Content area
Full Text
Germania 3: Gespenster am Toten Mann, or Germania 3: Ghosts at the Dead Man, is Heiner Müller's posthumously published and produced last play. Composed and compiled between 1990 and 1995, partly from material decades old, it is a collage work about German history and myth that belongs to the class of writings Müller generally called "synthetic fragments." Previously, the main synthetic fragments had been Die Schlacht (1951/1974), Germania Tod in Berlin (1956/1971), and Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preussen Lessings SchlafTraum Schrei (1977). AU of these plays are self-consciously disjunctive, densely allusive, and stylistically promiscuous, but Germania 3 is extravagantly so. In its first German edition, the eighty-one-page text was published along with a thirty-four-page appendix of encyclopedia articles prepared by Stephan Suschke, about the places, people, institutions, and concepts cited in the action (arranged in double "East" and "West" columns for contrasting views).1 Germania 3 has never been popular. It tends to flummox theatergoers with its massive palimpsest of obscure references, and even Müller specialists speak guardedly about it. Several early reviewers described its completion and publication as errors in judgment by a dying man.2
The aim of this essay is not so much to argue that Germania i's many detractors are wrong as to point out that, aesthetic judgments aside, its power and value have been impressively demonstrated in the para-aesthetic arena of political, legal, and social provocation. This arena is likely to be as important as any other to the future currency of Müller's dramatic works. Müller was plainly a provocateur par excellence; he savored the intemperate emotional reactions his writing provoked during his lifetime. Like Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol before him, however, he was a provocateur with a long view. His major works, particularly the densely referential ones such as Germania 3, were constructed as freeze-dried intellectual explosives, deliberate attempts to generate discomfort and controversy both in the short and long terms.
There is a tradition of hand-wringing among some recondite postwar German writers over the question of relevance and responsibility for identifying their target audiences. Paul Celan and Theodor Adorno, for instance, described their works as "messages in a bottle," deferring the relevance question to the distant future with a whiff of romantic regret, yearning,...