Heiner Muller's Lysistrata Experiment
Carl Weber
PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, PAJ 79 (Volume 27, Number 1), January
2005, pp. 117-124 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177766
Access provided by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (24 Apr 2018 15:21 GMT)
HEINER MÜLLER’S
LYSISTRATA EXPERIMENT
Carl Weber
A
mong the manuscripts left at Heiner Müller’s death, a fragment was
discovered, several handwritten pages that most probably were jotted down
in 1970, according to Frank Hoernigk, the editor of Müller’s collected
works published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. The text first appeared in
the January 2001 issue of the Berlin theatre magazine, Theater der Zeit, under the
title Lysistrate 70, and the same year in volume 4 of the Suhrkamp edition.
Müller evidently had probed the value of Aristophanes’comedy Lysistrata for an
adaptation to the contemporary historical environment, i.e., the East German
society of the former GDR during the early 1970s. Aristophanes’ utopian fable,
proposing an agreement between women from Athens and Sparta in which they
decide to refuse all sexual intercourse with their men until those men agree to end
the Peloponnesian War, must have offered an intriguing model to Müller who just
had written a farce that celebrated the emancipation of women in the GDR
workplace, Women’s Comedy (1969). The intended adaptation seems to have been
focused on a general strike by women against the dominant patriarchal family
system, i.e., the women’s refusal to be enslaved by men in every respect, sexually and
otherwise. Instead they would turn the tables and dominate their male oppressors.
The project, if completed, would have continued two trends that were conspicuous
in Müller’s previous writings. One of them is the adaptation of texts from the canon
of classic Greek drama and its constitutive mythology. Of these efforts, the
adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrant, had its premiere at East Berlin’s Deutsches
Theater, in 1967. The next year another Sophocles adaptation, Philoctetes (written
1959–68) opened at the Munich Residenz Theater in what then was West Germany;
the play went on to become one of Müller’s most popular and frequently performed
texts. In 1969, his adaptation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus had its premiere at
Switzerland’s Zürich Schauspielhaus. He later also completed a version of The
Persians by Aeschylus (1990) though, to my knowledge, there is no record of a
production. Previously, 1964–66, he had written Heracles 5, a farcical retelling of
Heracles’ fifth labor that satirized the idolatry and manipulation of “heroes” who are
perceived as social role models, a phenomenon quite dominant in the GDR at the
time when “model workers” were the subject of extensive press coverage; the play
© 2005 Carl Weber PAJ 79 (2005), pp. 117–124. 䊏 117
didn’t receive a staging until 1974, and that in West Berlin. Müller went on to insert
interludes he based on the myths of Heracles and Prometheus in his dramatization
of Fyodor Gladkov’s Soviet novel, Cement, staged at the Berliner Ensemble, in 1973.
Not much later he adapted the myth of Medea, in two very different versions:
Medeaplay (1974) and Medeamaterial (a text not fully completed until 1982).
During the 1990s, he wrote the epic poem Heracles 13, based on Euripides’ drama,,
and finally reflected in another long poem, Ajax for Instance, on the impossibility to
write any longer a tragedy at a time when global capitalism had emerged as the
triumphant victor of the Cold War. It would be interesting to speculate why Müller
considered in that particular historical moment the Greek hero, and his suicide
during the Trojan War, as a potential metaphor for a tragic treatment of contempo-
rary history.
Throughout his life, Müller conducted what might be called a creative dialogue with
the mythology and the theatre of ancient Greece. Athenian drama, in its dialectic
interaction with history, formulated the great paradigmatic narratives of the
individual’s conflict with an often hostile body politic. These were fables Müller
found useful in his attempts to negotiate comparable, if vastly different, conflicts of
his own time. As he once put it: “the return of the Same as an Other.” Beyond that,
Greek drama and epic literature offered rigorous models of a poetic language, which
served well Müller’s particular talent and his determined desire for a non-realistic
treatment of contemporary themes. In contrast to the many tragic narratives Müller
adopted from the Greek canon, the Lysistrata project would have become the only
comedy based on a classic Athenian theatre text. The adaptation also would have
continued a second line which can be traced in Müller’s previous writings, namely
an aggressive, often satirical treatment of the social shifts and struggles that the
emergence of women in habitually ‘male’ professions of a budding Socialist
economy provoked in the GDR. Equal rights for women were granted by the
country’s constitution and advocated by the official Party line, but much less
generally accepted by a public whose majority still held to conservative values. Nor
were women’s rights as effectively enforced as Müller thought desirable. A number of
his texts, beginning with the early short story, Love Story, had been dealing with that
problem. As for the stage, two plays particularly had brought to the fore this aspect
of Müller’s critique of the GDR’s complicated and often repressive as well as
regressive social reality.
In his first paradigmatic assessment of the condition of women in East Germany,
The Resettled Woman or Life in the Country (written 1956–61, based on motifs from
a short story by Anna Seghers), Müller created a female protagonist, named Niet,
who had been forced to leave the former Eastern provinces of the Reich that became
part of Poland at the end of World War II. She has been resettled in a small village
of the Soviet Occupation Zone (1945–46) where the estates of Prussian aristocrats
and other large scale land owners have been expropriated and are now partitioned
into small holdings to be allotted to former farm hands and other landless villagers.
Niet is quartered but barely tolerated in the house of the village mayor. She falls in
love with a local good-for-nothing and self-proclaimed anarchist who makes her
118 䊏 PAJ 79
pregnant. When he is offered a farm holding he refuses to accept it and leaves her to
settle in the American Zone. Having all her life been victimized by men, Niet turns
down a farmer’s proposal to marry or, at least, live with him. She accepts rather a
small holding that she will work together with another woman who volunteers to
join her, the ex-wife of the village Party secretary who also had been left by her man.
When declining the farmer’s proposal, Niet explains:
Just having gotten up from kneeling and
Having crawled out from underneath a man
Who wasn’t great but not the worst one either
Shall I lay down now on my back again
In haste to get beneath another man
And if he’d be the greatest which you might be
As if there’d be no other place that fits a woman.
The former wife of the Party secretary confronted her husband in an earlier scene
this way:
At home for nothing and a few good words.
Bear children, scream at the world, and bring them up
Until my breasts squat on my belly, also for nothing.
An aging woman no cock cares for, target
Of dirty jokes, and pushed aside for fresh
Flesh that you are enjoying now. I too
Have paid my dues, and more than I got back.
The play does not deal exclusively with the situation of women during those early
post-war years. It portrays in a humorous but sharply critical way the social shifts
and struggles caused by the land reform of 1945 and the later efforts to overcome
the newly endowed small farmers’ resistance to joining the agricultural collectives
that became part of the State’s socialist agenda in the mid-1950s. However, Müller
posited women’s conflicted emancipation in the society of the young GDR at the
center of his text. And doing so he anticipated much of what would appear in the
agenda of feminist movements during the subsequent decade.
When first performed on September 11, 1961, less than a month after the GDR
government had closed the borders to the West, the play received a vehemently
negative reception by the cultural and political authorities of the GDR. It was a
genuine surprise for the author who considered the play an honest and constructive
contribution to the building of socialism in his country. The production by a
student theater group at the College of Economy in East Berlin was canceled after
the one scheduled preview that had been attended by an invited audience. The
GDR’s security service ( the “Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,” commonly known
as STASI) opened a special file on the production, its author and director. The M.f.S
concluded in one of its reports that “the content of this play attacks the political
WEBER / Heiner Müller’s Lysistrata Experiment 䊏 119
situation in the GDR. Among other things, the Party is discredited, our society
based on the supremacy of workers and peasants is insulted, and at the end there is
a line claiming that our state is founded on bayonets.”
Müller was attacked by several commentators for indulging in pornographic
language as, for example, in Niet’s reply to the farmer’s proposal quoted above. The
author was summoned before an assembly of fellow GDR writers and cultural
functionaries where he was severely criticized. At an ensuing meeting, he presented
a groveling self-critique in which he tried to apologize for his “ideological failings.”
Nevertheless, after a heated debate he was expelled from the Writers Association of
the GDR. For two years none of his texts were published, nor were they staged for
nearly a decade. He survived, in a very meager fashion, by writing radio texts under
a pen name and, mainly, due to the repeated broadcasting of a detective play he had
drafted in a Raymond Chandler–like mode. Yet, fourteen years later, in 1975, a
revised version of the once so controversial play, now titled The Farmers, was
performed at the Volksbühne in East Berlin where Müller had then been appointed
a playwright-in-residence.
The other stage text with a ‘proto-feminist’ agenda that preceded Müller’s rumina-
tion of the Aristophanes play was Women’s Comedy, completed in 1969 and
performed at the East Berlin Volksbühne in 1970. The text was based on a radio
play, The Women’s Brigade, written in the late 1950s by his wife, Inge Müller, who
had committed suicide in 1966, at least partly due to the precarious situation the
Müllers had to live with after the debacle of The Resettled Woman. In Women’s
Comedy, Müller exploited with gleeful abandon the dramaturgy of farce, as it had
been developed during the 19th century. In a comment, he remarked: “What makes
farce different from comedy is that it treats the petit bourgeois aspect [i.e., lower-
middle-class manners and behavior] as a subject of amusement rather than of
critique [. . .] As long as work is a necessity rather than something desirable, the
theatre doesn’t need a vindication when it shows its behind.”
The play depicts the hilarious public consequences of a rather private act, namely
swimming in the buff, that a young woman likes to enjoy in a pond adjacent to the
industrial construction site where she is a model worker. This incident, observed by
a gaggle of horny male colleagues, triggers a rebellion at the woman’s workplace.
which ends with her “women’s brigade” (i.e., work team) appropriating and
successfully completing a job that previously had been the prerogative of male
workers, namely the moving of a huge crane to a different site on the construction
grounds.
In one scene, an inebriated male worker on phony sick leave warns his colleagues of
what is going to happen if they let the women move the crane on their own. Namely,
that soon the men will all suffer the life of their counterparts on some South Pacific
island:
120 䊏 PAJ 79
[. . .] The women are
In power there, and it looks like this:
The men who are still single live together
By the hundreds in some barracks. There
They must learn how to crochet, for example,
How to do laundry, cook and swaddle babies.
If someone’s learned it all, his time is up.
The women come, that is: a delegation.
Whoever needs a man picks one she fancies.
To test him. He must do the work for her.
If she’s fed up with him, she can exchange him.
The women have their fun, drink beer, play soccer.
That’s how they do it in the South Pacific.
And that is what will happen to us here,
If you don’t go and help them with that crane
At the final curtain, the oldest member of the women’s brigade speaks the epilogue:
Dear audience. On this stage here today
A woman has the last word of the play.
I hope some of you men will now accept
That your ways can be faulty or adept.
That you, colleagues, at least feel your disgrace
If you treat women as it’s been the case
Tonight with this and that guy in our play
Until it dawned on them: That’s not the way.
These few examples may serve to demonstrate how in his writings before1970
Müller reflected on the topic of women’s emancipation, and the concomitant
conflicts that pervaded East German society. His investigation of the Aristophanes
text as material for a contemporary play appears to be a logical extension of his
earlier efforts to present a proto-feminist discourse on stage. Shortly after Müller had
considered the Lysistrate project, he began work on an dramatization of the early
Soviet novel, Cement, by Fyodor Gladkov, that had been commissioned by the
Berliner Ensemble where he was a writer-in-residence at the time and where his
adaptation was premiered, in 1973. The novel, and more so Müller’s stage text
derived from it, tells of a young woman, Dasha, who had become an active
revolutionary while her husband was away as a soldier with the Red Army. Upon his
return he discovers that she has embraced a freedom in sexual relationships that he
can’t bring himself to accept. One strand of the play’s multi-layered narrative pursues
their conflict and its outcome, namely Dasha’s decision to leave her husband whom
she accuses of treating a wife as property:
Can we live with the truth. Or are we building
The world anew with our eyes blindfolded.
WEBER / Heiner Müller’s Lysistrata Experiment 䊏 121
What has been taken from you by those others
What from me. Why then can’t you feel also
Happy about my happy time with others.
What kind of love is it that clings to property.
Why don’t we rip with our teeth into
Each other’s flesh, you into mine and I
Into yours and we both bite out our share.
[. . .]
Were I a man. Sometimes I’m dreaming that
You are lined up against the wall, all of you
Those I have loved and also those I’ve hated
Naked, I want to shoot, I cannot, and you laugh
Or I do shoot but cannot hear a sound
I watch my bullets as they make holes into
Your flesh and from those bleeding holes
Pours like from loudspeakers your roaring laughter
And sometimes it bursts open like a blister
And spits a smutty joke into my face
Then I see that I’m naked, and you see it
And you perform before my nakedness
A dance in tune with shots and jokes and laughter
One hand around your prick, the other pointing
The fingers at me since I have no prick.
You all look very funny in my dream.
I need to be alone, Gleb, for some time.
I love you. But I don’t know anymore
What that is, love. When everything’s turned over.
First we need now to learn it, our love.
Issues of women’s emancipation were evidently very much on Müller’s mind and
became a dominant topic of his writings at the end of the 1960s and thereafter, a
commitment that probably had been intensified by Inge’s suicide in 1966.
The Lysistrate fragment consists of a long section spoken by the Chorus and then a
brief exchange between two characters, named A and C. Their naming and the
gestus of their lines clearly define them as clowns. A, standing for “August,” signals
the character as a classic type of male clown, and though C doesn’t represent a
particular clown’s name, it might have derived from the character of Calonice, one
of the rebellious Athenian women in Aristophanes’ play. The three lines spoken by
A and C remind us of the opening lines of the clown scene, “Brandenburg Concerto
1,” in Germania Death in Berlin:
CLOWN 1: I am the King of Prussia. [. . .]
CLOWN 2: I want to be King of Prussia, too.
CLOWN 1: You are the miller of Potsdam.
122 䊏 PAJ 79
Müller completed the final draft of Germania in 1971, a time when he appears to
have still been occupied with the Aristophanes project. In his papers, there were
several subtitles discovered that he considered for Lysistrate: (A Parlor Game); Or
We’ll Play Man and Wife; Or The War of the Women (Women’s War); Or We’ll Play
Shitting into the Crock. The subtitles seem to indicate that Müller had a very playful
work in mind; they also hint at a “Lehrstück ”-like concept for the text’s potential
performance.
Echoes and even literal quotes of the Chorus section appear in a number of stage
texts Müller wrote during the following decades. For instance, in the second of the
five segments of Hamletmachine (1977) the character of Ophelia uses language that
comes close to quoting the Chorus speech of Lysistrate 70 when she proclaims her
rebellion against all male oppressors. In the final segment she sits in a wheelchair at
the bottom of the ocean where male nurses/guards are wrapping her in gauze.
Calling herself Electra,, she pours forth a violent fantasy of destroying the world of
male dominance and the brutal subjugation it inflicts on its victims, until her voice
is stifled. Her speech recalls but also by far exceeds, the fury articulated in the
Chorus text.
In The Task (1979), the character of First Love condemns the fellow Jamaican
gentleman farmer/slave holder Debuisson, for leaving her, the woman he loved, so
he could indulge his abstract love for the revolution and the liberation of slaves.
When she announces the mode she’ll employ to exact her revenge, her text echoes
Ophelia’s and, hence, the Chorus of the Lysistrate fragment. Quartet (1981) is
certainly the most provocative treatment of male/female relationships and their
intricate, antagonistic and destructive aspects that Müller has authored. Though the
text doesn’t contain any literal quote from the Lysistrate fragment, its tenor often
strikes a similar note. And finally, in Despoiled Shore Medeamaterial Landscape with
Argonauts (1983), one discovers several lines that Müller pulled from the Chorus
section of the Lysistrate fragment, especially in the first part of the triptych where the
author also cited imagery from his early prose piece, Love Story. The text foregrounds
the oppression and betrayal of women throughout history, from the time of ancient
Greece to the Central Europe of the 1980s and—in an uncanny way considering the
time of its writing—a situation comparable to that in the disintegrating Yugoslavia
of the 1990s.
The Lysistrate 70 fragment marks a crucial juncture in the evolution of Heiner
Müller’s writing in its response to the emancipation of women and their struggle for
equal rights. His treatment of the predicament and the prejudices women had to
face in the society of his own time became much more aggressive and what might be
called more “feminist,” after he probed the Aristophanes text for the use value it
might have in the contemporary debate on women’s rights that interested him. It is
regrettable that he didn’t complete the adaptation but the fragment clearly pointed
the way toward the radicalized presentation of women’s issues that became so
prominent in his later texts.
WEBER / Heiner Müller’s Lysistrata Experiment 䊏 123
The question begs to be asked: Why did Müller not proceed with the Lysistrate
project, which certainly offered a very promising potential? One explanation that
comes to mind is that Cement, which he completed two years later, covered
compellingly, and in a very effective realist mode, many aspects of women’s
emancipation that were comparable to those he was trying to deal with in Lysistrate.
Furthermore, in 1975, Müller paid his first visit to the U.S. and then to Mexico and
the Caribbean. This was also his first face-to-face encounter with the vocal feminism
of the U.S. as well as with cultures that used to be labeled “the third world.” When
he talked about these experiences it became evident that his observations had
enhanced his views of feminist issues. During a later visit to New York, he explained
to me that in an American production of Hamletmachine “the main character could
possibly be Ophelia rather than Hamlet. [. . .] That might become an interesting
aspect in the U.S.” Hamletmachine could, indeed, at least partially be read as one
response to his first American visit, in which he reflects on women’s struggle against
male dominance in a quite more radical fashion than the one indicated by his
Lysistrate 70 fragment.
It remains to be noted that there have been quite a number of comments by feminist
critics who perceived a “male gaze” in Müller’s view of women and their conflicts
with a patriarchal society. It has especially been argued that the extreme violence he
proposed or put into the mouths of his female characters—as a metaphorical
response to women’s victimization throughout male-dominated history—reveals a
perception of women’s inability to pursue actively, i.e., in the real world, political
goals; a view that would again assign any actual power in the political arena to the
male. A comment Janine Ludwig made in her essay on Müller’s “Female Characters”
(in the recently published Heiner Müller Handbuch) seems appropriate here, namely
that such critical observations may be correct but that Müller “always insisted on
presenting conflicts unsparingly instead of peddling their harmonious solution—
and to punish the messenger doesn’t much help, as we know.”
(Note: All translations are mine.)
CARL WEBER, a long-time contributing editor of PAJ, is the editor of The
Heiner Müller Reader and DramaContemporary: Germany, both for PAJ
Publications. He teaches at Stanford University.
124 䊏 PAJ 79
