After leaving school, Mühe was employed as a construction worker and a border guard at the Berlin Wall. He then turned to acting, and from the late 1970s into the 1980s appeared in numerous plays, becoming a star of the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin. He was active in politics and denounced Communist rule in East Germany in a memorable address at the Alexanderplatz demonstration on 4 November 1989 shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
After German reunification he continued to appear in a large number of films, television programmes and theatre productions. In Germany he was particularly known for playing the lead role of Dr. Robert Kolmaar in the long-running forensic crime series "Der letzte Zeuge" ("The Last Witness", 1998–2007).
Heiner Müller was an independent Marxist and wrote roughly 30 stage works. They were notable for their forceful language and unsparing political criticism and were often reworkings of classical Greek plays or Shakespeare.
He was the most influential German playwright since Bertolt Brecht, a powerful critique of both the failed socialist experiment in his native East Germany and the barbarity of capitalism. He teached us that hope for a better future can only exist as contradiction to history.
Heiner Müller was born in a village not far from Dresden in what became East Germany after World War II. His father was a political prisoner, a jailed socialist who opposed Nazism.
He was 16 when the war ended, and he remained in East Germany. "Most of my life I have been a victim of German history," Mr. Muller said in an interview in 1990. "I have to deal with history because it has dealt so much with me. Besides, onstage you need an enemy. German history is my enemy, and I want to stare into the white of its eye."
He summed up the East German state as "a dream that made a nightmare of history, like Kleist's Prussia and Shakespeare's England."
In 1951 he moved to East Berlin and did clerical and journalistic work for several years before taking a job with the Government-supported, Berlin-based Berliner Ensemble, then headed by Brecht.
Müller's first stage work, "Der Lohndrucker" ("The Wage Dumper"), which was performed in Berlin and elsewhere in 1958, was about an overachieving East German bricklayer. The work drew opposition from the Communist Party and is said to have been kept off stages in East Germany until 1988.
For years Müller remained deeply out of favor with East Germany's authoritarian authorities, who called him a "historical pessimist." He was dismissed from the Writers' Union, the main East German writers' organization, in the early 1960's, and his plays were banned.
But in the 1980's, the East German Government, reportedly motivated by a desire to capitalize on his international prestige, began treating him better. He was awarded the country's National Prize in 1986.
Even his admirers say that his plays are complicated, extremely idiosyncratic and frequently difficult for theatergoers to understand. As the Suddeutsche Zeitung put it, "He made things difficult for his readers and his audiences not because he eccentrically wanted to prove to everyone how learned he was, but rather because he sought a participating partner, thinking and feeling along with him -- the recipient as fellow-producer."
Müller's playwriting has been called surrealistic or Dadaesque in its esthetics and confrontational in its politics.
In a New York Times review of "The Hamlet Machine," staged by Robert Wilson in 1986 at New York University, Mel Gussow wrote: "The plays by Heiner Müller are as dense as they are brief -- shell fragments fired into our collective psyche." He described the play as "a small still life with silent scream, until the climax, when that scream becomes an ear-piercing reality."
In "The Hamlet Machine" and other works, Müller deals with subjects like terrorism in its many guises, including genocide and assassination. His admirers have credited him with exercising a moral force.
After East and West Germany were reunited in 1990, Heiner Müller worked chiefly as a director. His autobiography, "War Without Battle: Life Under Two Dictatorships," was published in 1992. In the last months of his life, he tried to forestall plans by another noted German dramatist, Rolf Hochhuth, to gain control of the Berliner Ensemble theater company, of which Heiner Müller had become the artistic leader.
The audiobook "Einen Dichter denken - LAUT" is a hommage for the great Heiner Müller. He died Dec. 30, 1995.
Tracklist
| 1 | Prometheus I | 3:02 |
| 2 | Landschaft mit Argonauten | 10:10 |
| 3 | Der Mann im Fahrstuhl | 12:32 |
| 4 | Hamletdarsteller | 8:41 |
| 5 | Herakler 2 oder die Hydra | 9:05 |
| 6 | Debuisson, Sasportas, Gallouedec - „Die Revolution hat keine Heimat mehr ...“ | 15:59 |
| 7 | Prometheus II | 1:09 |
Ulrich Mühe - Heiner Müller - Einen Dichter denken - LAUT
(256 kbps, cover art included)
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