Enlarge image

Heiner Müller before a bust of Bertolt Brecht on February 8, 1994 in front of the Berliner Ensemble, the theater company where he served as artistic director.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was followed by German reunification in 1990. In celebrating the 20th anniversary of the peaceful revolution that brought down the Wall, we will profile over the course of 2009 important East Germans who have shaped beyond all physical borders the cultural, intellectual and political life of postwar Germany and Europe.

Heiner Müller, one of the most important European dramatists of the 20th century, wrote 30 plays which helped reconfigure the notion of modern theater.

Born in 1929 in Eppendorf, in the southeastern German state of Saxony, he died aged 66 on December 30, 1995 in Berlin. He would have turned 80 on January 9, 2009.

Based in the former East Berlin capital of communist East Germany, Müller flourished as a dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theater director. He remained in Berlin after German unification in 1990, working all over Europe - primarily as a director of his own plays - in the final half-decade of his life.

"Heiner Müller was perhaps the most politically and artistically sophisticated and provocative of Europe's post-World War II playwrights," the UK-based Cambridge Scholars Publishing states on its website in introducing The Cultural Politics of Heiner Mueller (2007), edited by Dan Friedman.

"He was a communist whose work was banned for years by the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic where he lived and worked. Müller offended the bureaucrats and political thugs who ran East Germany with his brutal, beautiful and honest dissection of the culture and politics in Eastern Europe. At the same time, Müller infuriated (or at least annoyed) the anti-communists and liberals of the West because he refused to leave the GDR or become a 'dissident,'" it adds.

This did not stop him, however, from being heaped with praise on either side of divided Cold War era Germany.

"In Müller's lifetime, the author achieved the rare feat of winning all the major literary prizes of both East and West Germany, picking up both the Mülheim and Büchner prizes of the democratic west, as well as the Heinrich Mann and National prizes of the communist east," Daniel Miller states online in The Local.

"Thirteen years after his death from cancer, his reputation remains enormous."

Internationally, Müller is widely recognized as among the most important and influential of all modern German playwrights - matched perhaps only by his legendary mentor, Bertolt Brecht.

Enlarge image

Heiner Müller speaking at a peaceful protest for democratic freedom in Berlin that drew some 500,000 East German citizens on November 4, 1989 - only a few days before border crossings from East to West Germany were opened on November 9, 1989.

(© Wikimedia Commons)

As Cambridge Scholars Publishing puts it: "Starting as a protégé of Bertolt Brecht, Müller evolved into one of the great innovative poets of the 20th century, writing texts for the stage that seem to defy the limitations of the theater. Not only do his later texts have no plot, they are often devoid of specific characters and even dialogue. His work is a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in the theater as well as between the East-West conflicts that defined the Cold War and the North-South conflicts that are emerging in the post-communist world."

Comparisons between Müller and Brecht abound.

"Both authors were poets, theorists and public intellectuals, as well as men of the theater. Both shared a commitment to socialism, and a taste for cigars. Both lived through tumultuous periods of German history, and both treated historical themes at length in their work," Miller writes for The Local.

Like Brecht, Müller was prone to statements such as: "Theater is a laboratory for the social imagination."

After starting out in 1954 as a research assistant and art magazine editor, Müller became a writer in 1957, followed by a one-year stint at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin and his eventual ejection from East Germany's official Writers' Association in 1961 when his work Die Umsiedlerin was banned.

From 1970 onwards he was a dramaturge at the Berliner Ensemble, switching to the city's Volksbühne theater in 1976.

Many of his most famous plays from this period premiered in the West, including Germania Death in Berlin, which was first performed in 1978 at the Munich Kammerspiele, a production for which Müller won the Mülheimer Drama Prize in 1979.

From 1990 to 1993 Müller was the last president of the former East German Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).

In 1992 he became a directing member and in 1995 sole artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, which was founded as the Bühne am Schiffbauerdamm theater company by Bertolt Brecht.

"On stage," Müller reportedly claimed, "you need an enemy. German history is my enemy, and I want to stare into the white of its eye."

He produced few new dramatic works late in life. Yet, like Brecht, he did write a lot of poetry in his final years. He also worked during this time towards transforming the interview into a literary genre.

Müller is buried at Berlin's Dorotheenstadt Cemetery, the final resting place of some of Germany's most important artists and philosophers, including Bertolt Brecht, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and Heinrich Mann.

The Frankfurt publishing house Suhrkamp recently issued a 12-volume edition of Müller's collected works.

Related Links:

Heiner Müller - official site with updated information on current plays

Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft (in German - founded 1997 in Berlin)

Happy Birthday Heiner Müller - The Local (online newspaper)

Heiner Müller - Wikipedia (online encyclopedia entry citing literary works etc.)

Heiner Müller - The Literary Encyclopedia

Party for Neighbor Müller - Goethe-Institut

Using Brecht and Müller Without Criticizing Them is Betrayel - Goethe-Instiut

Conversations Between Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge - Cornell University Library

Heiner Mueller - A German Proteus - The Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre