The mission (drama)

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The commission is a drama by Heiner Müller . It is subtitled Remembering a Revolution . The play, written in 1979, premiered on November 12, 1980 at the Volksbühne in Berlin (directed by Heiner Müller and Ginka Tscholakowa).

action

In the play The Order, Müller describes the failed attempt by three emissaries of the French Revolution to initiate a slave revolt in Jamaica and in this way to export the revolution to the Caribbean . Before they can complete their mandate, Napoleon takes power in France and the government that gave them the mandate is no longer in office. “The world becomes what it was, a home for masters and slaves. (...) I release us from our assignment. You, Galloudec, the peasant from Brittany. You, Sasportas, the son of slavery. Me, Debuisson. ”( The assignment ).

The motif of the assignment is reflected in many ways and varied at different levels of the plot. In the exposition, a sailor hands over a letter from Galloudec to the former client Antoine, who now has to live underground under the new conditions. Galloudec reports that the job has failed. Sasporta's black campaigner was hanged in Port Royal, while Debuisson, the son of slave owners, was doing well. The actual plot - the conspiratorial work of the three emissaries in Jamaica - is now told as a flashback. Upon arrival in Port Royal, they try on their “masks”, which they have to use to hide their revolutionary intentions. While Debuisson effortlessly plays the role of the slave owner, Galloudec and Sasportas fall out of role several times when trying to deny their convictions. The sight of a tortured black slave in a cage becomes the first acid test whether the "masks" hold up. Debuisson warns of impatience (“we can't help one” - The Mission ). A three-part game follows: the allegorical figure ErsteLiebe takes the apparently rueful son Debuisson back into the family's lap. In the “Theater of the White Revolution” Sasportas and Galloudec play the confrontation between Robespierre and Danton as a puppet game and beat each other's cardboard heads. Sasportas declares the theater of the white revolution over and sentences Debuisson to death "because your skin is white" ( The Order ).

A prose text follows - a monologue in first-person form. A man is in an elevator on the way to his boss who has an assignment for him. But he never gets to this boss. Instead, he suddenly stands on a village street in Peru without an assignment - in a world whose coordinates he does not know and in which his European knowledge does not help him. The monologue ends in an encounter with a threatening antipode: “One of us will survive” ( The Mission ).

Debuisson, Galloudec and Sasportas receive the news that Napoleon has dissolved the Directory and that their mandate has lapsed. While Debuisson, tired of the revolution, likes to take up his position as slave owner again, the revolution is by no means over for Sasportas and Galloudec. The “black revolution”, of which Sasportas makes himself its spokesman, replaces the “white revolution”. However, Galloudec's letter from the beginning of the piece with the message that Sasportas was hanged suggests that she too has failed for the time being and that the fulfillment of the contract remains open.

Emergence

In the spring of 1978 Heiner Müller went to the United States . On the way back, he stayed in Mexico , which was a country in exile for several German poets during fascism, including Anna Seghers . Seghers collected material there for her “Caribbean Trilogy”, the third story of which, The Light on the Gallows (published in 1961), is the literary model for the commission . Müller describes that he was interested in the story “mainly the motive of betrayal”: “The Seghers describes it like this: While stopping on a hill in Jamaica, as in the Jacobin Debuisson - he got the news of the 18th Brumaire and knows that the revolution is over - for the first time 'the voice of betrayal' begins to speak, he sees for the first time how beautiful Jamaica is. I was only able to write the piece after a stay in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Before that, I had no dramaturgy for it. In Mexico I found the form. The second part of the elevator text in the piece is a dream protocol, the dream the product of a night walk from a remote village to the main road to Mexico City, on a dirt road between cactus fields, no moon, no taxi. Every now and then figures like Goya pictures appeared, walked past us, sometimes with flashlights, sometimes with candles. A fear walk through the third world. (...) I have always been interested in the narrative structure of dreams, the seamless, the overriding of causal relationships. "

Productions (selection)

filming

The Order - Remembrance of a Revolution, Germany 2004. Director: Ulrich Mühe; u. a. with Florian Lukas , Christiane Paul , Ekkehard Schall , Herbert Knaup , Udo Samel , Inge Keller , Heike Kroemer. Was u. a. broadcast on ZDFkultur . Production in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.

Text output (selection)

  • Heiner Müller: Works 5. The pieces - 3. Ed. By Frank Hörnigk, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-40887-9 .
  • Heiner Müller: The order and other pieces of the revolution (edited by Uwe Wittstock ), Reclam, Stuttgart 2005 (Reclam's Universal Library No. 8470) ISBN 978-3-15-008470-0 .

Literature (selection)

  • Horst Domdey: I laugh at the negro. The winner's laughter in Heiner Müller's play “The Order”. In: Yearbook on Literature in the GDR , Volume 5, Bouvier, Bonn 1986, ISBN 3-416-02001-4 .
  • Richard Herzinger : Masks of the Life Revolution. Vitalistic criticism of civilization and humanism in texts by Heiner Müller. Fink, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-7705-2811-5 .
  • Hans-Thies Lehmann : Georg Büchner, Heiner Müller, Georges Bataille. Revolution and masochism. In: Georg Büchner Jahrbuch , Volume 3 (1983) Frankfurt am Main 1984, ISBN 978-3-11-024236-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Heiner Müller: Works 5. The pieces - 3. Ed. By Frank Hörnigk, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-40887-9 .
  2. ↑ Heiner Müller Handbook . Edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi. Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart and Weimar 2003
  3. ↑ Heiner Müller: War without a battle . A life in two dictatorships. Publishing house Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1992
  4. ^ Website Schauspiel Hannover