Mesocosm

“I want to live in my veins, in the marrow of my bones, in the labyrinth of my skull.” – Die Hamletmaschine

The following is my translation of German playwright Heiner Müller’s reflections on the composition of his play “Hamlet Machine,” drawn from his autobiography War Without Slaughter; A Life under Two Dictatorships. For my analysis of the play, see Heiner Müller’s “Hamlet Machine”.

There is very little available on Müller’s work in English, so I hope this will be a useful reference for interested readers. The play itself available here (English, PDF), und hier (auf Deutsch).

Heiner Müller: When the year 1977 began, I was hanging around in Bulgaria again. I had filled an entire Bulgarian schoolbook with notes, drafts, and sketches of pieces. And just across from the highrise where Ginka had a flat stood the biggest power plant in Sofia, called the “Traicho Kostov.”

Traicho Kostov was the Bulgarian equivalent of [László] Rajk. [László Rajk was a Hungarian Communist who was persecuted in Stalinist show trials and then executed in 1949.] Kostov was executed during the great purges.

Kostov had been Secretary under [Georgi] Dimitrov. According to the Bulgarian interpretation, Dimitrov was killed during “medical procedures” in Moscow. He had been in talks with [Yugoslavian autocrat] Tito about leading a Balkan Federation. Then he became ill and flew to Moscow for the better medical facilities, and there he died. Then the trials started up, in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, in the USSR, in Poland. That was the beginning of the 50s.

In Bulgaria, Traicho Kostov was the designated agent of imperialism. He was the only one of them who hadn’t made a confession, so they just had him killed, because they had become impatient and time was marching on. And after the Rehabilitation, this central power plant was named after him.

I had been planning for a long time to write a piece on Hamlet. I was interested in writing a version in which Hamlet was the son of a Rajk, Slansky, or Kostov. I didn’t know much about Kostov before – I knew a bit more about Rajk. That was the best-known case. Hamlet comes home from his father’s state funeral, and he has to carry on. Hamlet in Budapest. I envisioned a two-hundred-page work to lay out the whole problem.

Then I came back to Berlin, and [the Swiss director Benno] Besson wanted to stage Hamlet, and he asked me if I could translate it in four weeks, because that’s when he had to start. I said it wasn’t going to happen in four weeks, so he asked “What is the best translation?” I told him the one by Dresen and Hamburger would be the best. The performance I had seen in Greifswald was very good, and it also led to Dresen coming to the Deutsche Theater [in Berlin].

Besson had already started rehearsals with that translation. Matthias Langhoff was the director’s assistant because it interested him. He kept coming by with questions for me from Besson. This or that passage didn’t work, so I should change it.

In the meantime, Langhoff became bored by the rehearsals and was happy when we got together to work on the text. Then it became more and more a new translation. The actors couldn’t learn the new script fast enough, and for the dress rehearsal they delivered a composite of the old and new translations. Subsequently there was a plagiarism lawsuit.

Anyway, when I was finished with the translation, I saw my own plan in a new light. Then came this new nine-page work very quickly, “Hamlet Machine,” like a shrunken head.

I had already noticed in Bulgaria that it would be impossible to create dialog out of this material, if we were to travel into the world of so-called actual Socialism-Stalinism. It was a place where there was no dialog any longer. I had already seen, again and again, that it didn’t work, there was no dialog, only blocks of monolog, and that shrank the entirety down to this text. The theme of Budapest in 1956 also produced no dialog.

Naked Man with Knife
Jackson Pollock, c 1940

The history of the RAF, also material for the play, was [likewise] a single breakneck monolog. [The RAF, or Red Army Faction, was a far-left terrorist group led by the radical activist Andreas Baader and former journalist Ulrike Meinhof.]

After a failed action against Der Spiegel offices, the Baader Group, along with Ulrike Meinhof, threw the furniture out the window of the apartment she shared with her husband, the editor-in-chief of Konkret. The destruction of the bourgeois life context, the withdrawal from the bourgeois life and the entry into illegality – that interested me.

[During Ophelia’s long monolog near the beginning of the play, she states “I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home.” (1)]

Then there was the echo of Charles Manson. The final movement [of Ophelia’s monolog in “Hamet Machine”] is from Susan Atkins, member of his “family,” one of the murderers of Sharon Tate, who was famous for her “scaring phone calls.” One was cited in Life. I had read about it in Bulgaria by coincidence – in Bulgaria I depended on coincidence, when it came to reading. The sentence was “When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you’ll know the truth.” [This line, spoken by Ophelia, ends the play.]

I had no title for the text. Betty Weber, a German scholar from Texas, had a plan to publish one volume with [the prominent German publisher] Suhrkamp, with my attempt withs and at Shakespeare. So we had to find a title, and through Andy Warhol I came up with “Shakespeare Factory.” That brought me back to Duchamp’s “Bachelor Machine,” and to “Hamlet Machine” as the work’s title.

The Suhrkamp project failed, because it was essential to me to have the photo in there, of Ulrike Meinhof down from the gallows. [Meinhof was found hanged in her prison cell before her trial concluded in 1976.] Unseld said “That’s not possible, that cannot appear in my publishing house.” For me it was a point of honor. That’s why it didn’t appear in Suhrkamp.

One can make many things of “Hamlet Machine.” First of all, the impossibility of using dialog in this material certainly signifies stagnation. And if nothing occurs on the male plane, the women must come up with something. And so forth. Lenin always said, the Movement comes from the provinces, and woman is the province of man.

The machine metaphor may have something to do with the factory opposite the place in Sofia, too. I would have not have been able to write the piece without the trip to America – certainly, not without the travel to the west. Deleuze and Guattari’s book on Kafka was certainly important, because it dealt with the province, with the mobilization of the province. Criminality is also a province.

“Hamlet Machine” was not staged with Hamlet as I had hoped, at that time. It was banned until the fall of the DDR.

It was through the aforementioned plagiarism trial that I made the acquaintance of [the prominent left-wing politician and attorney] Gregor Gysi. There was a plagiarism trial, which took place in Leipzig, brought by Dresen and Hamburger against my translation. Gysi was our lawyer, Hamburger represented himself. He said that history has shown that no one could independently produce a translation of a Shakespeare play in two months. That was completely impossible. Gysi said “That just demonstrates the brilliance of my clients.”

He won the trial.

References
1) Müller H. “Hamletmaschine”. from Hamletmaschine and Other Texts for the Stage. ed. Carl Weber. Performing Arts Journal Publications. 1984. p.54.