Inge Müller

Memorial plaque for Inge and Heiner Müller at House Kissingenplatz 12, in Berlin-Pankow

Stele for Inge Müller in the Pankow III cemetery

Inge (borg) Müller , née Meyer (born March 13, 1925 in Berlin ; † June 1, 1966 there ), was a German writer and the second wife of the playwright Heiner Müller .

Life

During the Second World War, Inge Müller was drafted into various places in Styria for the Reich Labor Service until she came to Berlin in 1945 as an air force helper . Her parents died in an air raid, and in April she was buried under rubble with a dog for three days - a traumatic experience that accompanied her all her life.

In the post-war period she worked as a secretary, rubble woman , worker, journalist and people's correspondent . Her first marriage to Kurt Lohse, from which a son, Bernd, emerged, was short-lived. In 1948 she married Herbert Schwenkner , the director of the Friedrichstadt-Palast and later of the Circus Busch . She became a member of the SED and lived in Lehnitz near Oranienburg from 1954 to 1959 , where she enjoyed a privileged and carefree existence.

In the fall of 1953 she met Heiner Müller, who was then destitute, at an event organized by the “Young Authors' Working Group”. Heiner Müller moved into the Schwenkners' house and, with Inge's husband, lived on the first floor with Inge. Inge and Heiner Müller married in 1955. Both of them, who now earned their living as freelance writers, worked together on radio plays and plays . Inge Müller's dream of a working group on an equal footing did not last long. Too obviously she was overshadowed by her husband, who viewed her as a co-worker rather than an equal partner. An affair that began in 1956 with Wolfgang Müller , Heiner's sixteen-year-old brother, failed, and the relationship with her husband deteriorated noticeably. Both were honored with the Heinrich Mann Prize in 1959. Heiner Müller's exclusion from the GDR writers' association hit her. Under depression and psychosomatic complaints suffering, tried Inge Mueller several times to commit suicide. On June 1, 1966, at the age of 41, she died of medication and gas poisoning in her apartment at Kissingenplatz 12. Since 2006, a plaque on the house commemorates Inge and Heiner Müller.

The Aufbau-Verlag tried in vain to publish a volume of her poems shortly after her death. Her work was quickly forgotten, because a suicide woman did not fit into the literary image of GDR politics, and Heiner soon claimed sole authorship for the collaborations. The first posthumous publication of her poems was made by Bernd Jentzsch in 1976 in his Poesiealbum series . It was not until 1985 - 20 years after her death - that Richard Pietraß 's selection of her poems When I Must Die made Inge Müller's literary work accessible to the general public.

She found her final rest in a Pankow cemetery . The grave site was re-occupied in 1991. In 1997 a memorial stele was erected.

plant

Inge Müller published only a few books during his lifetime, including the children's books Wölfchen Ungestüm (1955) and Ten Boys and a Fishing Village (1958), the emancipatory-contemporary radio play Die Weiberbrigade and the adaptation of Wiktor Rosow's Auf dem Weg . Much remained fragmentary, for example the novel Ich Jona . The dramas Der Lohndrücker (1956), The Resettled Woman (1956), The Correction (1957), Klettwitzer Report (1958) and Unterwegs (1963) were created in collaboration with Heiner Müller .

She was remembered primarily as a poet. Almost 300 poems were written, of which only a few were published during the author's lifetime, mainly in the anthology In this Better Land . In her texts, Müller often deals with bitter war experiences:

"We, said one who belongs to it,
are the lost generation.
They cheated us out of our ration
. What we were entitled to was already distributed"

- From: "We"

The short, fragmentary verses of numerous poems are striking:

“Who will help me
Who do I help?
So and over and over again.
Me we
Life
Our face
Earth Dung Light "

- From: "Now"

Publications

Work editions

• Richard Pietraß (Ed.): If I have to die. Construction Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-351-00449-4 .
• Sonja Hilzinger (ed.): That I don't choke on being quiet. Construction Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-351-02937-3 .
• Blanche Kommerell (ed.): I want everything from the world. Bübül Verlag, Berlin, 2016. ISBN 3-946807-03-8
• Ines Geipel (Ed.): Somewhere; I want to see again. Construction Verlag, Berlin, 1996, ISBN 3-351-02361-8

literature

Biographies

• Ines Geipel : Then suddenly the sky fell. Henschel Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-89487-417-1 .
• Sonja Hilzinger: Life begins today. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-02585-8 .
• Jutta Rosenkranz: “I refuse to wear masks.” Inge Müller (1925–1966). In: Jutta Rosenkranz: Line by line my paradise. Eminent women writers, 18 portraits. Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-492-30515-0 .

Web links

Commons : Inge Müller  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Inge Müller in the catalog of the German National Library
• Inge Müller archive in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin