Contextualising Die Hamletmaschine

1
Contextualising Die Hamletmaschine

• Or how do I approach a literary text?

2
When is a play set?
3
Context 1 Theatre in the GDR

• Dominant paradigm of literary production in the
  GDR
• 1970s/80s Zivilisationskritik
• What kind of state was the GDR, whose inheritance
  was it supposedly putting into practice?
  (SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THIS AGE OF HOPE)
• The importance of the theatre as an institution
  in the GDR return to Brechts response in 1955
  to Dürrenmatt
• Müller as Brechts successor. Brecht gebrauchen,
  ohne ihn zu kritisieren, ist Verrat

4
Context 2 Theory

• Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author
• Michel Foucault, what does it matter who is
  speaking.
• Jean Baudrillard And so art is everywhere,
  since artifice is at the very heart of reality.
  And so art is dead, not only because its critical
  transcendence is gone, but because reality
  itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic
  which is inseparable from its own structure, has
  been confused with its own image
• Context 3 Gender
• Context 4 Reason and the intellectual
• Context 5 GDR / post-war history (1918, 1956,
  1976)
• http//www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/manifest.html

5
What is Müller saying?

• To a GDR audience
• To a wider audience

6
History

• What determines action economics or psychology?
• Who makes history? Intellectuals? Men?
• If rational statements about the world are not
  possible, then how to communicate?

7
Scene 4 1918?

• Scheidemann and Liebknecht

8
Müller and the end of drama

• The end of a tradition of revolutionary drama /
  drama as revolution / utopian impulse? Mein
  Drama findet nicht mehr statt
• The pedadogical impulse of German drama (since
  the age of the Enlightenment)
• The rejection of mere entertainment
• Making the spectator productive