The Battle (play)

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The battle is a series of scenes by the German playwright Heiner Müller , which was created between 1951 and 1974. The scene THE LAKEN OR THE IMMACULATE RECEPTION was shown for the first time on September 25, 1974, directed by Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne Berlin as part of the Spectacle 2 . The first performance of the complete sequence of scenes The Battle (together with Heiner Müller's tractor ) was on October 30, 1975 at the Volksbühne Berlin. Directed by Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff.

Plot and dramaturgy

The piece consists of five self-contained scenes that take place during the time of fascism . In THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES , two brothers, whom Müller calls A and B, meet on the night of the Reichstag fire . A is a class conscious worker and opponent of the Nazis. B was tortured by the Gestapo and defected to the Brown Shirts, but did not deliver anyone to the knife. For his comrades, however, he is a traitor. So he asks A to shoot him. A does.

I HAD A MATTER shows four soldiers in the snow at the front. Hunger makes them think to kill and eat one of them. The weakest is shot: "He was / our weakest link and a danger / for the final victory. Now out of comradeship / he strengthens our firepower." "The process is ideologically covered without residue by sayings of the fourth soldier, in the sense of Nazi ideology . "

In KLEINBÜRGERHOCHZEIT a fanatical Nazi calls on his wife and daughter to commit "heroic" suicide shortly before the Red Army marches in. When they resist, the man shoots them and puts the revolver to his temple. He hesitates to shoot when Hitler threatens him from the picture on the wall. The man knows how to help himself: he turns the picture around and runs away: "Where there was an end there will be a beginning. / The strong are alone most powerful."

FLEISCHER UND FRAU is a mini- drama , a "piece in a piece" that consists of five short scenes. The butcher has reorganized himself economically by joining the SA and is avoiding the war effort. When an American plane crashes nearby, he is instructed to kill the pilot: "That hits your shelf, you're a butcher." Shortly before the end of the war, the man went into the water for fear of being held accountable for the murder. The butcher's wife follows him and is unsure whether to save him or let him drown. Finally she jumps into the water to save him and kills her husband because the drowning man, clinging to her, would have killed her: "He or I. (...) The children are there too. Dead is dead."

THE LAKEN OR THE IMMACULATE RECEPTION takes place in an air raid shelter in 1945 , just before the Red Army marched into Berlin. A Wehrmacht soldier takes off his uniform. The other occupants of the basement make him hoist a white sheet as a sign of surrender. Two SS men break into the cellar, the soldier is betrayed by the others and hanged for high treason. Two Russian soldiers bring the body back to the cellar. One of the women claims that the deceased was her son and receives bread from the Russians. "Above the dead, the survivors' struggle for bread begins."

One of the main myths of National Socialism that the Germans were a " people's community " that goes to the death for "Führer, Volk and Vaterland" is taken ad absurdum with the dramaturgical means of the farce and the Grand Guignol . In the struggle for survival, everyone is close to himself. Regarding the dramaturgy of the sequence of scenes, Müller remarks: "Formally, Schlacht / Traktor is an adaptation of your own texts that are 20 or more years old or an attempt to synthetically produce a fragment Fuß "has (the fable in the classical sense), which still comes to reality. Incidentally, the text deals with situations in which the individual only has a particular effect, shattered by predicaments (which are of course brought about by individuals under certain conditions)." The method of "synthetic fragmentation" refers to the "assembly of attractions" which the Russian film director Sergej Eisenstein developed in the 1920s and which was also applied to the theater by directors such as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator . Brecht developed this dramaturgical approach further in his Epic Theater . Heiner Müller continued to experiment with montage and fragment a. a. in his plays Germania Tod in Berlin , Gundling's life Friedrich von Prussia, Lessing's sleep dream scream , Decrepit Shores, Medeamaterial, Landscape with Argonauts and Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV . From the tractor scene , which was originally intended for Die Schlacht , Müller developed an independent piece that was often performed together with Die Schlacht .

Relation to Brecht's fear and misery of the Third Reich

Müller's sequence of scenes The Battle makes clear reference to Bertolt Brecht's fear and misery of the Third Reich (first performance 1938, Paris). Compared to Brecht, however, Müller sharpened both content and form clearly. Brecht was interested in the question posed in a prologue - analogously -: How useful will this people be for the war of its spoilers? On the other hand, the unembellished and illusion-free answer that the author gave with the sequence of scenes included an emphasis on the resistance struggle of the working class . Müller is primarily concerned with the " subjective problem", the "concrete German appearance", which, in Müller's opinion, Brecht only captured precisely enough in the prelude to his adaptation of Sophocles' " Antigone " : Where were you, as your brother was killed?

Müller sees this subjective problem in the very far-reaching objectification and dehumanization of large parts of the population; all five scenes show how so-called "simple people" - workers, soldiers, petty bourgeoisie, as they are also in the center of Brecht's scene sequence - could manage to kill one another. In all drastic ways, Müller shows his readiness for betrayal, brutality and a lack of solidarity right down to the family. "If Brecht dealt with the disintegration of the bourgeois-petty-bourgeois family under fascism in scenes like The Spy or The Jewish Woman , Müller also shows the perverse of their functioning."

reception

Müller describes the circumstances of the premiere at the Volksbühne as follows: "My first play at the Volksbühne was Die Schlacht , 1975, staged by Karge and Langhoff. There were discussions beforehand in the theater's sponsoring company, the NARVA light bulb factory. The actors have the text there read aloud and talked to the workers about how they experienced the end of the war and the Nazi era. The result was a fairly extensive material and that cushioned a lot of skepticism. As usual, there was the recommendation not to do the piece, but no prohibition . In the first performances, battle was combined with tractor . Matthias Langhoff's strategy was intimidation through art, an elaborate staging, with perhaps even too much pomp and aesthetics. (...) The tractor later fell away. Battle went on for a very long time, until 1985 . "

After its premiere in the GDR, the battle initially aroused rejection, incomprehension and disturbance. Müller responded with a letter to Martin Linzer, which appeared in the August 1975 issue of the East German journal Theater der Zeit . But Western reviewers also criticized the one-sidedness of the presentation, which, for example, completely omits the anti-fascist resistance and replaces concrete historical causalities with a quasi-anthropically conditioned human cruelty.

Unaffected by this, the play experienced numerous productions both in the German-speaking area and abroad (including in France, Austria, Japan and South Africa). By 2002, the Heiner Müller Handbook listed 55 productions in Germany and abroad. Since the 1980s, it has often been combined with Müller's series of scenes Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV . Frank Castorf created an unusual combination and a very successful production in 1994 at the Volksbühne in Berlin: he installed the battle scenes in the middle-class Schwank Pension Schöller .

Productions (selection)

Text output (selection)

  • Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The pieces, 2nd ed. by Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  • Heiner Müller: The battle / tractor / life of Gundling Friedrich von Prussia Lessing's sleep dream scream . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1977

Interviews / discussions

  • Finding the biographies again after fascism. Excerpts from an interview conducted in Geneva about the production Die Schlacht an der Volksbühne Berlin; with Matthias Langhoff and others. In: Heiner Müller: Gesammelte Errtäne 2nd ed. By Gregor Edelmann and Renate Ziemler. Publishing house of the authors, Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-88661-103-5
  • Heiner Müller: War without a battle. Life in two dictatorships. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1992, pp. 252ff. ISBN 3-462-02172-9

Literature (selection)

  • Gottfried Fischborn : Intention and Material. Some aspects of Heiner Müller's battle and tractor . In: Weimarer contributions 24 (1978) 3, 58-92
  • Jost Hermand : Germans eat Germans. In: John Fuegi, Reinhold Grimm, Jost Hermand (eds.): Brecht-Jahrbuch 1978, Frankfurt am Main 1978
  • Frank-Michael Raddatz: Demons under the Red Star - On the philosophy of history and aesthetics of Heiner Müller, Stuttgart 1991

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Heiner Müller Handbook. Edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi. Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2003. ISBN 3-476-01807-5
  2. ↑ Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The Pieces 2nd Ed. By Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  3. ↑ Gottfried Fischborn: piece writing, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1981, p. 100
  4. ↑ Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The pieces, 2nd ed. by Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  5. ↑ Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The pieces, 2nd ed. by Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  6. ↑ Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The pieces, 2nd ed. by Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  7. ↑ Heiner Müller: The battle. In: Heiner Müller, Works 4, The pieces, 2nd ed. by Frank Hörnigk. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2001
  8. ^ Heiner Müller: theater work. In: Texts, 11 volumes. Rotbuch Verlag Berlin, publishing house of the authors 1974, p. 124 f.
  9. ↑ Joachim Fiebach: Epilogue to Heiner Müller: The battle / tractor / life of Gundling Friedrich von Prussia Lessing's sleep dream scream . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1977
  10. ↑ Gottfried Fischborn: piece writing, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1981, p. 104
  11. ↑ Gottfried Fischborn: piece writing, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1981, p. 100
  12. ↑ Heiner Müller: War without a battle. Life in two dictatorships. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1992, pp. 252ff. ISBN 3-462-02172-9
  13. ↑ Heiner Müller Handbook. Edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi. S. 274 Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2003. ISBN 3-476-01807-5
  14. ^ Heiner Müller: theater work. In: Texts, 11 volumes. Rotbuch Verlag Berlin, publishing house of the authors 1974, p. 124 f.
  15. ↑ Heiner Müller Handbook. Edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi. S. 274 Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2003. ISBN 3-476-01807-5
  16. ↑ Heiner Müller Handbook. Edited by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi. S. 274 Verlag JB Metzler, Stuttgart, Weimar 2003. ISBN 3-476-01807-5
  17. ^ Rolf Michaelis: Lehrstück without teaching . In: The time . No. 46/1975 ( online ).
  18. ^ Jens Mittelstenscheid: Heiner Müller's reception at Dresden theaters in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century. Grin Verlag for academic texts 2010
  19. ↑ Comedy, war, potato salad: Frank Castorf directs the German bastard drama "Pension Schöller: die Schlacht" at the Volksbühne in Berlin: Pension Hitler or Das Fidele Grauen . In: The time . No. 18/1994 ( online ).

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