GHOSTS & THE DEAD MAN
By Victor Beauregard
Berlin--At his death on December 30, 1995,
Heiner Müller was widely considered Germany's foremost dramatist.
Be that as it may, he spent most of his last decade and a half
talking--talking about history, politics, his occasional directing,
and, often, the "major" play he wanted to write about Hitler and
Stalin when time permitted. According to Berliner Ensemble dramaturg
Holger Teschke, this text was never completed, notwithstanding
the heralded recent publication and double premiere (in Bochum
and Berlin) of Germania 3: Ghosts at the Dead Man. Teschke
says that Germania 3--which lacks the unified tone of
Müller's other Teutonic collage works--is really a compilation
of material from which the author intended to construct seven
different plays, including the one on Hitler and Stalin. His decision
to publish the variegated scenes amounted to a hasty response
last year to the news that he was terminally ill.
How mordantly piquant, then, that two important German theaters
should have fought over the honor and box-office boon of presenting
the premiere of this supposedly great, integral, culminating opus.
And how perfectly, well, Müllerish that the respectable publisher
of the book (Kiepenheuer & Witsch) should now be defending
the work's line-by-line integrity in court--slapped with a restraining
order barring future sales and a demand for specific textual changes
by the heirs to Bertolt Brecht, the author Müller most revered
(he quotes him without permission, the heirs say) and whose theater
he led at his death.*
It's a grave error to believe that the dead are really dead, Müller
enjoyed saying. For one thing, they vastly outnumber the living
and thereby dominate history. For another, they colonize our thoughts,
coercing, controlling, and luring us into the historical vortices
that doomed them. The only possible resistance is to transform
monologue into dialogue, as he tried to do in his plays, forcing
ghostly potentates into the light where they can be seen and challenged.
In Germania 3, this applies not only to Hitler and Stalin--whose
linked ideological obsessions and mass murders set the premises
for the contemporary world, Müller thought--but also to a
potpourri of other figures from the GDR, the Third Reich, Croatia,
Nibelung myth, Kleist, Kafka, and more.
"What's a ghost? Unfinished business,"wrote Salman Rushdie in
Satanic Verses; presumably, in using this quote in the
program at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, the dramaturg didn't intend
to reflect unflatteringly on Leander Haussmann's production. "Do
it lightly," was Müller's parting comment about the play
to Haussmann. The latter's response: a doleful, four-hour, concrete
bunker of an evening in which deadly literalism conspires with
self-seriousness to immobilize spectators' mental faculties. Unfinished
business indeed.
Haussmann seems to have been guided by a principle of plodding
fidelity to text not only rare in Germany but also inconsistent
with all Müller's theoretical statements about the theater.
This author didn't want directorial slaves but rather dialectical
conversation partners who understood that trying to freeze a text
is like trying to step into the same river twice. It's also redundant:
as in the Stalin monologue for which Haussmann finds a Russian-speaking
Stalin look-alike, gives him bloody hands and spooky backlight,
and has others cower before him. And invariably distracting: as
in the numerous scenes in which the director uses technical tricks
to see how close he can come to making impossible stage directions
(a Müller specialty) possible.
Why, when you can gorge visually on headless bodies, skeletons,
and innumerable other candied pleasures of sensationalism, should
you bother cracking your nut over the historical subtleties of,
say, Nazi widows begging a fleeing Croatian SS-man to kill them
so they won't be raped by "Asiatic" Russian soldiers? Yes, Müller
wrote such gruesome images, but the last choice he would have
made as a director was simply to reproduce them physically. Haussmann's
single truly original contribution was the addition of a malevolent
and unfunny court jester who acts as a colluding chorus and whose
motley serves mostly to magnify the play's motley of styles.
The jester's finest moment is also Haussmann's:
departing from the text, he grins and introduces three "Brecht
widows" by name (Helene Weigel, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Isot Kilian)
in violation of an agreement the theater made with the Brecht
heirs to keep them anonymous even in the program. When an actor
arrives to rehearse a speech from Galileo, the bearded
women badger him patriarchally with corrections and line readings
until he runs off in distraction.
The fictional site of this anti-rehearsal, the Berliner Ensemble,
is the actual site of Martin Wuttke's Berlin premiere of Germania
3, and one can imagine the backstage discussions of the Brecht-widows
scene there. In fact, the staging was more respectful than Haussmann's,
with anonymity preserved and the women dressed elegantly in ornate
veils and long-trained gowns, but Wuttke's restraint (with people
he must continue to work with, after all) ought not to eclipse
his extraordinary artistic courage in the production overall.
With acute sensitivity to the spirit rather than the letter of
Müller's work, this thirty-seven-year-old actor with no previous
directing experience (one of the theater's three new leaders)
set aside fidelity and homage to begin with, concentrating instead
on carving a comprehensible, apprehensible core from an unwieldy
mélange.
A raked stage, devoid of furniture, is split into pure black and
white halves, each used to frame elegantly crafted tableaux whose
visual power is heightened by the stark contrast of the other
side. On this essentializing background the action clips along
at a pace so snappy that the show ends after an hour and 40 minutes.
With most plays, such a pace would lighten and clarify, but with
material as poetically and referentially laden as Müller's
it becomes, oddly enough, its own sort of burden. Hell-bent on
lightening up, the actors are nevertheless chained to the gravity
of what they must say, and the effort to carry both responsibilities
generates an infectious anxiety that follows them like a tin can.
Wuttke's concept might be described as unembarrassed reductiveness,
employing seemingly simple oppositional contrasts whenever possible,
as if to provide ground beneath the flurry of ideas and anxieties.
The theater building, for instance, is papered with black and
white posters reading NO ONE OR EVERYONE and THERE ISN'T ENOUGH
FOR EVERYONE--slogans from one of Hitler's monologues intended
to distill the communist and capitalist mythologies, and hence
their justifications for murder. When scenes align themselves
clearly under this opposition, the emphasis is helpful, illuminating.
When they don't, the inevitable response is suspicion and pique--as
when Wuttke, apparently at a loss to fit several scenes into his
puzzle, simply seats actors in the theater's boxes to shout overlapping,
incomprehensible lines to each other. But the gains far outweigh
the losses.
Müller has a chance to come to words in Berlin in ways he
is deprived of from the outset in Bochum. Internationally
famous actor Ekkehard Schall in a dinner jacket and handlebar
moustache, for instance, stands onstage for ten minutes before
turning to speak about his nightly angst over the "light sleep"
of the dead. His words identify him as Stalin only halfway through
his monologue; hence, the audience listens harder than was possible
with the look-alike actor in Bochum, possibly even speculating
on connections with BE politics that would have made Müller
smile.
A similarly light hand is taken with other historical figures,
also to make room for the "content" of the current moment--as
when one top-hatted figure says to another, gazing about the BE,
"the mausoleum of German socialism," eliciting a long laugh from
spectators. The figures are supposed to be socialist heroes Ernst
Thälmann and Walter Ulbricht, on patrol as guards atop the
Berlin Wall, but how many spectators, even from the former GDR,
would have sufficient knowledge of those figures to savor the
joke? Too few, thinks Wuttke, who leaves them generic in a demonstration
not only of good theatrical instincts but also of just the sort
of refreshing humor and honesty about self that will be needed
to save this troubled ensemble.
"Who knows?" I thought as the lights went down on Wuttke's shrewd
production. Maybe Müller-the-ghost will turn out to be more
effective than Müller-the-man at ferreting out ghosts among
the living. He often said that dictatorship, with all its attendant
pressure of censorship and whimsical power, offered better conditions
for drama than democracy. Lest we congratulate ourselves prematurely
on those pressures disappearing after 1989, we need only ponder
the case of the Brecht heirs, who clearly keep the home fires
burning, and burning.
(1996)
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