Der Auftrag und andere Revolutionsstücke

by Heiner Müller

German language only

Genres: Plays, Theatre, Drama

145 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Heiner Müller was a German (formerly East German) dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is often considered the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht. His "enigmatic, fragmentary pieces" are a significant contribution to postmodern drama and postdramatic theatre.

Reviews

[Mesoscope · Rating 5 out of 5]

The public duty of the intellectual, Heiner Müller told Alexander Kluge, is to create chaos. Not in a trivial or destructive sense, but in a liberative sense - they are to expose the contradictions and paradoxes of power. Friction makes heat, heat makes fire, and fire, hopefully, creates a clearing.

Like a super-charged Brecht, Müller confronts the dialectical ouroboros of the state with blistering intensity and overflowing imagination. I don't think I've ever read or seen a Heiner Müller play I didn't love, and Der Auftrag is no exception. It's a haunting exploration of an aborted attempt by Jacobins in the aftermath of the French Revolution to instigate a slave rebellion in Jamaica, which foundered after Napoleon seized power. Various points of view are represented in a highly abstract and impressionistic manner by three of its ringleaders, including a former slave and a slave owner.

In typical Müller fashion, the whole affair takes on a hallucinatory quality. But the poetic through-line is always crystal clear as the paradoxes of a colonial attempt to export revolution to a European colony collapse in on themselves.

This Reclam edition I'm reviewing includes several other worthwhile pieces, including Die Hamletmaschine, which is one of my favorite works of the twentieth century.