von Holger Suedkamp.
URL zur Zitation: http://www.theaterforschung.de/rezension.php4?ID=816
Copyright by www.theaterforschung.de
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