Hamletmachine

Abstract

Heiner Müller was born in eastern Germany in 1929. In 1945 he was drafted into the German army and after the end of the Second World War returned home to the part of Germany occupied by the USSR. He took up writing in the 1950s and began a checkered relationship with communist officials in the German Democratic Republic: he worked for the League of German Writers in 1954–1955; he wrote for Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre in 1957; he was expelled for political reasons from the writers’ league in 1961, so that his plays could not be performed until 1967; he was invited to join the prestigious Berliner Ensemble (founded by Brecht) in 1969; in the 1970s and 1980s he was given unprecedented freedom to travel to and return from Western Europe and North America, although many of his plays remained banned in East Germany. By this time he had become a world-renowned playwright, ‘a sort of socialist William Shakespeare’ (Hofacker: 335). After the fall of the East Bloc, Müller was forced to rethink his position in the world and the political role of his theatre (see Croyden, Höfele). He died on 30 December 1995.