https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/08/theater/theater-in-germany-a-warning-from-heiner-muller.html

THEATER; In Germany, a Warning From Heiner Muller


''Most of my life I have been a (검열됨)victim of German history,'' says Heiner Muller, generally considered Germany's, both East and West, leading playwright. In 1933, when he was 4, his father, a socialist who opposed Hitler, was dragged off to prison. ''I have to deal with history because it has dealt so much with me,'' Mr. Muller says. ''Besides, on stage, you need an enemy. German history is my enemy, and I want to stare into the white of its eye.''


As the two Germany's head toward reunification, Mr. Muller's work is receiving more attention than ever before. He is one of the few major dramatists of the 20th century to make history his subject. In play after play he returns obsessively to the ghosts of Germany past. Although his work is rarely performed in America, many European critics regard him as the most important playwright since Samuel Beckett. His abrasive lyricism and visionary stage techniques, say the critics, break new ground for the theater.


''The terror I write of comes from Germany,'' says Mr. Muller, an East German who during May and June found himself the subject of a theater festival in West Germany. Leading theater companies from East and West Germany presented nearly 40 different productions of Mr. Muller's works in addition to ballets, operas, lectures and concerts based on his texts. More than 20,000 spectators attended the events, which were sponsored, in part, by the Ministry of Inner German Relations, a state agency that fosters exchanges between the two Germanys.


Despite the wide-ranging approaches to Mr. Muller's works, the festival revealed that the two Germany's are passing through an identity crisis. His plays force Germans to ask themselves what the role of a united Germany should be in a united Europe. Today Mr. Muller is the most frequently produced dramatist in both Germanys, but from 1961 to 1973 his plays, which explore why workers failed to create a socialist utopia, were banned in East Germany. There, Mr. Muller says, ''I was considered a commodity for export.'' On(검열)ly after his reputation in the West had consecrated him as Germany's most important playwright were his works permitted in the East. ''Quality,'' he says, ''is your best weapon.''


One afternoon during the festival the playwright sat in a coffee shop watching the patrons eat pastries. ''Look at these smug West Germans,'' he said, gesturing at the tables. ''They're all ex-Nazis, but they feel completely innocent. They accept no responsibility for what Germany did. They believe they never did anything to anybody. I hate their moral complacency. But I can't forget. I feel guilty for Germany. And what surprises me most about recent events is not the tumbling of the wall but the resurgence of nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. I thought these weeds had been pulled out, but the roots were left in the ground to sprout again. A reunited Germany will make life unpleasant for its neighbors.''


In ''Germania Death in Berlin,'' completed in 1971 and performed at the festival, Mr. Muller strolls through 2,000 years of German history, creating a phantasmagoria of violence peopled by the Nibelungs, Hitler and a circus clown who thinks he's Frederick the Great. In Mr. Muller's kaleidoscope of the past, one disaster after another brutalizes the German people - the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt at the end of the Middle Ages; the Thirty Years' War; the invasion of Napoleon; the triumph of Prussian militarism; the rise to power of the Nazis. In this view Hitler is not an aberration in German history but the culmination.


One of Mr. Muller's masterpieces, ''Germania'' epitomizes the author's mature style, which he calls ''synthetic fragments.'' Instead of traditional realism, Mr. Muller offers metaphoric visions assembled from conflicting bits and pieces. Dense, elliptic, poetic, his plays destroy the pillars of conventional drama - plot, dialogue, character. Exploring the edges of drama as a genre, Mr. Muller's plays work through a montage of images rather than logic. Critics point to his works as the prime example of post-modernism in drama. His collage of contrasting styles and techniques opens up the ambiguity of experience.


''Fragments have a special value today,'' Mr. Muller says, ''because all the coherent stories we used to tell ourselves to make sense of life have collapsed.''


The festival presented two productions of ''Germania,'' one by the Berliner Ensemble from East Berlin, the second by the innovative Schauspielhaus Bochum of West Germany. The first was straightforward, austere, didactic, Brechtian. The second, directed by Frank-Patrick Steckel, one of West Germany's most avant-garde directors, was a high-spirited romp through Mr. Muller's black humor.


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In the play's most famous scene - the birth of a new Germany spawned by a sexual union between Hitler and Goebbels - Hitler, a beetle-eyed cross between Charlie Chaplin and Dr. Caligari, staggered onto the stage chugging gasoline. As he coupled with Goebbels, portrayed as a transvestite Valkyrie, the strains of ''Deutschland Uber Alles'' pounded through the theater to a disco beat. A chorus of angels, dressed in black leather and heavy metal, entered carrying a sign: ''Germany a United Fatherland'' (Mr. Steckel's comment on reunification). While the characters of Uncle Sam, John Bull and Marianne (the symbol of France) looked on in helpless stupefaction, the new Germany was born - half wolf, half pig. A gold neon swastika descended from the heavens to bless the event.


''I added the poster in response to recent events,'' Mr. Steckel said, ''because I see reunification as problematic. Germans haven't reflected deeply enough on the horrible events between 1933 and 1945. But Muller won't let them forget. He confronts them with their history and guilt. His plays appeal to me as a director because of their expansive fantasy. No other dramatist today has his imaginative power.''


Mr. Muller says his hope ''is for a world where a play like 'Germania' can never be written again because its truth would no longer obtain. Art must awaken the yearning for another world, and this yearning is revolutionary. If you stray into a theater and see on stage exactly what you saw in the subway or the street, why bother to go to the theater? Stay in the street. I don't find it interesting to see a man on stage with two eyes, two ears, two legs. I want to see a man with three ears and four legs. This is more interesting. Theater must not duplicate reality.''


In ''The Battle,'' a play completed in 1974 and performed at the festival, Mr. Muller dramatizes the rise and fall of the Third Reich as the eternal return of the joy of destruction and self-destruction. Hitler is seen not as a charismatic figure who misled a nation but as the perfect expression of Germany's obsession with power and love affair with sadism. In the Frankfurt Conservatory production, after the bombing of Berlin, an army of Rockette lookalikes dressed in red, white and blue tapped their way across the stage to ''St. Louis Blues'' and seduced the Germans into the delights of bourgeois democracy.


People crawled out from beneath the rubble and rebuilt the set - humming, first softly, then louder, ''Deutschland Uber Alles.'' As they re-formed into a goose-stepping battalion, the ghost of Hitler looked on, laughing the last laugh: the German Army failed, but the German mark will conquer Europe. Two of the most interesting productions of the festival came from East Berlin's Deutsches Theater and were directed by Mr. Muller himself. ''The Scab,'' an early, realistic play, shows how socialism infantilizes workers and breeds indolence and irresponsibility. A multi-media event incorporating film and projections, the play oscillated between expressionistic nightmare and stylized farce.


The most enthusiastically received production of the festival was Mr. Muller's ''Hamlet/Machine,'' an eight-hour combination of Shakespeare's play with ''Hamletmachine,'' a text completed in 1977 which many consider to be Mr. Muller's masterpiece and which was presented in 1986 at New York University in a production directed by Robert Wilson. ''I was Hamlet,'' says the title character. ''I stood at the shore and talked with the surf blah blah, the ruins of Europe in back of me.'' Mr. Muller's hero represents the impotence of intellectuals to affect the world. Through Ophelia, the piece is a war cry to the oppressed to rebel.


This production, with a set by the Viennese set designer Eric Wonder, who is known for mixing contrasting visual styles, establishes Mr. Muller as one of the major directors of Europe. Now farce, now tragedy, Mr. Muller's Hamlet, played by Ulrich Muhe, an eminent East German actor, was a desperate clown who knew the political order had to be destroyed yet could not bring about the necessary revolution.


Despite their cynicism and gloom, Mr. Muller's works are not unredeemably bleak. Neither Pollyanna nor pessimist, the playwright is best described as an optimistic nihilist. In his plays hope lurks between the lines of his belligerent prose. The elegance of his style implies the possible triumph of reason and justice in a dark world. And the explosion of theatrical energy affirms the will to live and create over the joy of destruction. His insistence on learning from the mistakes of history suggests that men can learn and that through the exercise of intelligence and the healing power of laughter, we might save the world.


''Fear,'' Mr. Muller says, ''is a good teacher.''


내가 뮐러를 사랑할 수밖에 없는 이유가 드러나는 기사라 독갤에 올려봄....
''I have to deal with history because it has dealt so much with me,'' Mr. Muller says. ''Besides, on stage, you need an enemy. German history is my enemy, and I want to stare into the white of its eye.''

이것 말고 다른 발언도 뮐러가 보는 그 관점이 너무나도 좋고 내가 지향하는 바와도 닮았지만 독재국가에 남아서 검열당하고 탄압당하던 때가 더 행복했던 덴지뇌는 진짜 끝내줌... 

자신을 감싼 억압이란 적이 없다면, 쓸 수 없는 남자라니...... 개꼴리지않습니까