Enemy in the Mirror

“Unlike Lenin, Hitler came to power in a free election, which makes Auschwitz also the result of free elections.” The East German dramatist and poet Heiner Müller wrote these words in late November of 1989, on the eve of the first free elections on the territory of the German Democratic Republic (socialist East Germany) since 1932, when the Nazis came to power. Never one for feel-good moments, Müller’s thinking was deeply out of sync with the general euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. While giving a speech on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989, he didn’t echo the sweeping optimism of the other speakers but read a statement calling for independent unions; many in the crowd booed him. In his autobiography, Müller admitted that the fall of the GDR had not been easy for him: “Suddenly there was no adversary…whoever no longer has an enemy will meet him in the mirror.”

That line proved prophetic. As he was dying of throat cancer in 1995, just a few years after assuming the directorship of Bertolt Brecht’s famous Berliner Ensemble theater, he expressed admiration for his fatal tumor. One of his last poems was a tribute of sorts to this final adversary:

I CHEW THE HOSPITAL FOOD DEATH’S
Taste comes through
After the last endoscopy in the eyes of the doctors
My grave was open I was almost touched
The sadness of the experts and I was
Almost proud of my invincible
Tumour
For one long moment flesh
Of my flesh

Müller knew he would have to live with his own contradictions unto death, “as strange to myself as possible^”— a reality perhaps reflected in the title of his 1992 autobiography War without Battle [Krieg ohne Schlacht]. He embodied the full range of human potential, from profound insight and sensitivity to incredible cruelty, and so lived the doubling of Germany not merely as a nation divided into East and West, but as a divided state of being. In one of his earliest poems, he cites a passage from Edgar Allan Poe: “THE TERROR OF WHICH I WRITE COMES NOT/ FROM GERMANY IT IS A TERROR OF THE SOUL.” To which Müller rejoins

THE TERROR OF WHICH I WRITE COMES
FROM
GERMANY.

Like his then-idol Brecht, Müller was much more renowned for his plays than for his poetry. Yet during the first and last decades of his career, he focused on the latter. Some early efforts were published under a pseudonym, the name Müller (Miller) seeming too pedestrian for a poet. (A German teacher allegedly once told him that “true poets have names like Hölderlin, Grillparzer, Strittmatter.”) A volume of his collected poems was published in German in 1992, three years before his death, and then another in 2014. A translation based largely on the selection in the latter volume has just appeared in English as Waiting on the Opposite Stage: Collected Poems (Seagull Books, 2020), translated by the poet James Reidel.

Reidel’s translation starts out roughly chronological, but at the end whips back to some of Müller’s earliest poems and translations in an addendum titled “For Party Morale: Lyrics, Verse, and Translations,” which includes propaganda poems such as “The Peasants” and “Song of Soviet Schoolchildren.” Instead of adhering to Müller’s own stated preference for “brutal chronology,” Reidel wants to keep the “doggerel that [Müller] had to write to survive” out of the main body of the work. The choice has a peculiar and likely unintended effect. Arriving at the title of the last poem “WE WILL NOT FORGET,” the reader wonders whether it is an appeal to revive the socialist spirit of resistance to fascism, or an ironic reference to Müller’s own paradox-laden relationship with socialism and the GDR (especially since he declared in his autobiography that he had written and translated such poems “assembly-line” style, and—doubly ironically—for money rather than from conviction).

The German word for poetry, Dichtung, stems from the Latin dictare, meaning to compose or dictate. But to a German ear, the word rather suggests a relationship to the adjective dicht, meaning dense or tight. A poem is, after all, a kind of distillation of thought, a making dense. Müller’s creative trajectory could be compared to the Big Bang, with the dense poetic material at the beginning expanding outward into longer and less compressed plays. Many of his early plays grew out of a line or an idea from his poetry, assuming a theatrical poetic form not unlike ancient Greek drama or Shakespeare. At a certain point in the 1970s, the whole universe of his work seems to formally converge, with his plays resembling his poems both in form and content such that Müller proves a stubborn adversary to the critic intent on enforcing genre boundaries.

***

Born in 1929, Müller witnessed the collapse of three consecutive German regimes: the Weimar Republic, the Nazi German Reich, and the socialist German Democratic Republic. Each held personal significance for him. In 1933, after the Nazis took over, SA men arrested Müller’s father for being a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SAP). The four-year-old Müller watched his mother through a keyhole as she in turn watched the SA men beat and then arrest her husband (who spent the next year in a concentration camp). Some parents would not allow their children to associate with Müller after that. As a youngster trying to prove himself to a pair of hooligan farm brothers, he traded off with them throwing stones at a barn swallow’s nest. Müller threw the one that finally smashed it. “And then I saw the young swallows lying on the ground,” he wrote, a memory that recurred in his later work.

In the autumn of 1944, Müller’s entire high school class was drafted into military labor service. After a few months, the Soviets arrived and his work detail was dissolved, so at age 16 he became a waif. He stole volumes of Kant and Schopenhauer from the abandoned house of a village teacher. He stole a bicycle from a group supplying potatoes to refugees. He jumped off a train with two soldiers, found a flask of home-brew anis schnapps near the body of a dead horse, only to have it confiscated by an American soldier a few miles down the road. “I never forgave the Americans for that,” he later recalled.

One of Müller’s earliest poems, “AND BETWEEN ABC AND ONETIMESONE,” spans the period from his early childhood before the war to his early adulthood at the war’s end. In the first stanza, the narrator is a child pissing with his schoolmates against the schoolhouse wall. “HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF SHAME,” asks the teacher. “We had none,” the narrator says. In the second stanza they’re climbing a tree from which that same teacher had been hanged the day before.

Müller later wrote almost wistfully of those “lawless” times, which for him were synonymous with “absolute free rein.” He called them “a mixture of End Times and Carneval.” Müller’s place in that world calls to mind a passage from W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (1952):

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The two years after the war provided the material for the next 20 years of Müller’s work. The poem about the teacher, for example, formed the basis (along with another of his poems) for his 1974 play The Battle (Die Schlacht). The immediate postwar period also likely colored his dismal take on the course of history, which he retained for the rest of his life. The East German dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann wrote of Müller that he “saved himself in sarcastic prophecies of coming apocalypses.” An Austrian critic who interviewed Müller in 1983 also recalls the writer’s unmitigated pessimism, which manifested at the time as certainty that the world would soon end in nuclear holocaust. The critic asked why he still bothered to write. “Because the libraries will still be there,” Müller replied dryly.

***

After a rapid rise and fall in the municipal communist hierarchy of the early GDR, Müller’s father fled to West Germany in 1951, along with the rest of the family. Müller, then a young writer with communist sympathies, opted to remain in the East. Regarding the confiscations, trials, torture, and executions that took place during the early years of the GDR, he was much more sanguine than his father, who had grown disenchanted with the new regime. Müller later confessed to being “fundamentally in favor of every confiscation,” because “violence was being used against people I couldn’t stand.” He recalled being on the streets of Berlin during the first and only workers’ demonstrations against the regime in 1953, when workers protested increased work quotas and the rising cost of living. The strikes quickly escalated into an uprising in which more than a million people participated across hundreds of East German localities. Seeing the Soviet tanks deployed to put down the uprising, Müller observed: “It was simply interesting: a great spectacle.” Besides, he reasoned, the strikers had also been Nazis.

Müller believed the GDR was a better place to be a writer than West Germany, not least because Brecht had come to head the Berliner Ensemble theater after years of exile in Scandinavia and the United States. “Because Brecht was there, one had to stay,” Müller concluded. One day the young Müller visited Brecht’s theater and showed the master some of his poems. “Very interesting,” Brecht said, but nothing came of their encounter. In his work, Müller would first emulate, and then smash the Brechtian idol.

Although Müller considered himself a socialist and was frequently employed and supported by the regime, most of his plays were censored or banned, and performed in the GDR only years later—or, in some cases, never. “A dictatorship is more colorful for dramatists than a democracy,” Müller wrote. “There is a fascination through power, a rubbing of oneself against power and participating in power, and possibly even subordinating oneself to power in order to have a piece of it.” Drama, like architecture, is thus more bound to the state than other art forms, he insisted. By adopting Brecht’s method of planting theatrical bombs in the name of clearing away the old to make way for something new, “we considered what we were doing to be truly socialist.”

Although the socialist project was often redeemed in the final act of Müller’s plays, his work touched all the hot button issues of the time: the high prices of staple goods, shoddy work done under the pressure of unreasonable quotas, and low wages during the early socialist takeover; the lies and unfulfilled promises of the socialist collectivization of agriculture; the rape of German women by Soviet soldiers after the war; the failures of denazification of the German working class; and the violent excesses of the Russian Revolution. For Müller, it was all “raw-material.” 

His approach had its casualties. The director B. K. Tragelehn, who tried to stage one of Müller’s most scandalous plays, The Resettled Woman (Die Umsiedlerin), was sentenced to hard labor in a coal mine. In fact, so many of Müller’s plays were burned, banned, subject to official censure, or landed him and his theater associates in trial proceedings, party hearings, or worse that his career acquired the character of dark slapstick. The West German writer Heinar Kipphardt once sketched Müller’s fate with a parable-like short story: A man is invited to visit a wealthy person at his villa, does so, is well-received, and upon leaving is told to go out the back way, where there’s a shortcut. He then proceeds to fall into a deep ditch. Later, he receives another invite from the same wealthy man, is again well-received, and is again told to go out the back way, where he falls into the same ditch. This happens a third time, too.

Three morals can be drawn sequentially from the story, according to Kipphardt. After the first instance, one could view the matter as a misunderstanding. After the second, one begins to suspect the villa owner is a bad person. After the third, one wonders whether the visitor isn’t simply an idiot. Müller was enchanted when he heard this anecdote.

In 1980, one of his earliest banned plays—The Resettled Woman, from 1961—was finally staged in the GDR. The response unnerved him: “There was nothing but praise.” Then came 1987, when the censorship office returned one of his plays with no official assessment. For Müller, that spelled the end of the GDR. “When they can no longer forbid, it’s over.”

And once it was over, it was only a matter of time before someone—in the end it was another East German writer, Dieter Schulze—forced the revelation of just how much Müller had subordinated himself to power “in order to have a piece of it,” namely by working as an “unofficial collaborator” with the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. (During the investigative and media frenzy that followed, it was further discovered that the Stasi also intensely surveilled some of Müller’s theatrical activity.) In his defense, Müller sent out a press release through his lawyer in 1993, insisting, “In opposition to the all-German perspective on the history of the GDR, the following statement holds true: Truth and reality are two different things.”

***

One day in 1953, Joseph Stalin died. Müller dedicated only a third of a page to the occasion in his autobiography: “To me he was long-since dead,” he wrote. Fully a tenth of his memoirs are dedicated to the relationship that began shortly thereafter, when he met 28-year-old Ingeborg (Inge) Schwenkner at a gathering of the Young Writers Syndicate. Inge wrote about their first encounter:

We met in a group
Of writers and such as wanted to be
There like an old man you stooped
Rhymed verse, unfree
One read from his oeuvre
I sat in the stock of phrases as if glued
Another read
That rhymed, too
And went in one ear and out the other.

Afterward they went to a pub, where Müller noticed the expensive green-striped blouse she wore, its top button undone: “I can mark the precise moment when my proletarian lust for the upper crust kicked in.” At the time, Inge had just published a children’s book. Müller did not conceal his low opinion of such endeavors. His own Brecht-inspired poetry often mimicked the form of nursery rhymes, but with a dark, bawdy, or ironic edge. One of them, “A Girl Going to Fetch Water,” is about Inge:

This thing wore only a thin blouse
The sun seemed to pass through it.
Early at the cool fountain.
 
I saw her going to the water again
And had already seen more of her
In the moon at the cool fountain
Like by day in the sun.

Brecht defined love as “the art of producing something out of the capacities of others.” The first several plays now generally attributed to Müller alone were originally published with Inge as co-author. Her biographer, Sonja Hilzinger, wrote of the couple: “They led a common life and sustained a creative collaboration that was as productive as it was (increasingly) destructive.” The plays were largely based on Inge’s work experience at the industrial firm Siemens-Plania, as well as on informal interviews she and Müller conducted with construction and factory workers. He later regretted listing her as co-author and claimed to have written the plays himself.

A poem unambiguously co-authored by Müller and Inge offers a rare instance of a precisely dated work (November 9, 1954) that also clearly indicates who wrote which passages. The setting is a bridge with three planks missing in the middle. Inge writes: “I reach out my hand to you…” And Müller replies

Looking to the water I saw
Your eyes seeking me, I
Found myself there.

The poem established a tradition by which they wrote poems for each other every year on their birthdays. In one, Müller wrote a “fairytale” about a Narcissus figure who throws a stone at his own mirrored image in a well and loses sight of his face, but later finds it again reflected in the eyes of a girl:

And so he had a mirror that was delicate as a cloud, stronger than fire and water, harder than steel and stone. And so he stayed with the girl for seven thousand years and seven times seven thousand and always.

Inge rarely showed her own poems to anyone, including Müller; most were published only two decades after her death. “They were alien to me,” Müller wrote of the few he had seen, adding that he came to appreciate their quality only after she was gone. Some of those poems were about her experiences during the war, of being buried under rubble for three days following an aerial bomb attack, or of digging her dead parents out of rubble, loading them on a pushcart, and burying them herself. In “PERHAPS I WILL” she writes

Perhaps I will
Disappear suddenly
From lack of air
And the body
Will be found nowhere.

Those memories always came back to her under the influence of alcohol, Müller recalled, when the crossed window frames appeared to her as grave markers.

They married in 1955, after Müller had twice divorced his earlier wife with child (“Children make you blackmailable and dependent,” he later wrote). Thereafter he lived with Inge in a nice apartment, in the same building as her second ex-husband. Within a year, Inge was sleeping with Müller’s 16-year-old brother, Wolfgang. Perhaps no one knew the couple more intimately than he did; Inge was both lover and ersatz mother, while Müller was brother and rival. In an interview from 2002, Wolfgang offered a detailed characterization of the couple’s divergent personalities: Inge was thoroughly Prussian, disciplined, strict with herself, deeply interested in others, and ran an efficient and tidy household. She could drive heavy machinery, play the accordion, shoot, sail, and take photographs. Müller was the anti-Prussian: he couldn’t keep a promise, was chronically late, was incapable of driving a nail into a wall, and spread chaos around him at lightning speed. He had something “soft, indulgent, and anxious” about him even as a child, Wolfgang said.

Müller’s lover (and later wife), the Bulgarian theater student Ginka Cholakova, later characterized Inge’s poetry as “her way of communicating with the world.” For the last eight years of Inge’s relationship with Müller, and indeed of her life, the signal was one of nearly constant distress. What began as a romantic and creative dialogue ran up against Müller’s swelling silence. Inge then turned to other forms of communication. She made several attempts to jump out the window or off the balcony in his presence. Müller remembered: “I bandaged her arm when she slit her veins, and called the doctor, I cut her down from a noose, took the thermometer out of her mouth when she wanted to drink mercury.” The final two poems in Inge’s papers are free renderings of works by the brilliant Hungarian poet Attila József, who committed suicide in 1937, at age 32. One is titled “Fatherless and motherless,” and the other is “There is nothing for me.”

On June 1, 1966, Müller decided to move out of the apartment he and Inge shared, complaining that cohabitation impeded his ability to work. He returned from the theater at 3 a.m. the next morning to find her on the kitchen floor. Leaning over to speak to her, “I had the feeling I was in a play […] holding her head and addressing her like a doll for no other audience than myself,” he wrote in “Death Announcement,” a short prose piece in which he also narrates a murder in the first person, mixing Inge’s suicide with scenes from his own life before and during the war. “I THREW THE SEVENTH STONE AT THE SWALLOW’S NEST AND THE SEVENTH WAS THE ONE THAT HIT IT,” he wrote, alluding to the scene from his childhood.

Following Inge’s death, Müller became fascinated by Shakespeare, and by Hamlet in particular. This obsession was “an antidote to Brecht,” who had famously laughed in the face of “bourgeois tragedy.” The result was a Hamlet adaptation that started as a (largely plagiarized) translation, swelled to a 200-page original adaptation, and was then distilled to its final form: a nine-page postmodern play in five disjointed parts titled Hamlet Machine (1977), which not only draws on themes from Müller’s earlier poetry but also often reads like a poem itself. It remains his most internationally famous work.

Müller originally planned to write the play as a series of dialogues, but soon realized the impossibility of the task. Neither “Real-existing socialism-Stalinism,” nor the 1956 anti-communist uprising in Budapest, nor the story of the Red Army Faction—all of which served as raw material for the drama—had produced any dialogue: it was all “just one single racing monologue” that spelled palpable stagnation. “And when at the level of men everything’s stuck,” Müller concluded, “the woman has to come up with something.”

And so the suicidal Ophelia became the play’s true hero. “Yesterday I stopped killing myself,” she says, with a defiance characteristic of Müller himself. As if reliving the horrific scene on the kitchen floor, when Müller addressed Inge’s corpse, the actor playing Hamlet insists: “I’m no longer playing a role.”

In the loneliness of airports
I can breathe again I am
A person of privilege My disgust
Is a privilege
Protected by walls
Barbed wire prison
[…]
I don’t want to kill anymore.

Then a photograph of Müller is ripped up onstage. In the final scene, Ophelia appears as Electra—a Greek mythological figure who takes Hamlet-style revenge for the murder of her father without herself falling prey to inexorable tragedy as Hamlet does. In a prose poem from around that time Müller wrote, “I am the knife with which the dead breaks out of the coffin.”

The theatrical reanimation of Inge in Hamlet Machine unfolded alongside Müller’s steady erasure of her creative contribution to his work. Over the years he acknowledged her co-authorship less and less until, writes her biographer, “no trace of her remained.”

***

Müller had no compunctions about amassing debts he never repaid, receiving commissions for work he never produced, or squandering what money he had on seemingly absurd luxuries. When he won the prestigious West German Georg Büchner Prize in 1985, he seriously considered spending the full 30,000-German-mark prize money on a renaissance figurine of a dove he spotted in a jewelry shop window. It’s no coincidence he appears on the cover of the German edition of his autobiography smoking an expensive cigar. But as he blows smoke toward the camera on the back cover, his defiant gesture may well be directed toward himself. As Müller’s life and work make clear, confronting Germany’s past and present often meant staring one’s self down in the mirror.

In late 1989 or early 1990, Müller wrote a poem titled “SELF-CRITICISM 2 BROKEN KEY.” It opens with a citation from a book about the Stalinist show trials, but its subject feels more personal, as though the crimes of societies and states are indistinct from the crimes of the poet:

Bluebeard’s forbidden door Forbidden dream
The dead women in the dance-wrecked chamber
No rain washes off the blood on the key
No grave hides the death on your retina 
No angel’s wings will blow your room open
The dead women are dining on your dream
Sex for the last time is drumhead justice
In the year of wolf ’s milk you see your face

In 1992, just after it was revealed that Müller had been a Stasi informant, he met his friend Wolf Biermann at the Frankfurt book fair. Biermann later wrote of the encounter that, as they embraced, Müller said, “Wolf, there’s also a human right to cowardice.”