War without battle

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War without battle - Life in two dictatorships - An autobiography is the full title of by far the most extensive text by the playwright Heiner Müller (1929–1995).

Emergence

After much pressure and the promise of a “nice advance payment” (Ziemer), Müller committed himself to Kiepenheuer & Witsch at the 1990 Frankfurt Book Fair to work on an autobiography . In a letter from the chief editor Helge Malchows (now publisher) to Heiner Müller, dated May 7, 1990, the archive of the Akademie der Künste Berlin (which houses Heiner Müller's artistic estate) contains the first written mention of the project. The letter shows that the book was planned as an autobiographical interview from the start .

At the end of January, beginning of February 1991, Heiner Müller, Helge Malchow, his secretary Renate Ziemer and his former sister-in-law, the writer Katja Lange-Müller, met in the holiday home of the KiWi publisher Neven du Mont for a fortnight on La Palma to do the autobiographical interviews to lead. These conversations represent the primary material basis for the emergence of war without battle .

The interview marathon was followed by the transcription of the tapes. The tape copies were first edited by Helge Malchow, Katja Lange-Müller and Renate Ziemer. The revision of the resulting rough version took place in several steps in the spring of 1992 on Lanzarote and in Berlin . In addition to Helge Malchow, Müller brought in his assistant director Stephan Suschke for this work .

A handwritten draft of a letter to Helge Malchow shows Heiner Müller's resignation in the face of the upcoming task of final editing. At times he considered abandoning the project. He wrote to Helge Malchow: "I will pay the publisher the money back + we will make a press release (which may bring better press than the book) + forget the whole thing." (HMA 4480) The decisive point for Heiner Müller, to release the text for publication anyway may be justified in this letter itself. The formulation of the doubts and the explicit admission of failure in the epilogue to Krieg ohne Schlacht go back to this letter. They enabled Müller to operate in a field “beyond” literature without having to give up his own artistic claim.

In the closing words of the print version, Müller explicitly refers to the collective development process of war without battle . In terms of the importance of editorial cooperation, it seems more conciliatory than the draft letter to Helge Malchow, but it cannot do without problematizing the concept of literature. “I would like to thank Katja Lange-Müller, Helge Malchow, Renate Ziemer and Stephan Suschke for their work. You have reduced more than a thousand pages of conversation, which for a long time was also gossip, to a text that I could revise, even if I could not turn it into literature in the time available to me. ”( War without battle , p. 366f. )

The book came on the market in mid-June 1992. After the paperback edition of 1994, which was expanded to include a dossier with Stasi documents, translations were published in France (1996) and Brazil (1997). In autumn 2005, WAR WITHOUT BATTLE was published as volume 9 of the work edition by Suhrkamp. In addition to the appendix to the first edition and the dossier of the extended edition from 1994, the Suhrkamp volume contains material for the first time. In addition to a draft foreword and the synopsis of two earlier versions of the text of the later chapter “The Power and the Glory”, the editor Frank Hörnigk comments on a large number of notes and documents from the context in which they were created in an “Editorial Note”. The name register has been supplemented by a work register in this edition.

title

The title quotes a novel by Ludwig Renn . Renn's novel War Without Battle was published by Das neue Berlin in 1957 . A reference that seems to have grown Müller's title rather than following the wrong track of Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golßenau (the real name of Ludwig Renn, who comes from a Saxon noble family), can be found in Gilles Deleuze, who with a view to his own work as Philosopher speaks of a "war without battle" ( Negotiations , p. 7).

Another quote is placed in front of the autobiography as the motto: "Should I talk about myself I who / From whom is I talking when / I am talking about me who is that". It is taken from Müller's piece Verkehres Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mir Argonauten (1982).

reception

At the time of its publication, War Without Battle is the book of the hour and not only the most extensive, but also the most widely read text by Heiner Müller. This is mainly due to the interest in a public figure who pointedly commented on the unification of Germany at the time of the fall. As president of the Akademie der Künste (East) and member of the board of directors of the Berliner Ensemble , Müller enjoyed full press and television attention in the early 1990s. In addition, there was the hysterical outcry in the media when Heiner Müller made the absurd accusation at the end of 1991 that he was a Stasi informant.

In the relevant research, war without a battle is mostly used as valid evidence of the intention of Müller's letter. The poetic dimension of the text is insufficiently reflected or completely ignored. This results in the misperception of the text as the record of a life. The fundamentally poetic and poetological (Müller's texts are always both at the same time) reorientation of self-reflection and self-aestheticization in Heiner Müller's late work must escape such a perspective, especially since Müller's self-analysis never takes place independently of the historical-social predispositions of the individual.

expenditure

  • Heiner Müller: War without a battle. Life in two dictatorships . Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, Cologne 1992, ISBN 3-462-02172-9 .