Abstract

Violence seems to be the central preoccupation in the work of Heiner Müller: from the early plays on the painful birth of a new socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), built on the ruins of one and overshadowed by the rise of another totalitarian system, to the political parables and allegories borrowed from Greek and Shakespearean tragedy; from his adaptations of some of the bloodiest episodes of the French, Russian, and German revolutions to the late dramatic experiments bent on shattering the theatrical form itself. The concern with violence is indeed so pervasive as to appear obsessive. Violence is...