Writing into the Void:

Heiner Mllers Mommsens Block

as a State of Exception
Thomas Freeland
Heiner Mller once remarked that he wrote to get rid of ideas. Rather than
rewrite, he preferred to embark on a new project.
1
This attitude challenges
any ideal of craftsmanship that one might conventionally ascribe to writing
especially writing for the theater, where (in English, anyway) Mller has been
identifed as a playwright, a usage that reinforces antique notions of handi-
craft. Plays are things to be made. How, then, does this model hold up? Was
Mller a poor craftsman for wanting always to move on, rather than to stay and
lovingly polish every surface of a piece? Mller observed that if he were to
dwell too long on a given writing project, he would run the risk of lingering to
interpret his work, when he felt it much more important to keep moving and to
change, to reinvent himself in each new text.
2
Inasmuch as Mller was (however cussedly) a Marxist playwright,
widely hailed (or decried) as the heir to Bertolt Brecht, the vicissitudes of
New German Critique 119, Vol. 40, No. 2, Summer 2013
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2077753 2013 by New German Critique, Inc.
167
1. Heiner Mller, Germania, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schtze (New York: Semiotext[e],
1990), 5556.
2. Heiner Mller, Ich mu mich verndern, statt mich zu interpretieren (I Must Change
Myself, instead of Interpreting Myself), in Gesammelte Irrtmer 2: Interviews und Gesprche
(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1990), 22. The choice of phrase also, of course, allows
him to riff on Marxs Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.
168 Writing into the Void
Marxism per se demanded analysis. What could it mean to be a writer who
bore at least the highly problematic label of a specifc political commitment, in
a changed world where that very label, and the commitment it bespoke, had
become anachronistic? Did Mllers pronounced ambivalence secure him any
breathing space, or did his very reluctance to plant himself with both feet in a
particular position leave him entirely ungrounded?
But such uncertainty seems to have been what he wanted: ideas, he told
an interviewer, were material.
3
This word should not pass our notice. We
should not allow mere to slip in presumptively ahead of material as we read.
Let material read frst as a descriptor (in a legal sense): the material as the
germane, the directly relevant and possibly probative. And of course the word
cannot be invoked without at least some revenant echo of the suffx it once
carried with it, that would make of it a philosophy, a movement, a Weltan-
schauung: materialista familiar euphemism for Marxist. Perhaps it was a
better word for Mller to use, living in a professedly Marxist nation-state, the
German Democratic Republic (GDR). Materialist may have been a way to
talk about Marx that did not bear such a heavy taint of offcial approval. In
the remarks to follow I retrace these issues, rereading Mommsens Block and
some of the texts I had earlier consulted when I translated and directed the
frst staging of Mllers text in 1994. Some of these writings (Walter Benja-
min, principally) I also excerpted for the production itself. I read these texts
now in light of more recent scholarship (Giorgio Agamben, for example) and
in light of intervening events. One returns to a text as one reenters the river of
Heracleitus: it is never the same again. Or perhaps the legendary drummer
Shelly Mannes defnition of jazz comes closer to the mark: Never the same
way once.
4
In seven terse pages of unrhymed verse,
5
Mommsens Block presents this
conundrum in a theatrically compelling metaphor: what happens when a his-
torian gets writers block? Such an obstruction to the fow of creativity is, of
course, a condition more commonly associated with writers of fctiona lapse
of imagination. Surely a historian could not suffer from such a failure, inas-
much as he or she need notindeed, ought notinvent anything. The histo-
rian has only to record, to observe, and perhaps to interpret or explain, but at
its base the work has to do with the arrangement of fact, not the spinning out
3. Heiner Mller, Am Anfang War . . . , in Gesammelte Irrtmer 2, 41.
4. See the liner notes to Bill Bruford, If Summer Had Its Ghosts, CD, Discipline Global Mobile
9705, 1997.
5. Originally published as the frst in the Drucksache series Mller inaugurated when he ascended
to the leadership of the Berliner Ensemble, and included in the frst volume of Mllers Werke.
Thomas Freeland 169
of tales. Mller mulls over various explanations for the gap in Mommsens
output, comparing the great classical historians situation with his own: writing
at the end of an era, contemplating the fall of something much like an empire
the Soviet Union and its bloc of allied/subject states.
In this sense Mommsen serves as a mask for Mller himself, who wrote
only one major play in the six years between the fall of the wall and his death.
A 1994 newspaper article drew out the implications of Mllers masquerade,
echoing Platos distrust of mimesis (notably in book 3 of the Republic). Ml-
ler used this very fgure to discuss his interest in Mommsen as a subject:
writing about myself in the mask of Mommsen.
6
The question Mller asks
about Mommsen his readers may ask about Mller himself: what does this
silence mean?
Mllers Mommsen emerges from a contested source, one that has
passed through other hands before reaching the reading public, like a samizdat
text passed from reader to reader in the old Soviet Union. Mller had read the
volume of Mommsen lectures transcribed by Sebastian Hensel and his son
Paul at Berlin University in 1882 and 1883.
7
The notebooks containing these
transcriptions were discovered in a Nuremberg antiquarian bookshop in 1980
by Alexander Demandt, who edited them for publication. Demandts introduc-
tion reads like a frst draft of Mommsens Block: there on the page lies one
citation after another that Mller absorbed into his text, from James Bryces
recollection of Mommsens growing contempt toward the pettiness of his
source material, which Mller used as an epigraph to his text (What authori-
ties are there beyond court tittle-tattle?), to Friedrich Nietzsches letter to Peter
Gast, recounting the news of the fre at Mommsens Berlin home, in which a
manuscript of the legendary fourth volume may have been destroyed. So dense
with such citation is this introduction, in fact, that one can easily imagine that
Mller read no fartherexcept perhaps to peruse the Akademie-Fragment, a
twelve-page expos of materials to be explored in the projected fourth volume
(which Demandt reproduces as a kind of preface to the volume of lecture tran-
scriptions). This text was rescued from the frethough as Mller notes in
Mommsens Block, it did not escape the fames altogether: its edges were
singed and some words and phrases were rendered illegible (Demandt includes
a color plate showing a page of this text).
6. Helmut Bttiger, Die Maske wchst in das Gesicht: Die schwarze Brille von Heiner Mller
(The Mask Grows into the Face: The Black Glasses of Heiner Mller), Frankfurter Rundschau,
July 16, 1994. All quotations from this and other German-language texts, unless otherwise noted,
are my translations.
7. Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Heiner Mller, oder Das Prinzip Zweifel (Berlin: Aufbau, 2001), 499.
170 Writing into the Void
What need had Mller to read any farther? Mommsens Block as a text
does not actually explore another text, or any specific historical event; it
explores an event that did not happena text that was not written. Mller
places himself in the scene, one frustrated writer speaking to another, leafng
through the notes taken down from your lectures: not the notes from which
the lectures were given but a listeners attempt to capture the lecture as an
event. This Mommsen-Hensel-Demandt-Mller complex affords us a glimpse
of the elusive, ephemeral nature of the historical phenomenon itself: What,
really, happened? What did it really mean? What concrete effects remain?
How is it possible to claim knowledge of history? What happens to those
events the historian cannotor will notaddress?
In making Mommsens missing fourth volume a blank but pregnant
palimpsest for his own diminishing literary production, Mller reproblema-
tizes his status as Mller-Deutschland, the wall-straddling spokesman of
the divided nations historical conscience:
Knowing the unwritten text is a wound
Out of which blood seeps that no posthumous fame stops
And the gaping hole in your history-work
Was an ache in my how much longer breathing body
8
As it turned out, his body would breathe for just three more years after this
piece was composed. In the kind of heavy-handed irony that only real life
can provide, just as the two Germanies were being sutured together, Mllers
voice was surgically removed (his esophagus and vocal cords excised in an
attempt to halt the spread of his laryngeal cancer).
Mller occupied a highly specialized ideological niche, which he
described with the fgure of straddling the Berlin Wall.
9
Having a connection
to both Germanies also meant he was truly at home in neither. He could have
settled in the West any time he liked, at least after the late 1970s or so; he
chose to remain in the East and to visit the West frequently. His growing popu-
larity in the West contributed to the striking increase in his prestige in the
East; his refusal to abandon the East lent his work an undeniable cachet in the
West. As long as the wall stood, he traded on this balancing act, playing each
side against the other to further his career. But after the wall came down, and
the new normal took hold in the new Germany, the Stasi (Staatssicherheit,
8. Heiner Mller, Mommsens Block, in Drucksache 1 (Berlin: Berliner Ensemble, 1993).
9. Mller, Germania, 3233.
Thomas Freeland 171
State Security) fles were opened and Mller was found to be listed as an Inof-
fzielle Mitarbeiter (unoffcial collaboratori.e., an informer), even though no
further documentation was ever discovered to substantiate claims of his having
denounced or reported on anyone.
As he wrote in his autobiography, Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei
Diktaturen (War without Battle: Life in Two Dictatorships), Mller main-
tained a fraught relationship with the functionaries who ruled the Workers
and Farmers State. He went through periods of being very much persona non
grata, with specifc works banned from public performance. Most notable
among these was his 1961 play Die Umsiedlerin, oder das Leben auf dem
Lande (The Resettled Woman; or, Life in the Country), a comedy about the
resettlement of ethnically German refugees after their expulsion from areas no
longer included in the territory of either Germany at the end of World War II.
Not only was the play banned, but Mller was expelled from the Writers
Association, and he struggled for a few years to make a living by writing mur-
der mysteries for radio. What is especially striking about this episode is his
detachment: he explicitly distinguishes himself from a fgure like Vclav
Havel, who ran into comparable diffculties with a Communist government
and spent time in prison for his beliefs. Mller was never a dissident in that
sense; he may have offended the sensibility of party offcials, but he never
offered them direct political defance. He remained in basic agreement with
the (at least professed) socialist principles of the East German state. As he
relates these diffculties (Die Umsiedlerin was by no means the only play of his
to run into trouble), the party apparatchiks come off as much more obtuse than
sinister. He avoided more serious consequences of his ideological lapse by
drafting (under the supervision of Brechts widow, the legendary actress
Helene Weigel, then artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble) and delivering
a speech of classic Communistic self-criticismprecisely the sort of orga-
nized hypocrisy Havel shunned. For Mller, it was simply a performance, nec-
essary for preserving any hope of survival as an artist. He took comfort that
Sergei Eisenstein had had to do the same more than once; in the end Mller
shrugs off any moral consideration attaching to the whole pantomime: To me,
writing was more important than my morals.
10
A poet, however, occupies a special place as the keeper of some kind of
fameand people wanted to know who had been paying Mllers gas bill. A
special trust is placed in some poetswhether or not they ask for it. If people
10. Heiner Mller, Krieg ohne Schlacht: Leben in zwei Diktaturen, in Werke, ed. Frank Hrnigk,
12 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 19982008), 9:180.
172 Writing into the Void
feel that trust has been taken lightly or forsaken, they may punish the poet
with what Mller may have dreaded most: entombment in the canon. This is
the fate Mller alludes to in the closing lines of Mommsens Block, acknowl-
edging the destiny he held in common with the great historian of Rome: to
be placed on a pedestal in some vast, unvisited vault. But whereas Mommsen
was being disinterred and returned to his plinth in front of Humboldt Univer-
sity, Mller was headed the other way, into the vault, under the ground.
How much dust has settled by now on Mller? Does he get any visitors
down in that vault? In The Messingkauf Dialogues Brecht argued that what
really matters is to play these old works [such as Shakespeares] historically,
which means setting them in powerful contrast to our own time. For it is only
against the background of our own time that their shape emerges as an old
shape, and without this background I doubt if they could have any shape at
all.
11
Mller, clearly, is not nearly so far removed from us as Shakespeare
but precisely because of this historical distance Shakespeares immediacy can
strike us all the more powerfully. Would an early twenty-frst century epigone
of Jan Kott write of Mller, our contemporary? Has he been gone long
enough to become current once more? It has been eighteen years since he
died, and already the postCold War international realignment has realigned
itself again. Looking back now, we can see the two snickering businessmen at
the end of Mommsens Block as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, gossiping about
Boris Yeltsin:
This four million
Must get to us immediately
But that Wont cut it
But it wont be noticed at all
If you havent learned how its played
Are you lost You saw that with X
He hasnt mastered it
Youll have to pound that into him or else hes out to sea Too bad
11. Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1965), 64.
Thomas Freeland 173
So Im afraid
That theyre going to nail him to the wall Like a jellyfsh
Then hell hang there and wriggle and wriggle
I fgured him for a good buyer in the early rounds
But when it gets down to the bone . . .
Then he has to put it in other hands
But then the question is Are our hands so good
That they can turn the spit
Mllers reaction to this overheard conversation is undisguised contempt:
Animal noises
Whod want to write that down
With passion Hate doesnt pay Contempt is running empty.
But then even contempt is hard to gin up. At a slightly earlier point Ml-
ler asks Mommsens pardon for the bitter tone of these refections. Mom-
msens Block reads like a text trying for the elegiac but continually running up
against the downmarket. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the absorption of
the East by West Germany, elegy appeared to be all that remained to Mller.
He lived in the East but was defned just as much by the pull of the West: it was
the very division of Germany that energized his writing. Though not conven-
tionally a dissident in the mold of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Havel, Mller
needed the opposition (or more precisely: the persistent threat of opposition) of
the state to push against. He once spoke of the last piece he wrote during the
GDR era, Volokolamsk Highway, of the bet he made with a reader at the pub-
lishing house to which he had submitted the text: he wagered two bottles of
scotch that the authorities would not approve the play. After his earlier experi-
ences with offcial disapproval (such as with Die Umsiedlerin), he felt sure that
this new script would incur the bureaucracys wrath. It was the reader, however,
who won: the government ignored the new text. This, Mller says, was around
the end of 1987, and then I knew it: it was at its end. When they can no longer
forbid, its over.
12
Mller sensed that the new circumstances might also mean
the end of his dramaturgy, the advent of his own block, for which Mommsen
12. Mller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 350.
174 Writing into the Void
was a convenient mask: How anyone could still be writing, I dont know.
Theres no more dramatic material, no historical confrontations, conficts,
collisions.
13
An interviewer once mentioned to Mller that a trip to East Berlin was a
trip in a time machine. Mller took the interviewers point but then held him-
self somewhat aloof from its ideological ramifcations. People in the East knew
that they were living in a different time-space, but they held out hope of a new
era, beyond the failure of consumer society. This situation might be seen as a
form of schizophrenia, but Mller expressed a desire to be a self-made schiz-
oid man: Maybe Im schizophrenic too, but I wouldnt like to live in another
age with an image of what I take to be a new age. Maybe this new age will
never materialize, but it exists as Utopia.
14
As this hope is let go, what remains
is the elegiac. Like Prospero drowning his book, Mller turned inward, pon-
dering not this or that specifc event or crisis in German history, but instead
fxing his gaze precisely on the pondering itself. What occupied him was not
writing about history, but the writing of history.
A glance at a globe, however, reminds us that these linear chartings of
political face-off are, sensu stricto, tangential. The world is roundspherical,
in fact: tensions form along arcs, and new ideas travel around more than across
spaces. Benjamin, the semimystic Marxist philosopher with whose work Ml-
ler long felt his own had a particular affnity (even to the point of appropriating
the image of Benjamins famed Angel of History as his own Luckless Angel),
15

wrote of the ongoing catastrophe of progress (for Benjamin always a loaded
term): That things just keep on going is the catastrophe.
16
Instituting emer-
gency as the normal state of affairs creates all but limitless opportunities
for the powerful to carve out one exception after another while maintaining
their professed reverence for regularity and due process. For Mller, Antonin
Artaud most clearly embodied emergency as a mode of life: The emergency
is Artaud. He tore literature away from the police, theatre away from medi-
cine. Under the sun of torture, which shines equally on all the continents of
13. Quoted in Hauschild, Heiner Mller, 500.
14. Ich glaube an Konfikt. Sonst glaube ich an nichts. Heiner Mller, interviewed by Sylvre
Lotringer, in Gesammelte Irrtmer: Interviews und Gesprche (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der
Autoren, 1986), 70.
15. See Heiner Mller, Der glcklose Engel, in Werke, 1:53; see also Walter Benjamin, The-
ses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York: Schocken, 1969), 259.
16. Walter Benjamin, Convolute N: Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, trans.
Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 64.
Thomas Freeland 175
this planet, his texts blossom. Read on the ruins of Europe, they will be clas-
sics.
17
Benjamin himself formulated it explicitly in his eighth thesis on the
philosophy of history: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state
of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must
attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. Then we will
clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this
will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.
18
So now, instead of drafting metanarratives neatly demarcating the his-
torical norm from its exceptions, we are left with a very different picture: the
exception is the normwhich may allow us to speculate that the normal may
be some kind of exception. As Agamben observes in his readings of Benjamin
and the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, what proves decisive in this context is
precisely the principle to which George W. Bush staked his claim: who
decides? This power was for Schmitt the essence of Staatsrechtone might
call it the raison dtre of raison dtat. It is what the state iswhat it does.
Mller brought these questions of power and its exercise to center stage in his
1990 production Hamlet/Machine at the Berliner Ensemble, which combined
his translation of Shakespeare with his own deconstruction of the text. As he
explained it, the appearance of Fortinbras and the disposition of Hamlets body
at the end of the play were greatly infuenced by an enigmatic fragment of
writing by Schmitt: Ophelia (who identifes herself in Hamletmachine as the
one the river didnt keep) returns to accompany Hamlets body offstage, when
the dead Dane is transformed into the Norwegian prince. The Schmitt frag-
ment simply stated that Kafka is Fortinbras. Mller seized on the implica-
tions of metamorphosis in this identifcation to bring into play another of
Schmitts observations: that true drama enters into a play where the pressure of
the (historical) time makes itself felt: When the hesitant Hamlet transforms
himself in the end into Fortinbras, then a mythic unity of drama and history is
brought about.
19
The Cold War was Mllers context but never really his subtext; it had
more to do with the conditions under which his works were performed and
read than those under which they were written. There were certain practical
aspects of his situation in the East we might take into account: in the absence
of a massive entertainment state apparatus (such as would be found in the
17. Heiner Mller, Artaud the Language of Cruelty, in Germania, 175.
18. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 259.
19. Wozu? Gesprch mit Heiner Mller, in Werke, 12:457. See Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The
Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos, 2009).
176 Writing into the Void
West), there was simply more of an audienceand a comparatively generous
public subventionfor theater in the GDR. Mller also liked to argue that,
owing to the states clumsy and oppressive efforts to control information,
audiences in the GDR were more discerning than those in the West; people
in the East knew that they were being lied to regularly and had grown adept
at reading between lines in both offcial communications (such as newspa-
pers) and in other situations (such as the theater).
20
They would not settle for
being merely entertained. The densely allusive and formally challenging
works Mller began to produce in the later 1970s (Hamletmachine was frst
published in 1977 and frst performed in 1979, in France) were acclaimed in
the West as prototypically postmodern, but to his audiences in the East they
merely represented a further refnement of this highly coded aesthetic. When
the wall came down, it was not so much that he lost his audience; his audi-
ence lost its edge.
With free passage restored between East and West, Mommsen hit his
block. Precisely this new freedom and ease proved to be the obstruction that
called forth the image of the stymied historian. Speculation about what caused
Mommsen to leave his history of Rome incomplete was an occasion to ponder
the next metanarrative frame: after the Cold Warwhat? Francis Fukuyama
stuck his neck out to venture an answer: after the Cold Warnothing. The End
of History. The Cold War itself appeared to be an extended emergency, in
which we were brought up to expect not something weird and abstract like the
End of History but a vividly imagined End of the World. In fre and fallout
duck and cover all you please.
History per se was Mllers preferred theme (in Roland Barthess sense
of theme as an organized network of obsessions);
21
it was for Mller the best
source of ideas, of material (as discussed above). But history was not simply
stuff to write about, as fungible subject matter; it was an especially resistant
material, and fabulously costly. Just as Michelangelo or Benvenuto Cellini fret-
ted about the terrible expense of the fnest marble or gold and gemstones for
their work, so Mller continually challenged himself with the moral extrava-
gance of his chosen material. He spoke more than once of looking history in
the eyein the white of its eye, to render the German idiom more exactly
and his challenge consisted in not finching or falsifying what he witnessed.
He wrote to hold faith with the integrity of his dramatic vision, both on the
level of the frequently impossible demands he casually scripted into his stage
20. Mller, Germania, 53.
21. Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 3.
Thomas Freeland 177
directionsThe dance grows faster and wilder. Laughter from the coffn. On
a swing, the Madonna with breast cancer. Horatio opens an umbrella,
embraces Hamlet. They freeze under the umbrella, embracing. The breast
cancer radiates like a sun.
22
and on the level of the moral hazard he under-
took as interrogator of the dead.
History was not mere stuff; it was both an occasion and a mode of
inquiry. If for Mller it was a mode that enjoyed some special privilege, it
enjoyed its privilege only at the expense of constant anxietylike a miser who
cannot stop opening his safe to count his money, never quite believing that it is
still there. History remained subject to unceasing interrogation; indeed, inter-
rogation was precisely the point of the recourse to history in Mllers writing.
To use Brecht without criticizing him is betrayal, Mller once wrote.
23
He
could as easily have written history instead of Brechtif indeed there was
much to distinguish the two. The fgure of Brecht (another thread in the obses-
sive network) looms behind and above Mller as a stylistic personifcation of
history, as more material, but again, usable only at the cost of relentless cri-
tique. Such unfinching critique informs the permanent emergency of history
as it now is lived: an experience of encompassing breadth but no discernible
depth. This sense of emergency underwrites the historical collisions staged in
Mllers theater: the condition of emergency is necessarily one of importunate
presentness. A siren wails to announce something right now; the ambulance is
herenot yesterday, not tomorrow, but now. Emergency fattens temporal-
ity; this enables Mller to bring together Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Pink
Floyd (in Gundlings Life), or to overlay Ophelia with the Charles Manson fol-
lower Susan Atkins (at the end of Hamletmachine). This is not, as it may at
frst glance appear, yet another example of historical hyperlinkage, the famil-
iar postmodern pastiche of guest stars drawn from various periodized green
rooms; it is a strategically attenuated historicity.
Emergency dispenses with rules, with the bare possibility of or justifca-
tion for rules. Here again we see the rejection of temporality implied by the
state of emergency, of exception: rules refer to a temporal structuration, estab-
lishing standards and striving for some sort of constancy. Rules attempt to
conform what is being done, what will be done, to what has been done, if only
by hypostasizing an ideal, model past. An implicit historicity lends a set of
rules its shape and purposefulness. Rules anchor the behavior they govern in
22. Heiner Mller, Hamletmachine, in Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, trans.
Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 55.
23. Mller, Germania, 133.
178 Writing into the Void
an embedding, supervening order of memory or of expectation. Memory, in
this sense, serves as the mirror of expectation: as it was, so it shall be. Where
there is no memory, there can be no rules; there is only amnesiac contingency,
in every case starting afresh.
History, Mller suggests, then risks becoming mere/more stuff,
reading-matter for poets
To whom history is a burden
Unbearable without the dance of vowels
Upon the graves against the gravity of the dead.
What later generations theorized as the playful jumble of the postmodern,
Mllers Mommsen anticipates as the want of affect in forgetful heirs:
For whom else do we write
But for the dead all-knowing in the dust A thought
That perhaps doesnt gratify you the teacher of youth
Forgetting is a privilege of the dead
After all you yourself forbade in your will
Publication of your lectures
Because carelessness at the lectern practices betrayal
Of the toils at the writing-desk
The image of the sun of torture that Mller invoked in reference to Artaud
appears again in Hamletmachine, this time as words in Ophelias mouth:
This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture.
To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims.
24
In the state of emer-
gency, in the absence of rules, torture is once again on the menu. This sun,
which shines equally on all the continents of this planet, creates shadows as
well, pools of darkness in which power does its secret workthe black sites
to which terror suspects are brought by an extralegal procedure called extraor-
dinary rendition. Let us take a moment to catalog all the exes so far amassed:
exception, extralegal, extraordinary, extravagancethe state of emergency
appears to consist only of an outside. Reversing Jacques Derridas argument
about the expansive scope of the textual (il ny a pas de hors-texte), might we
not say in this instance il ny a pas dedans-texte? By establishing a domain
entirely determined by this negativity, a lawfulness-without-law takes shape, a
24. Mller, Hamletmachine, 58.
Thomas Freeland 179
pure form of legality scrupulously devoid of content. We have no time for con-
tent: this is an emergency.
Though the words are often used interchangeably, the state of emergency
is not a crisis: a crisis marks a moment of decision, a turning point (stemming
from the Greek krino, to decide). The state of exception makes possible a
deferral of decision while enabling a sweeping expansiveness of deciding.
This, then, is the state of exception, the state of being put aside from,
pulled out of the ordinary stream of time. As Mller observed in reference to
the last major work he wrote while the GDR still existed, Volokolamsk High-
way, I was interested in the displacement from power of the Soviet order by a
situation of exception, sovereign in Carl Schmitts sense, in the novel by Bek
an anti-Stalinist intervention.
25
This state can also be seen as the ahistoricity
that stopped the historian Mommsen in his tracks, at his desk. But this is also
the distant promise of crisis that arguably makes Mller concerning, as the
newest term in security-speak phrases it. For another reading of the state of
exception frames it in messianic terms, seeing it as simply the measure of the
time remaining until the messianic cessation of happening Benjamin saw as
the ontotheological aspect of a revolutionary rupture of conventional historic-
ity. As Agamben reads Benjamin and the apostle Paul (turning one eye, as it
were, on each text), messianic time is the time that time takes to come to an
end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our
representation of time.
26
It characterizes an experience of time that consists of
perpetual deferral (an idea Agamben fnds in the writings of Benjamins friend
Gershom Scholem, the noted scholar of the kabbalah).
27
The absent referent of this deferral in Mommsens Block is the unwrit-
ten fourth volume, the book whose coming-into-being was obstructed by the
Block. The text presents this absence as itself a historical problem, some-
thing to occupy later historians:
Good reasons have been on offer
Handed down in letters rumors speculations
The lack of inscriptions He who writes with a chisel
Has no handwriting The stones dont lie
No reliance on literature I NTRI GUES AND
COURT GOSSI P
25. Mller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 273.
26. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 67.
27. Ibid., 69.
180 Writing into the Void
Two things immediately draw the readers attention: the pointed absence of
punctuation and the resort to capital letters. These features mark many other
Mller texts, and in these different settings have similar purposes. The upper-
case passages often denote quotations from other sources, and often appear in
other languages than German (most often in English). They also sometimes
indicate a shift in register (much as capital letters do in the texts of the British
dramatist Howard Barker): the actor is not necessarily expected to shout these
lines, but he or she must at least fnd some way to give them a changed or
heightened intensity.
The absence of punctuation presents more complex problems. Punctua-
tion generally keeps statements from blurring all together; it holds things in
their places and sometimes makes relationships among things clear.
28
Time, as
the cutesy folk wisdom has it, is Gods way of ensuring that everything does
not happen at once. This principle materializes in the text as punctuation. The
comma, the colon and semicolon, the full stop: these are Gods little marks,
establishing order and maintaining proper separation among what must be
kept separate. It is the faint lexical residue of the proscriptions in Leviticus,
which admonish us to be vigilant about what is clean and what is unclean, and
to put the unclean aside, to repurify it, to shun what cannot be purifed, and so
on. Law and tradition manifest themselves as the power to make and enforce
such distinctions. Proper usage (of, for example, punctuation) bespeaks a sub-
mission to such law, an internalization of its imperatives. Grammatical
thoughts are orderly thoughts.
Mller, however, steps around this law, writing without punctuation but
dropping in the occasional capitalization, to indicate a new thought setting off
without the old one being brought defnitively to a close. This lends Mom-
msens Block a textual form that refects the historians enterprise: constantly
starting anew without ever defnitively closing off the old. The historian fnds
himself at a series of beginnings, but endings are never at hand. In this sense
we confront the never the same way once nature of historiography: Mller is
always starting over; there is no smooth run-through of the text. The text is
restless, interrupting itself, enclosing within itself a multitude of voices, all
enmeshed in a jostle of crosstalk. In my stage production I found a physical
way to bring this structure forward, by dividing the lines among the perform-
ers, combining and recombining voices in an elaborate interwoven orchestra-
tion that (I hope) captured something of how thoughts can chase each other
28. In this connection, note the example provided in the title of Lynne Trusss book Eats, Shoots
and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (New York: Gotham, 2004), where the
inclusion of that comma transforms the peaceful panda into some sort of Clint Eastwood character.
Thomas Freeland 181
around in the confnes of a single mind. The customarily dialogic movement of
a playscript thus surfaces in the only apparently univocal structure of Mom-
msens verse narrative.
29
Punctuation also carries a certain vestigial historicity, as Adorno noted in
his brief essay on punctuation: History has left its residue in punctuation marks,
and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out
at us, rigidifed and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.
30
The question of punctuation, moreover, echoes the Mosaic proscriptions
by allowing, in its absence, a promiscuous admixture of high and low, ludic
and tragic, sublime and grotesque. This technique of abrupt and sometimes
shocking juxtaposition is familiar from many other Mller texts (remember
Ophelia and the Manson girls in Hamletmachine), but in the compressed space
of Mommsens Block it works to even more striking effect:
The pedestal is once more your station
In front of the university named after Humboldt
By the rulers of an illusion
(They didnt read your Roman history
Nor did Marx who concealed the lesson
Had he lived longer one could have said
It was out of envy perhaps for your Nobel prize the Jew)
Caught in the knitting-pattern of the red Caesars
Who scanned HI S text with combat boots
How do you clear a minefeld asked Eisenhower
Victor in the second world war of another
Victor With the boots
Of a marching battalion answered Zhukov
We move in the space of a few lines from the bust of Mommsen, restored to its
accustomed place before the massive buildings of Humboldt University on
Berlins grand boulevard, Unter den Linden, to unworthy speculations about
Marx, the Moses of state socialism, to some historically authenticated gallows
humor between two victorious generals in historys bloodiest war.
31
Over all
29. Mller explicitly points to similar staging possibilities in supplemental notes to both
Mauser and Volokolamsk Highway.
30. Theodor W. Adorno, Punctuation Marks, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Antioch
Review 48, no. 3 (1990): 301.
31. See Otto Preston Chaney, Zhukov (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 350. The
high command of the Red Army apparently determined that casualties from an actual mine-clear-
ing operation would be about as high as those incurred by simply marching men through the mines,
and because mine clearing is so much more time-consuming, the more direct method was pre-
ferred. Much more care was taken, however, to clear antivehicle mines.
182 Writing into the Void
these reflections there hovers a metareflection, the brooding figure of
Nachtrglichkeit. This is one of those untranslatable words that only point up
the fnal incommensurability of languages. The dictionaries render it variously
as belatedness, as invoking both the retrospective and the retroactive; in dis-
cussions of Freuds use of the term (which seems to fgure more prominently in
texts about Freud than in texts by Freud) it is often rendered as deferred
action. Fredric Jameson offers his own view of the term and its use: The
frst-time event is by defnition not a repetition of anything; it is then recon-
verted into repetition the second time round, by the peculiar action of what
Freud called retroactivity [Nachtrglichkeit]. But this means that, as with the
simulacrum, there is no frst time of repetition, no original of which suc-
ceeding repetitions are mere copies.
32
Repetition in this sense is the histori-
ans stock-in-trade: events are only, can only be, events, but when taken up by
the historian and recorded, interpreted, argued over, and placed in one or
another sort of framethus, repeatedthey can become not just stuff that
happens (as Donald Rumsfeld said of the looting in Baghdad that followed
the US invasion) but meaningful.
33
In the historians revisiting, events cannot
escape some degree of transformation, if only to the extent that they have
changed form; out of the necessary messiness of actual occurrence they
undergo the editorial neatening of narrative. Some events, it would appear,
resist this sort of capturethe depravity of the later Caesars, for example:
He didnt like the caesars of the latter period
Not their vices not their depravity
He had enough of the peerless Julius
Who was worth as much to him as his own gravestone
When he was asked about the outstanding
Fourth volume he had NO MORE PASSI ON
Even TO PORTRAY CAESARS DEATH
And THE PUTREF YI NG CENTURI ES after him
GRAY I N GRAY BLACK UPON BLACK For whom
The epitaph That the midwife Bismarck
Was as well the gravedigger of the empire
The afterbirth of a faked dispatch
Can be concluded from the third volume
A lassitude of the imagination has set in; the historian can no longer bring
himself to engage with the grubbier details of the period under study. But
32. Fredric Jameson, Reifcation and Utopia in Mass Culture, Social Text, no. 1 (1979): 137.
33. And what, after all, was this looting but the determined destruction of Iraqs past?
Thomas Freeland 183
34. This is a reference to the infamous Ems dispatch, a message sent by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prus-
sia to Bismarck in July 1870 to inform him of the French ambassadors offensively insistent demands
regarding a German plan to place a relative of the kaisers on the throne of Spain. Bismarck released the
dispatch (in somewhat edited and reportedly sharpened form) for publication, and the affair as a whole
greatly helped him whip up public support for war with France. The outcome of this war was the estab-
lishment of the Second Reich, with Wilhelm I of Prussia crowned emperor of Germany. See Rainer F.
Schmidt, Otto von Bismarck (18151898): Realpolitik und Revolution (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2004),
18485; see also Edward Crankshaw, Bismarck (New York: Viking, 1981), 26769.
35. Mller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 230.
even the noble Julius Caesar palled on Mommsen; it was the very elapsion of
the past that was the problem. Nachtrglichkeit had led to melancholia. Mor-
tality marks us at birthhence Bismarck is both midwife and gravedigger of
the empire, the Second Reich, founded on a falsifed message.
34
Not only the
historical record, then, is suspect; even to those directly involved, events
themselves are not necessarily what they seem to be. For the historian, they
cannot be taken as solid and fnal referents.
In all these meditations we cannot quite take hold of Mommsen as a
character; he is a subject (in several senses of the word), a fgure, perhaps a
portraitbut not really a protagonist, unless one were to counterpose history
itself, in its dense layering of connotation, as his antagonist. Mller argued
that in the context of the GDR there could be no protagonistsa sharp
departure from Brechtian dramaturgy:
[Brecht] never understood that the protagonist in the context of the GDR
had disappeared, that there were no protagonists in this other context. He
could not think a dramatics without protagonists. Even his concept of the
fable was ultimately bound to the presence of a protagonist. The plays are
all about protagonists, insofar as it was still, in the end, bourgeois drama-
turgy. I then instinctively wrote a play without protagonists.
35
Events themselves thwarted Mommsen: time, the unsavory habits of
emperors, the fnal inaccessibility of the past
THE COURAGE TO COMMI T ERROR
that QUALI F I ES A HI STORI AN I KNOW NOW
ALAS WHAT I DONT KNOW For instance Why
Does a world empire collapse The ruins dont answer
The silence of statues gilds the decline
all we understand are the institutions
All we understand . . .what we know of the past hinges on what the past
wants us to know, what it knew of itself. It is possible, of course, to get beyond
184 Writing into the Void
36. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 257.
37. Ibid., 258.
38. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin,
1973), 102.
this bottleneck, but nothing is given or guaranteed, as Benjamin knew: The
true picture of the past fits by. The past can be seized only as an image which
fashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . .
(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart
may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)
36
But as Mller observes of Mommsen, He who writes into the void needs
no punctuation. Was this encounter with the void one of defance or of sur-
render? Did he consign his words to the void out of acedia, the indolence of
the heart Benjamin mentions in his seventh thesis, which despairs of grasp-
ing and holding the genuine historical image as it fares up briefy?
37
The frst
book of Moses states that in the beginning the earth was without form and
void. There was no differentiation, no punctuation to set things apart one from
another; even once order was established and structure imposed, the void still
haunted these great works. Nothingness has patience, knowing that in the end
everything will return to it. The primal chaos is also the fnal oblivion. Mllers
Mommsen sees himself as a middleman, shoveling knowledge from one pile
to another. Nachtrglichkeit then becomes the exchange of glances with the
void about which Nietzsche cautions his reader in Beyond Good and Evil.
38

Mommsen could look over either shoulder to see it.