“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 333

GALIN TIHANOV

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”:Hamlet from Berlin (East)

Hitherto unknown archival material allows a closer look at Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture andtragedy, and a fuller examination of Heiner Müller’s interest in, and debt to, him. The significance ofSchmitt’s theory of drama for Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine is analyzed against the comparativebackground of Russian literary Hamletism. Müller’s self-conscious intertextualism was a response to,and an extension of, Schmitt’s critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama, which is treated here asbut an element of his wider post-romantic cultural and social theory.

The title of this article contains a threefold reference. To start with, it plays onthe titles of a number of narrative works that were published in Russia over sometwenty years between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, notably Turgenev’s“Hamlet of the Shchigrov District” (1849) from Sketches from a Hunter’s Album

and Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865), whose title wasconsciously modeled on Turgenev’s.1 There were no doubt many more Shake-spearean characters in the nineteenth-century Russian thick journals, but thesewould suffice to evoke the general picture of translating the heroic passions ofmonarchic history onto the diminished scale of the everyday, so specific of theRussian appropriation of Hamlet at the time.

The second reference, equally easy to detect, is to Heiner Müller’s play Ham-

letmachine, to which a significant part of this essay is dedicated. The third refer-ence, perhaps no less transparent, is to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet book, which, aswould become clear before long, was a major inspiration for Heiner Müller andshould serve as a key to at least partially understanding the complex and multiplemeanings of Müller’s drama.

These three allusions mark the three parts of the present article. I start bybriefly surveying the scene of Russian literary Hamletism, only to the extentwhere important (dis)continuities with Müller’s drama could be established.

1 See Iu. Levin, “Shestidesiatye gody”, in Shekspir i russkaia kul’tura, ed. M. Alekseev, Moscow andLeningrad: Nauka, 1965, 469. Levin later argued that while Turgenev’s title was unmistakablyironical, Leskov’s was meant as an entirely serious reference to his heroine’s cruelty (Iu. Levin,Shekspir i russkaia literature XIX veka, Leningrad: Nauka, 1988, 155). Leskov was also one of thefew contemporaries to write approvingly of Turgenev’s 1860 speech “Hamlet and Don Quixote”(cf. I. Stoliarova, “‘Gamlet i Don Kikhot’: ob otklike N. S. Leskova na rech’ Turgeneva”, Turge-

nevskii sbornik, Leningrad: Nauka, 1967, Vol. 3, 120–23).

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Then I attempt a succinct interpretation of some central motifs of the almostimpenetrable, and certainly unnarratable, text of the Hamletmachine, and finallyI place Müller’s drama in the hermeneutic purview of Carl Schmitt’s post-romantic cultural theory and social thought. I scrutinize Schmitt’s key proposi-tions in the context of his failed project of overturning and leaving behindRomantic ideology. His arguments are examined at some length, often with ref-erence to other prominent German attempts to theorize drama and tragedy intheir sociological and aesthetic significance. In the concluding remarks, I ana-lyse Heiner Müller’s self-conscious intertextualism as a response to, and anextension of, Schmitt’s critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama. Myultimate goal is to add to existing knowledge in a three-fold manner: by extend-ing our notion of Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture and tragedy 2, not leastthrough drawing on previously unknown archival evidence; by adumbrating afuller picture of Heiner Müller’s interest in, and debt to, Schmitt 3; and by posingthe question of the ways in which drama makes sense of myth and negotiatesbetween historical reality and artistic invention, between necessity and contin-gency.

Russian Hamletism deserves attention as what I would call, following HansBlumenberg’s suggestion, a secondary cultural myth. Empirically, it has beenthoroughly studied both in the West and in Russia.4 But not comparatively.Heiner Müller’s range of reference and his own familiarity with Russian andSoviet literature lie beyond any doubt. Suffice it to point to his autobiography,War without Battle (“Krieg ohne Schlacht”), which contains a long list of Russian

2 Carl Schmitt as a theorist of tragedy remains an inchoate field of inquiry. For two substantialexceptions, see Christoph Menke, “Tragödie und Spiel”, Akzente, 1996, Vol. 43, No. 3, 210–25and Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision”, Representations, 2003, No. 83,67–96.

3 There have been so far almost no sustained attempts to spell out the significance of Carl Schmittfor Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine. Among the few exceptions, see Alexander Weigel’s briefbut insightful essay, “Hamlet oder der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel” (1991), in M. Linzer andP. Ullrich, Regie: Heiner Müller, Berlin: Zentrum für Theaterdokumentation und -information,1993, 74–7. Michael Ostheimer has drawn on Menke (cf. note 2 above) in his own statementon Schmitt, Heiner Müller and tragedy in “Mythologische Genauigkeit”. Heiner Müllers Poetik und

Geschichtsphilosophie der Tragödie, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, esp. 12–14 and161–6 (for an earlier version, see M. Ostheimer, “‘Götter werden dich nicht mehr besuchen’.Zum Europa-Mythos in Heiner Müllers Langgedicht ‘Ajax zum Beispiel’”, in Ian Wallace etal. (eds.), Heiner Müller : Probleme und Perspektiven. Bath-Symposium 1998, Amsterdam and Atlanta:Rodopi, 2000, 383–402).

4 In Russia, the best research in the field has been published by Iurii Levin; in addition to his workreferred to above, see also his “Russkii gamletizm”, in Ot romantizma k realizmu. Iz istorii mezhdu-

narodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. M. Alekseev, Leningrad: Nauka, 1978, 189–236. The moreimportant works in English are quoted in notes 6 and 10 below; in German, see A. Rothkoegel,Russischer Faust und Hamlet. Zur Subjektivismuskritik und Intertextualität bei I. S. Turgenev, Munich:Otto Sagner, 1998.

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 335

prose writers, whose work Müller drew into his own intellectual orbit.5 Russianprose of the nineteenth century, in particular that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turge-nev, Gogol and Chekhov, was available in the GDR in numerous state-sponsorededitions of high print-runs; in an ideologically monitored climate, it was meantto offer a package of unassailable humanistic values and high aesthetic standardsto complement the works of the German classics exemplified by Goethe andSchiller, who were the objects, at least until the 1980s, of a veritable cult nurturedand protected by the state.

There are two crucial points where a meaningful continuity between HeinerMüller’s and nineteenth-century Russian Hamlet interpretations, notably Turge-nev’s, is bound to emerge. The first is the time-honoured issue of the balance be-tween intellect and emotion, and the resulting (in)ability to act. In his famousspeech on Hamlet and Don Quixote of 1860, Turgenev had given a Romanticspin to this question. In his Berlin years, Turgenev was acquainted, after all, withBettina von Arnim, and through Stankevich he appropriated a Romantically-col-oured Hegel. Schelling’s philosophy, too, was of vital importance, asserting as itdid the identity of the unconscious mind of nature and the conscious life of theintellect, thus setting a high standard for a harmony between the two.6 It was therift between the two that worried Turgenev and plagued his Hamlet in the well-known speech of 1860. Hamlet, much to the displeasure of some of Turgenev’scritics, was now turned into a simplistic but powerful emblem of a person in dis-cord, whose inner life fails to support the outward activities of the self.

The second important issue in Turgenev’s Hamlet interpretation is that ofexistential originality, or rather its absence. In “Hamlet of the Shchigrov Dis-trict” (“Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda”), a story from Turgenev’s Sketches from a

Hunter’s Album (“Zapiski okhotnika”), the main character goes unnamed formost of the time, only twice being referred to as “Vasilii Vasilich,” a rather cus-tomary Russian name, which, moreover, he seems to deny to be his own realname. When prompted at the end of the story by the narrator (who is also hisconfidant) to finally introduce himself, Turgenev’s character protests his ano-nymity: “No, for God’s sake, don’t ask me or anyone else for my name. Let meremain for you an unknown person, a Vasilii Vasilich who has been crippled byfate.” This crisis of naming is caused by the character’s self-perception as an “un-original person”; as such, he says, he doesn’t deserve any particular name. “But ifyou earnestly want to give me some kind of title, then call me … call me Hamlet

5 For an overview confined almost exclusively to Müller’s appropriation of Russian and Sovietdrama, see V. Koljazin, “Russische Literatur”, in H.-T. Lehmann and P. Primavesi (eds.), Heiner

Müller Handbuch, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003, 156–60.6 Cf. Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision, The Hague and Paris:

Mouton, 1975, 13.

336 Galin Tihanov

of the Shchigrov District. There are many such Hamlets in every district, butperhaps you haven’t come across any others […].”7

An echo of Turgenev’s Hamletism reverberates strongly in Heiner Müller’sdrama, but his own twist is recognizably post-romantic, flowing over into a post-modernist resistance to self-identity. The reason-emotion tension is sublated in amechanistic existence that obviates the very question of essence and originality.The organic unity of flesh and intellect is now declared beyond reach, and theonly emerging perspective is that of the machine: “My thoughts are woundsin my head. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms to grab legs to walkno pain no thinking.”8 Early on in the same part (“Pest in Buda Battle of Green-land”), the Hamlet-performer has formulated the mechanistic terms of his dis-course that annul the very debate of originality so central to Turgenev: “I am thetypewriter … I am the data bank … My drama did not take place. The script waslost” (91–2). Hamlet’s life, in other words, had been written for him, and all hecould do is enact this life as a performer, at a considerable distance from the con-dition of identity with himself. He has to reconcile himself to the role of a type-writer that reproduces mechanistically a chaotic version of the lost original. Theallusion here, unexplained up to now by Heiner Müller’s commentators, seemsto be to the recorder scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet there refuses to be“played upon” like an instrument, while Heiner Müller’s Hamlet does not mindbeing a mere typewriter to be typed upon. The incongruous story of his lifeknows no state of identity, nor indeed does he desire such a state. Ironically, to be“at one with my undivided self ” seems to him suitable only when “killing time.”(“I go home and kill time, at one with my undivided self ”; 92).

Crucial in explicating the mechanistic metaphor in Heiner Müller’s play isthe context of surrealist, avant-garde and pop art, to which he refers in hisautobiography (e.g. Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol). Indicatively, Lautréa-mont’s surrealistic definition of the beautiful as “the casual meeting between asewing machine and an umbrella” is seen by some critics as inspirational forMüller’s preference for the disparate and the inconsequential.9 But there is alsoa Russian avant-garde, and in many ways a surrealist, prose text that could fur-nish insight here. Held in high regard in the GDR because of its non-orthodoxpoetics that departed from prescribed realist conventions, Iurii Olesha’s 1927novel Envy (“Zavist’”) offers an original interpretation of the machine-motif

7 Both quotations are from I. Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, trans. R. Freeborn, London:Penguin, 1988, 209.

8 H. Müller, The Hamletmachine, in H. Müller, Theatremachine, trans. and ed. Marc von Henning,London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995, 93; all further quotations are from this edition, withpage numbers in parentheses in the main text.

9 See H. Fuhrmann, Warten auf “Geschichte”: Der Dramatiker Heiner Müller, Würzburg: Königshausenund Neumann, 1997, 100.

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and, in so doing, also evokes Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The second half of Envy

features Ivan Babichev’s “conspiracy of feelings” and his fantastic weapon, themythical machine Ophelia: “And I’ve given it the name of a girl who went out ofher mind with love and despair. I’ve called it Ophelia, the most human, the mosttouching name.”10 With Ophelia, Ivan plans to avenge his era and to produceone last celebration of those human feelings which are “scheduled for liqui-dation”: pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love. The ideal young CommunistMakarov, too, has declared his desire to become a machine, but Ivan’s Opheliais actually meant to undermine Makarov’s life without emotions. However, ina final nightmare (Kavalerov’s), Ophelia turns on Ivan and impales him. Ina move all too familiar ever since the Romantics, the machine has gone out ofcontrol; it devours its own creator, and with him the dream of a world wherehuman emotions thrive beyond peril and challenge. In Olesha, remarkably, thethemes of the parity between reason and emotion, on the one hand, and of un-originality and mechanicity, on the other, have come together in a way Müllercould have found suggestive. In his drama it is precisely Ophelia who material-izes Hamlet’s dream of a machine-like existence. In Part 2 (“Europe of theWoman”) she appears with her heart turned into a clock. Although she later sig-nals her desire to break away from mechanistic existence (“I dig the clock thatwas my heart from out of my breast”), in the final part she chooses to give uporganicity, for she recognizes in it another male-dictated stereotype. Müller’sOphelia thus embodies the dilemma of modern feminism: how to negotiate amodus vivendi that steers clear from the dangers of both mechanicity and or-ganicity, which are both unmasked as ideologically usurped male-dominatedmodes of existence. That Heiner Müller’s Hamlet wants to be like Ophelia, thathe wants to be a woman, as he claims in Part 3 (“Scherzo”), could also be read asa hidden reference to Olesha, in whose major play “A list of benefits” (“Spisokblagodeianii,” 1931) it is a woman, the actress Goncharova, who plays Hamletfor an audience of workers (in The Hamletmachine, the three great ideologuesand practitioners of revolution – Marx, Lenin and Mao – all appear on stage aswomen).

Yet in Heiner Müller’s drama the whole gender issue is treated with more sub-tlety than in Olesha’s novel. The feminine principle is seen as the proactive one,but it is controversially projected onto the plane of symbolic matricide. Hamletsets forth in Part 1 (“Family album”) his vision of a “world without mothers,”where “women should be stitched up” – this “would have spared me myself,”as he ironically puts it (87). In the concluding Part 5, whose title (“Maddening

10 Iu. Olesha, Envy and Other Works, trans. A. MacAndrew, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967,90 (translation modified). My brief analysis of Olesha’s work relies on Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A

Window on Russia, New York: New York UP, 1976, 137–9.

338 Galin Tihanov

Endurance”) is an explicit reference to Hölderlin11, Ophelia holds, in a wheel-chair, a final soliloquy that proclaims this new world without birth and concep-tion, in which the destruction of motherhood amounts to the vicarious murderof Gertrude, thus extending the original task Hamlet faces in Shakespeare’s play.Not by accident does the monologue open with the claim “Here speaks Electra.”Müller seeks to integrate his own drama into a larger inter-textual continuum,where ancient Greek tragedy receives pride of place. Electra is bound to activatethe memory of matricide that flows from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.Herself a virgin, and therefore childless, in Euripides Electra goes to the lengthof pretending to have a child in order to lure Clytemnestra into her home, wheredeath awaits her. In Heiner Müller’s drama Ophelia is determined to efface thetraces of sexuality and motherhood in order to sponsor a vision of the worldwhere the enslaving “happiness of surrender” – female but also all-human sur-render – is scorned and left behind:

In the name of the victims. I discharge all the sperm I ever received. I transform the milkfrom my breasts into deadly poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. Between mythighs I strangle the world that I gave birth to. I bury it in my crotch. Down with the hap-piness of surrender. Long live hatred, contempt, uprising, death. When she walks throughyour bedrooms with butchers’ knives you will know the truth.

Ophelia’s final sentence (“When she walks …”) has been variously related to twofemale terrorists: Susan Atkins, one of the murderers of Sharon Tate, andSqueaky Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Ford. Elsewhere in hisautobiography, Müller notes that Ophelia has to do with Ulrike Meinhoff andthe problem of terrorism in Europe. The question of terrorism and political ac-tivism is a central one in Müller’s play. Hamlet is portrayed as a person tired ofboth action and the failure to act over centuries of European history. He is thefailed reformer of socialism, with thinly veiled references to the Hungarianuprising of 1956, but he is also – to some extent autobiographically – the EastGerman intellectual, whose resistance to the regime is cast in the compromisingforms of complicity: “In the loneliness of airports I breathe freely / I am Privi-leged / My repulsion is a privilege / Protected by wall. Barbed-wire prison”(92–3). In addition, this modern Hamlet is also a citizen of a globalized world,where people bear “the scars from the consumer battle” and hail “Coca Cola” asa supranational commodity. For this new Hamlet, locality is not any more ofoverriding importance. He no longer belongs in, or to, he only comes from, ac-cidentally and inconsequentially.

11 Cf. Hölderlin’s “Wildharrend” in the line “Wildharrend in der furchtbaren Rüstung, Jahrtau-sende” (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1951, vol.2, 316); this reference has been pointed out by Patrick Primavesi, among others (P. Primavesi,“Friedrich Hölderlin”, in H.-T. Lehmann and P. Primavesi (eds.), Heiner Müller Handbuch, 131–34,here 133). For a summary of other textual and historical allusions, see Jean Jourdheuil’s article“Die Hamletmaschine” (ibid., 221–27).

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The extent to which The Hamletmachine has to be read as a political play thatexamines the questions of what exactly constitutes the engine of change, andwhether history has not been reduced to a reproductive machine incapable ofsustaining the hopes for a radical transformation of society, can only be under-stood when Müller’s play is interpreted against the background of another im-portant German appropriation of Shakespeare, Carl Schmitt’s 1956 book Hamlet

or Hecuba. The Burst of Time into the Play (“Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch derZeit in das Spiel”).12

Schmitt’s book followed in time his major work of 1950, The Law of the Earth;before his death in 1985 he published two more books: Theory of the Partisan

(1963), also known by Müller, and Political Theology II (1970). These latter worksboth built on earlier texts: Theory of the Partisan drew on the political philosophyand the theory of space articulated as early as 1942 in Land and Sea and later on inThe Nomos of the Earth, while Political Theology II quoted the title of Schmitt’seponymous book of 1922. Hamlet or Hecuba, however, appeared out of the blue,or so it seemed to many.

As a matter of fact, the book had already been in the making for a number ofyears, even though in a post-publication talk Schmitt was anxious to have hisreaders believe that it was “hardly planned” and certainly “not aimed for”.13

Back in 1952, Schmitt’s daughter Anima had translated Lilian Winstanley’s bythen almost forgotten historical account Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 14, whichat the time of its English publication (1921) triggered a lively discussion amongscholars; Schmitt himself wrote the preface to the German translation15, and healso furnished a “Note for the German Reader”16, where he summarized someof the main positions in the polemic surrounding Winstanley’s book.17 Winstan-

12 Further on I quote from Schmitt’s book by indicating the relevant pages in parentheses in themain body of the text. The most important part of the book (Chapter 3: “Die Quelle der Tragik”)is available in David Pan’s excellent English translation (C. Schmitt, “The Source of the Tragic,”Telos, 1987, no. 72, 133–46). Pan also provides a useful synopsis of Chapters 1 and 2 and a trans-lation of Schmitt’s “Exkurs 2 ‘Über den barbarischen Charakter des Shakespeareschen Dramas;zu Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1928’”(pp. 62–7 in Schmitt’s German text; 146–51 in Pan’s translation). Wherever possible,I quote from David Pan’s translation; in all other cases I give my own translations without signal-ling this specifically.

13 C. Schmitt, “Was habe ich getan?” in C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, ed. A. Mohler,Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995, 221–4, here 224 (“nicht gezielt und kaum geplant”). This wasthe text of a talk Schmitt gave on 12 June 1956 at a discussion evening in Düsseldorf organizedby his publisher; the text was republished, with notes, by Piet Tommissen in Schmittiana, Vol. 5,1996, 15–19.

14 L. Winstanley, Hamlet Sohn der Maria Stuart, trans. A. Schmitt, Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1952.15 C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” ibid., 7–25.16 C. Schmitt, “Hinweis für den deutschen Leser,” ibid., 164–70.17 Schmitt’s acquaintance with Lilian Winstanley’s studies of Shakespeare apparently dated back to

1950 when he referred to her 1924 book “Othello” as the Tragedy of Italy (C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der

340 Galin Tihanov

ley’s book was very important to Schmitt, for he found in it support for his coreargument. Winstanley (1875–1960), the grand-daughter of Lord Winstanley, apioneer of adult education in Victorian Manchester, was at the time a Lecturer inEnglish Literature at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.18 The authorof fiction, poetry, and several scholarly studies of Shakespeare, Spenser and Shel-ley, Winstanley maintained that Shakespeare’s major plays could all be inter-preted with reference to real historical events and figures. Thus she argued thatHamlet actually mirrored the anxieties of Jacob I, that Lear was an allegory forFrance, while Othello stood for Spain and Desdemona for the Republic of Ve-nice. Without undertaking to weigh the historical evidence, Schmitt believed thatWinstanley’s approach served his own agenda very well indeed19: her researchwould assist him in theorising tragedy as a genre that relies on non-negotiablehistorical authenticity, a literary form that accommodates the salutary intrusionof real historical time, and – on the crest of singularity and genuineness – is bestequipped to rise to myth. Neither Schmitt nor Winstanley seems to have beenaware of the fact that as early as 1829 the German Romantic Achim von Arnimhad already drawn a suggestive parallel between Hamlet and Jacob I, arguing thatin Shakespeare’s play the former probably stood for the latter.20

The importance invested by Schmitt in writing Hamlet or Hecuba can be ga-thered from a letter to Ernst Jünger of 6 March 1956. Schmitt tells Jünger thatthe title of the book led to extensive discussions with the editors at EugenDiederichs; perhaps Schmitt was unhappy about the title (the alternative oneapparently being Tabu und Rache 21), for he anxiously asked Jünger: “What do yousay to a title like this one? It turned out that no one knows any more who Hecuba

Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), 4th edn, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,1997, 116–17 n. 2). In Schmitt’s Nachlass in Düsseldorf, there is also a copy (without an inscrip-tion by the author) of Winstanley’s 1914 book on Tolstoy (RW 265, No. 363) and an autographedcopy of her book Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1922 (“Professor Dr Carl Schmitt with the author’s compliments, 22/10/1951”, RW 265No. 366).

18 There are five letters (one of them preserved as an undated fragment) and a postcard by Win-stanley in Schmitt’s Nachlass. These were written over some five years, between 1951 and 1956; asis evident from Winstanley’s first letter of 4 October 1951 (RW 265 No. 18213), Schmitt initiatedthe correspondence in September 1951 by offering to send his Nomos der Erde.

19 The admiration was mutual: in her last letter to Schmitt (28 June 1956), Winstanley told him thatshe read Hamlet or Hecuba three times on receiving it as a gift in early April 1956 (RW 265, No.18216).

20 Cf. Achim von Arnim, “Hamlet und Jakob. Eine Anmerkung zum Shakespeare,” in Arnim,Schriften in 6 Bänden, ed. R. Burwick et al., Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992,Vol. 6, 883–9 (I am grateful to Reinhart Koselleck for directing my attention to Arnim’s essay).

21 The two options are discussed, obviously on Schmitt’s request, in Sava Klickovic’s letter to himof 26 March 1956, where Klickovic, a friend of long standing, voices preference for Hamlet oder

Hekuba: “Der andere Titel hat nicht die Kraft der unmittelbaren Wirkung, die der Gegenüber-stellung lebendiger Gestalten eigen ist” (RW 265, No. 7735).

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was?”22 Jünger, however, withheld judgement, and three weeks later, on26 March 1956, Schmitt wrote again: “In my last card to you I asked you for ad-vice on the title Hamlet or Hecuba. The Burst of Time into the Play. Nothing can bechanged any longer.”23 Schmitt’s concern lest the title of the book prevented itfrom reaching out to a wider audience was to be taken very seriously, somethingJünger had apparently failed to do.24

His failure to engage in discussion over Schmitt’s title may well have resultedfrom sheer negligence. But I wish to suggest that Jünger must have recognized inSchmitt’s title a strong echo from his own earlier texts, particularly from The

Worker, an echo he chose to pass over in silence. A significant parallel that goesbeyond the mere lexical similarity between Schmitt’s title and some of the keyphrases in Jünger’s book has so far remained unnoticed in scholarship. Schmitt’s“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel” tacitly invokes and modifies Jünger’s “DerEinbruch elementarer Mächte in den bürgerlichen Raum,” the title he gave to sec-tions 13–15 of The Worker.25 (It has to be conceded that in his earlier Political Theol-

ogy (1922) Schmitt himself had already glorified the power of life to break throughthe crust of mechanical existence in the hour of exception.) In Jünger’s discourse,the space of the bourgeois, who has long become a hostage to the ordinary, theeconomically-rational and the banal, is disrupted by the “break-in” of the elemen-tary in the guise of danger and pain. This process is couched in terms that incor-porate, just as with Schmitt, an uneasy synthesis of temporality and myth: “Thedangerous that [used to] appear under the signs of the past and the spatially re-mote now rules the present. It seems to have burst into the present from primevaltimes and from the expanse of space […].”26 What is more, both Jünger andSchmitt charged “Einbruch” with the semantics of a Romantic rupture of theeveryday framework of life in favour of authenticity, gained at the expense oftrauma and an enforced re-ordering of reality. “Einbruch” can be seen as anothermetaphor of the dialectic of discontinuity and transition between ontologicallydifferent levels and conditions of life, which is so emblematically captured inSchiller’s Romantic idea of “suddenness” and “shock” (“Erschütterung”) in the

22 Ernst Jünger/Carl Schmitt, Briefe 1930–1983, ed. H. Kiesel, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999, 295.Schmitt had already expressed the same concern, couched in precisely the same words, in a letterto Armin Mohler of 13 February 1956 (cf. C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, ed.A. Mohler, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995, 214).

23 Ernst Jünger/Carl Schmitt, Briefe 1930–1983, 299.24 Schmitt’s self-promotion efforts are documented (RW 265, No. 20346) in a list of 44 review

copies to be sent out by the publisher and another list of 31 free copies to be presented bySchmitt to influential intellectuals and friends (including, among others, Hans Freyer, LucienGoldmann, Erich Przywara, Hans Zehrer, Mircea Eliade, Rolf Schroers, Adolf Frisé).

25 E. Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932, 46–56.26 “Das Gefährliche, das unter den Zeichen der Vergangenheit und der Ferne erschien, beherrscht

jetzt die Gegenwart. Es scheint aus uralten Zeiten und aus der Weite der Räume in sie einge-brochen zu sein […]” (Der Arbeiter, 55; my translation).

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work of the sublime.27 According to Schiller, the sublime furnishes an abruptand forceful exit from the world of material sensations where “the beautifulwould always have kept us with pleasure”; through “upheaval,” it liberates usfrom the limitations of sensation and transplants us into a sphere beyond thegrasp of reason.28

Schmitt’s book is a rigorously argued philosophy of drama and history,which he self-consciously positioned among nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryGerman debates on drama. While working on Hamlet or Hecuba, from 1951 on-wards, but also in the years following its publication, Schmitt read and made ex-cerpts from several representative texts of German drama theory and criticism:Jean Paul’s “Ueber die dramatische Poesie,” Gervinus’s Shakespeare, Grillparzer’s“Notizen über Shakespeare,” Friedrich Gundolf ’s Shakespeare und der deutsche

Geist, Max Kommerell’s Lessing und Aristoteles, Werner Krauss’s Corneille als poli-

tischer Dichter, as well as texts on tragedy and drama by Hegel, Lukács, and Ben-jamin.29 Modern genre theory in Germany has been consistently marked byattempts to study the three major genres of literature (epic, drama, and poetry)with a view to establishing some verifiable correspondences between the formsof artistic creativity, on the one hand, and the forms of history and society, onthe other. In this respect, Schmitt was following a well-trodden path. Suffice itto point to Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel and “The Metaphysics of Tra-gedy” (the latter mentioned in passing by Schmitt), to Franz Rosenzweig’s sec-tions on tragedy in The Star of Redemption, or to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, whichbecame a major reference point for Schmitt.

Whence this special interest in drama? Twentieth-century debates on dramain Germany evolved under the sign of sociology and philosophy of history.Thinking of drama was a way of analysing the trends of social evolution and thefortunes of class. Three examples would do: Lukács, in his monumental History

of the Development of Modern Drama, associated drama with the decline of a (ruling)class, the moment when its worldview no longer goes unquestioned and tragicdefeat is near. Drama, he concluded, “reaches its peak always in tragedy; a per-fect drama can only be tragedy.”30 Fritz Sternberg, the German sociologist andpolitical thinker, who wrote, among other books, an influential study of imperi-

27 On the semantics of “shock” and “suddenness” in Ernst Jünger and the avant-garde, see KarlHeinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,1981.

28 Cf. F. Schiller, “Über das Erhabene,” in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Bd. 21: PhilosophischeSchriften. 2. Teil, Weimar: Böhlau, 1963, 45–6.

29 Cf. Schmitt’s notes in his Nachlass: RW 265, Nos. 20295 (Grillparzer), 20313 (Gervinus and Gun-dolf), 21087 (Hegel, Benjamin, Kommerell, and Krauss), 21088 (Jean Paul), 20345 (Lukács).

30 G. Lukács, Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Dramas [1911], ed. F. Benseler, Darmstadt, Neuwied:Luchterhand, 1981, 25.

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alism31 and from whom Brecht learned a lot during the early months of his con-version to Marxism, submitted that drama itself was in decline. Far from being amere historical contingency, Sternberg interpreted this as a historical necessity, aconsequence of the gradual ousting of the individual by “collective forces” in theperiod following World War I.32 In a similar vein, but with political implicationsthat would be used by the Nazis for their own purposes, Gustav Steinbömerargued in his 1932 book State and Drama (“Staat und Drama”) that the evolutionof drama reflects historically evolving relations between the private and the pub-lic, in which the individual is eventually subordinated to the public institutions,norms, and values.

Schmitt does retain this largely sociological interest, but not as his primaryfocus of attention. Drama is important for him in so far as the performanceexemplifies the coming into existence of a community made up of the actors andthe audience. Schmitt takes a hermeneutical approach here, which sets him apartfrom other contemporary approaches to drama, notably Karl Jasper’s interpre-tation of tragedy in the framework of his philosophy of truth.33 Modern drama,Schmitt argues, is usually first published as a work of literature, and only thenperformed. This means that the audience, while watching the play, can enjoy thesupport of preliminary knowledge of the text. Shakespeare’s drama, however,worked differently (and to a better effect), in that the audience did not normallyacquaint itself in advance with a printed text. (Schmitt here shares a long-estab-lished tenet of German drama theory, according to which drama has to be(en)acted – not read – and has therefore to rest on common knowledge. A strongexponent of this view was Hegel in his Aesthetics and, after him, Arnold Gehlenin his 1934 essay “Die Struktur der Tragödie”.34) Thus for a community toemerge in the Renaissance theatre, a common historical experience had to beshared by both the actors and the viewers (37), i. e., a history lived through by, oralready known to, everyone present had to make its way into the play before themeaning of the play could be shared and understood by the spectators’ commu-nity. Playwrights can orientate their writing in two different fashions: towards a

31 F. Sternberg, Der Imperialismus, Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1926. Brecht was familiar with this study(cf. Sternberg’s memoirs of Brecht published in the year of Sternberg’s death: F. Sternberg, Der

Dichter und die Ratio: Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht, Göttingen: Sachse & Pohl, 1963, 65). On Stern-berg, see S. Papcke, Deutsche Soziologie im Exil. Gegenwartsdiagnose und Epochenkritik, 1933–1945,Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1993, 38–58.

32 See F. Sternberg’s open letter to Brecht “Der Niedergang des Dramas,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, no.219 (12 May 1927), republished as an appendix to Sternberg’s Brecht memoirs, 58–64, here 63.

33 See K. Jaspers, Von der Wahreit, Munich: Piper and Co., 1947, 915–960. The differences betweenJaspers and Schmitt seem to me more significant than the similarities suggested by V. Kahn(cf. note 2).

34 See A. Gehlen, “Die Struktur der Tragödie,” in Philosophische Schriften II (1933–1938). Gesamt-

ausgabe. Band 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1980, 199–215, esp. 209–211.

344 Galin Tihanov

contemporary community of spectators sharing the same historical experience(“für die Mitwelt”), or towards a future audience that comes to know historyonly in the form of more or less abstract knowledge (“für die Nachwelt”).35

Shakespeare’s drama was one for the Mitwelt, and that was its advantage over laterwork for the stage (e.g. Schiller’s dramas, written as they were – according toSchmitt – for posterity, the Nachwelt, rather than for a fellowship of spectatorswith immediate grasp of their common past and present).

Schmitt thus starts by distinguishing the literary sources of drama (e.g. Shake-speare’s use of Plutarch in Julius Caesar) from the actual historical resources thatenable actors and viewers to invoke shared experience and knowledge. He aversthat this distinction was not always made with due consistency. Thus a miscon-ception arose that the playwright, being at liberty to deal in whatever fashion hepleases with the literary material he draws on, is actually a free and sovereign ar-tistic creator. Going back to his vehement rejection of Romantic ideology inPolitical Romanticism (1919), forty years later Schmitt again warns against Roman-tic subjectivism and occasionalism. The origins of the disproportionate belief inthe poet’s creative freedom are seen by Schmitt in the Storm and Stress move-ment of the eighteenth century, and in the dominant role ascribed to poetry inthe ideology of modernity. Yet a poem is rather different from drama, and so isthe relation of the poem to the poet’s experience (Erlebnis) when compared tothe relation of drama to its mythical or historical resources. Stefan George,whom Schmitt here calls “one of our greatest and most form-conscious poets”is all but quoted verbatim as saying that poetry reshapes experience to an extentwhere it becomes meaningless for the poet; knowledge of this experience thusbecomes for everyone else “confusing rather than redemptive” (35: “eherverwirrend als erlösend”). This may well be true of poetry, especially modernpoetry, but it is utterly false as a way of explaining drama, Schmitt insists. Theaudience and the need for common knowledge to be mobilized in the perform-ance set a limit to the playwright’s creativity. Shakespeare’s frivolous manipu-lation of his literary sources, Schmitt submits, is only the reverse side of his beingchained to his audience’s knowledge of history and current events.

Within drama, however, not all genres are equally open to and receptive ofhistory, nor are they equally dependent on it. Theatre is after all about “play”(“Spiel”), which means that all dramatic genres establish their own theatricaltime and space, their own framework of conditional (fictional) reality that makessure that the text can also be read by subsequent generations that no longer sharethe experience and the knowledge of the original audience. Play, therefore, is aninalienable element of drama, a conditio sine qua non of its existence.

Here enters Schmitt’s crucial distinction. Tragedy, unlike all other forms ofdrama, while preserving the mode of playability also has an irreducible core of

35 The distinction is made in C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” in L. Winstanley, Hamlet Sohn der Maria Stuart, 12.

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 345

authenticity supplied by history. That time and temporality were forces shapingthe nature of the tragic was not Schmitt’s discovery. The young Benjamin, in atext written in 1916 which served as preparatory material towards the Trauerspiel

book (the text remained unpublished in his lifetime), sought to clarify the con-ditions under which “historical time passes over into tragic time,” reaching theconclusion that tragedy may be distinguished from mourning play precisely“through the different ways they relate to historical time.”36 Furthermore, MaxScheler, whose opposition to the inductive approach in aesthetics was an inspi-ration for Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book37, had argued in his 1914–15 essay On the

phenomenon of the tragic that – because it is the product of a dynamic relationshipbetween values that changes in a particular (inevitably catastrophic) direction –the tragic “always appears within the sphere of a motion of values” (“erscheint inder Sphäre der Wertbewegung”), and therefore time, in which this motion takesplace, belongs to the non-negotiable conditions for the unfolding of the tragic:“In a world without space tragedies would [still] be possible, but not in a timelessworld.”38 Schmitt radicalizes this thesis by turning time from a passive conditioninto an active force enabling tragedy to emerge. Historical time bursts into thetime of the play, which in the wake of this intrusion assumes a dual ontologicalstatus that combines the playability of any drama with the “unplayability”(Unverspielbarkeit) reserved exclusively for tragedy. It is very difficult to renderadequately the entire range of potential meanings accommodated by the Ger-man “Unverspielbarkeit.” As a verb, “verspielen” means “to lose, to waste, tosquander away,” often by gambling, but through the prefix “ver-” it could alsoconvey the meaning of converting something into something else by using a dif-ferent medium of expression, as is the case in “verfilmen.” Finally, the prefix“ver-” also suggests the possibility of distortion, as in, say, “verbauen.” “Unver-spielbarkeit” (42), then, is much more than “unplayability”; it suggests that thenucleus of historical authenticity characteristic of tragedy cannot be turned en-

36 W. Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings, Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996, Vol. 1, 55–6. The volume contains two more textsof 1916 that served as drafts towards the Trauerspiel book and also remained unpublished in Ben-jamin’s lifetime.

37 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, London: New Left Books,1977, 38–9. Benjamin seems to have been more indebted to Scheler than he would let on; hisinterpretation of melancholy appears to be consonant with Scheler’s observations about the“specific sadness of the tragic” (“[D]ie spezifische Traurigkeit des Tragischen”), characterized byboth “depth” and “boundlessness” (“Unabsehbarkeit”) and “flowing over beyond the event into,as it were, an indefinite width without horizon” (“Die Trauer fließt so über das Ereignis hinaus ineine gleichsam horizontlose unbestimmte Weite”; cf. M. Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tra-gischen,” Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1972, 149–69, here 157–8,my translation).

38 M. Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tragischen,” 154 (“In einer raumlosen Welt wären Tragödienmöglich; in einer zeitlosen nicht”; my translation).

346 Galin Tihanov

tirely into a play, cannot get lost or distorted in the play. Thus tragedy rests on anunassailable authenticity underwritten by either myth or a shared and immediateexperience of history (often at its most dramatically-exceptional), both of whichfall beyond the scope of the playwright’s power of invention. History, in otherwords, cannot be framed by invention. History itself is the framing agency withregard to tragedy, and the presence – or rather the burst – of historical time in itremoves the contingencies of invention. Thus invention (“Erfindung”) andtragic action (“Geschehen”), in Wackernagel’s words, repeated here by Schmitt(51), become incompatible.39 Tragedy, Schmitt concludes, stops where play be-gins (42), for these are two markedly different regimes of authenticity. It is pos-sible to have a play within the play, but there cannot be a tragedy within tragedy.Tragedy, just as for Benjamin, but in a more resolute and perhaps straightfor-ward way, is different from other dramatic genres, including the Trauerspiel. Thetragic situation cannot be invented or made up, that of the Trauerspiel can. And socan that of historical drama, which relies not on an immediately co-experiencedknowledge of history and reality, but rather on the distant Bildungswissen of his-tory, i.e., knowledge of history acquired through education. Unsurprisingly, thetarget of discontent here, as in Benjamin’s treatise40, is Schiller, whose theory ofthe play-drive (“Spieltrieb”), expounded in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of

Man, was misread by Schmitt as resembling the Romantic “lack of earnestness”which tries to dissolve the seriousness and authenticity of tragic life in the alleg-edly “higher order” of artistic play.41 Schiller’s historical dramas, then, forSchmitt as much as for Benjamin, fail to rise to tragedy and cultural myth: “Schil-ler’s drama is Trauerspiel; it has not risen to the level of myth.”42 As one can see,

39 Schmitt borrowed the reference to Wackernagel from Benjamin (cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of

German Tragic Drama, 106), but he tried to question in a lengthy note (72–3 n. 21) the suitability ofWackernagel’s words as an endorsement of Benjamin’s theory.

40 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 122, where Schiller’s historical drama isdescribed as “closer to the form of the Trauerspiel” rather than to that of tragedy (Benjamin’sexample is Die Braut von Messina).

41 Schmitt’s suspicion of the principle of play and his appeal for seriousness commensurate withthe conflict between friend and enemy, on which politics rests, led to criticism in the 1930s byJohan Huizinga, not least in his book Homo Ludens, which argued that culture originates in, andsubsists on, play (for more on Huizinga’s critique of Schmitt, see H. Quaritsch, “Eine sonderbareBeziehung: Carl Schmitt und Erich Kaufmann,” in Bürgersinn und staatliche Macht in Antike und

Gegenwart. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schuller zum 65. Geburtstag, Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag,2000, 71–87, esp. 80–81).

42 “Schillers Drama ist Trauerspiel und hat den Mythos nicht erreicht” (49). I cannot resist relatingat this point an amusing story that speaks volumes about the challenged reputation of Schiller’shistorical dramas at the time. In 1961, some five years after Schmitt wrote Hamlet or Hecuba,Heiner Müller was about to be excluded from the GDR Writers’ Union for his “ideologicallyunacceptable” drama “The Resettler” (Die Umsiedlerin). After the meeting he was approached byHanns Eisler who advised him that if he wanted to be safe in the GDR he should follow Schil-ler’s example: “[A]n Austrian tyrant gets murdered in Switzerland. This is the kind of play you

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 347

Schmitt’s stance with respect to Schiller’s aesthetics was rather complicated:Schmitt partook of the Romantic fascination with “upheaval,” “suddenness,”and “burst,” and he also endorsed the idea of ontologically different layers ofreality, so prominent in Schiller’s treatise on the sublime, but he was eventuallydissatisfied with the importance accorded to play in Schiller’s account of whatmakes one human.

What matters here most is the realization of the fact that even when Schmittopposed Schiller’s praise of play and playfulness, he was doing so in a way thatwas thrusting him back into the bedrock of Romantic ideology. Schmitt’s yearn-ing for authenticity constituted a return to the Romantic discourse of originalityand genuineness. Ever since his 1919 work Political Romanticism, Schmitt hadbeen anxious to leave behind what he believed to be the compromising softnessof Romantic philosophy, its submission to occasionalism and subjectivism. Hebelieved that his Hamlet book was a return to a history-based discussion of artwhere dialectical materialism had established an unhealthy monopoly.43 TheHamlet book was seen by him as breaking the customary practice of understand-ing art as an autonomous aesthetic realm. He hoped that Winstanley’s and hisown reading of Hamlet, based as it was on the recognition of the force of historyto burst into, and confine, the realm of play, would be a resounding refutation ofthe Romantic interpretative method, whose unchecked psychologism meantthat, in T. S. Eliot’s sardonic words, for Goethe Hamlet became a Werther, andfor Coleridge – Coleridge himself.44 And yet Schmitt’s Hamlet book speaksforcefully the language (Adorno would have preferred “jargon”) of authenticity,singularity, and “unplayability,” all in a post-romantic key that recognizes theexistence of ontologically different layers and modes of life, whose rift can nolonger be healed except in the rare bursts and epiphanic appearances of authen-ticity. Admittedly, Schmitt takes the power of imagination away from the artist(in a move critical of Romantic aesthetics), but in the same breath (in a typicallypost-romantic move) he restores the notion and the norm of irrepeatability anduniqueness with regard to the historical situation, as well as the myth-generatingpower of the solitary hero at the moment of decision. It is tragedy, just as forLukács and Rosenzweig, that is called upon to be the guardian and exponent of

should be writing in Germany” (the reference, of course, is to Wilhelm Tell; the story can be foundin Heiner Müller’s autobiography: H. Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen, Cologne:Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1992, 178). It has to be noted, though, that in his 1952 “Vorwort,”where Schmitt regards Schiller’s dramas as being written “for posterity” (“für die Nachwelt”), henevertheless concedes that even they (at the hands of gifted critics such as Max Kommerell)could acquire the status of myth-generating art (Schmitt, “Vorwort,” 19); cf. also Müller’s owndescription of Wilhelm Tell as “the drama of liberation” in 1989 (H. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation,Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 97).

43 Cf. Schmitt, “Was habe ich getan?,” 223.44 Schmitt quotes Eliot’s words in the 1952 “Foreword”, 23.

348 Galin Tihanov

authenticity in Schmitt’s reworking of the Romantic ideal. But unlike Lukács andRosenzweig, Schmitt is more concerned to assert authenticity with regard to his-tory and the past than to life as such; it is the saving grace of myth that shouldtake care of the latter. Thus Hamlet or Hecuba seems to be indicative of Schmitt’sentire career as a thinker: it reproduces his syndrome of trying to flee the Ro-mantic agenda and finding himself over and over again replicating and having tomodify it in a time when the answers of the Romantics would not do.45 The stateof exception46, the revolt against the indecision of the “chattering classes” (inThe Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig had drawn a characteristically anti-cli-mactic comparison between silence, proper speech, and mere “debate” in attictragedy 47), the glorification of the sea over the land mass, the veneration of thehistorically singular and authentic, the hopes attached to the lonely figure of thepartisan and his irregular combat – all these motifs participate in a fascinatingdrama of ideas, where the repressed Romantic ideology makes its inexorable re-turn. Thus in his 1952 foreword to the German translation of Winstanley’s book,Schmitt insists that drama is better placed than the novel to capture, and remaincloser to, the singularity of historical events. Moreover, there (and four yearslater in his own book) he interprets Hamlet as the drama of a king who destroysthe “sacred substance” of his kingdom through too much thinking (“zerdenkt”)and talking (“zerredet”).48 It then becomes logical that Schmitt should havewanted to assert the heroic effort of decision and action, which he found to bethe centerpiece of Shakespeare’s drama, by extending the meaning of Hamlet toembody the tragic vacillation and indecisiveness on the eve, or in the face, ofgroundbreaking historical events. His own somewhat cryptic interpretation ofHamlet in a letter to Armin Mohler of 15 July 1956 suggests that Shakespeare’shero symbolized to him Germany on the threshold of the 1848 revolution(“1848: Deutschland ist Hamlet”)49 and Europe (or at least European intelligent-

45 I have written on other aspects of Schmitt’s “post-romantic syndrome” in “Carl Schmitt andTheodor Däubler: The Geopolitical Afterlife of the Post-Romantic Epic,” in Romanticna pesnitev

/ The Romantic Poem, ed. M. Juvan, Ljubljana: Ljubljana University, 2002, 609–24; see also my ar-ticle “Regimes of Modernity at the Dawn of Globalisation: Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève,”in D. Kadir and D. Löbbermann (eds.), Other Modernisms in an Age of Globalisation, Heidelberg:Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2002, 75–93.

46 On the state of exception as a Romantic relic in Schmitt’s political philosophy I concur with anumber of other scholars (Hofmann, Lübbe, Bredekamp).

47 F. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. Hallo, Notre Dame and London: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1985, 77.

48 C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” 17.49 C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220. Schmitt borrowed the phrase “Deutschland ist

Hamlet” from the opening line of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s 1844 poem “Hamlet,” a piece of unre-markable poetic quality that conveys the staple view of Hamlet as an over-hesitant intellectual:“Das macht, er hat zuviel gehockt; / er lag und las zuviel im Bett. / Er wurde, weil das Blut ihmstockt, / zu kurz von Atem und zu fett. […] Drum fehlt ihm die Entschlossenheit; / kommt

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 349

sia) in the traumatic years of World War I (“1918: Europa ist Hamlet”).50 What ismore, writing in 1958, Schmitt projects the Hamlet symbol onto the immediatefuture of the entire Western world, probably meaning to suggest that the plagueof indecision in dealing with the past and facing one’s own future has progressedto affect not just Germany and Europe but the whole array of Western democ-racies.51 Thus the inescapability of decision and action, on the one hand, and theideal of authenticity, on the other, converge for Schmitt in the “unplayability”that makes the essence of tragedy (and of political life).

Schmitt sees in the “unplayability” of the tragic a feature that also determinesthe options available to the stage director. The uniqueness and singularity of ashared historical situation as the formative moment of tragedy, which it thenelevates to myth – as Hamlet supposedly does – means that there is no point intrying to dress the actors in period costumes and stage a museum-like perform-ance. No amount of effort could arrest and convey the singularity of the pastmoment. No matter what we do, we can never attain the same significance of thehistorical situation that glued together through shared experience actors andaudience. So there is nothing wrong with playing Hamlet in a tailcoat. But thisshould be no more than a necessary prevention of naive and misconceived “his-toricism” (“Historismus”). If pushed too far, this approach could lead to whatSchmitt disparagingly terms “Offenbachiade,” i.e., something that resembles theease and fleeting merriness of operetta. It is quite possible that the invocation ofOffenbach was not free from a renewed criticism of Karl Kraus, an admirer ofOffenbach (as attested in Benjamin’s essay “Karl Kraus reads Offenbach”) and

Zeit, kommt Rat – er stellt sich toll, / hält Monologe lang und breit, / und bringt in Verse seinenGroll.” Freiligrath ends by appealing to the heroism of decision (“Nur ein Entschluß”), but con-cedes identification with Hamlet (“Bin ja selbst ein Stück von dir”); cf. F. Freiligrath, Werke in

einem Band, ed. W. Ilberg, Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1967, 73–5. On the wider context,see the chapter “Hamlet et l’Allemagne” in I. Omesco, Hamlet ou la tentation du possible, Paris:P.U.F., 1987, 138–57. A reference to Freiligrath’s poem, in a different context, also appears inHamlet oder Hekuba, 54. Schmitt’s identification of Hamlet and Germany was a confirmationsui generis of the lasting German cultural myth of Shakespeare as a poet whose work’s true homeis Germany rather than England, a myth expounded by Gerhart Hauptmann and Friedrich Gun-dolf, among others; on this see Werner Habicht’s richly informative article “Shakespeare andTheatre Politics in the Third Reich,” in Hannah Scolnicov and Peter Holland (eds.), The Play out of

Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989,110–120.

50 C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220. The reference is to Paul Valéry and is unpackedby Piet Tommissen in his republication of “Was habe ich getan?,” Schmittiana, Vol. 5, 1996, 15 n.12.

51 “1958: Die Westliche Welt ist Hamlet” (C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220). In alate archival note of March 1975, Schmitt saw 1968 as a more suitable date for the symbolic iden-tity of the Western world with Hamlet; he also added, somewhat puzzlingly given his Catholicbackground, the following sentence: “1900: Wir (Protestanten) sind alle Hamlets” (RW 265, No.19862).

350 Galin Tihanov

the target of a parody Schmitt contributed anonymously to Franz Blei’s 1920 Bes-

tiarium of German literature.52

Important as it might be in its own terms, this episode in German intellectualhistory would not have busied us here, certainly not at such length, were it not forits crucial impact on Heiner Müller. Operetta and musical, with their determi-nation to suspend the monopoly of seriousness and originality, bring us to post-modernism and back to Müller’s Die Hamlet-Maschine, conceived as early as the1950s but not completed before 1977, the debris – indicatively – of a 200-pagetranslation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Müller prepared in 1976–77, only toget embroiled in accusations of plagiarism soon afterwards.53 Müller, along withAlfred Andersch and Rolf Schroers, was one of the most prominent admirers ofSchmitt on the literary Left (Benjamin, of course, being the most prominent ofall, even though his fascination with Schmitt in The Origin of German Tragic Drama

came at the close of his, in George Steiner’s words, “romantic-metaphysical”period, just before his affiliation with Marxism54). Müller knew Hamlet or He-

cuba 55 and used it, along with texts by Norbert Elias, Paul Virilio56, and JohnDonne, Augustine’s Confessions, Stephen Hawking’s A Short History of Time, Frei-

52 Cf. Tommissen, In Sachen Carl Schmitt, Vienna: Karolinger, 1997, 29–30.53 On the textual history of Hamletmachine, see J. Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller, Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1998, 108 and 210–11; and the editorial notes in H. Müller, Werke, ed.F. Hörnigk, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001, vol. 4, 592–4.

54 For Benjamin’s complex appropriation of Schmitt, see Horst Bredekamp’s excellent article“From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry, 1999, Vol. 25,No. 2, 247–266, and the articles listed in Bredekamp’s extensive footnotes, esp. Samuel Weber,“Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Diacritics, 1992, Vol. 22,5–18; see also the book-length study by Susanne Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen: Walter Benjamin

und Carl Schmitt, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996, esp. 127–36, and Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Das Theater

des “konstruktiven Defaitismus”, Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld, 2002, passim. With specific referenceto Hamlet or Hecuba, cf. D. Pan, “Political Aesthetics: Carl Schmitt on Hamlet,” Telos, 1987,no. 72, 153–9; G. Meuter, Der Katechon. Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit, Berlin:Duncker und Humblot, 1994, 472–6, and Chr. Schmidt, “Zeit und Spiel. Geistergesprächzwischen Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt über Ästhetik und Politik,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer

Welt ohne Gott. Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès, ed. J. Mattern et al., Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000,78–89.

55 Cf. his brief text of 1988 “Shakespeare eine Differenz,” where the name of Carl Schmitt appearsnext to Müller’s statement (itself a reference to Schmitt) “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel kon-stituiert den Mythos” (Heiner Müller Material. Texte und Kommentare, ed. F. Hörnigk, Leipzig: Phi-lipp Reclam Jr., 1989, 106). Müller quotes the subtitle of Schmitt’s book again in his 1992 text“Beschreibung einer Lektüre” (cf. G. Schulz, “Kein altes Blatt. Müllers Graben,” in Heiner

Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, ed. Theo Buck and Jean-Marie Valentin, Frankfurt a. M.: PeterLang, 1995, 12). See also H. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 22.

56 Interestingly, an old and ailing Schmitt had read the German translation of one of Virilio’s basictexts (Geschwindigkeit und Politik, Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1977), given to him as a present by GünterMaschke on 9 February 1982; Schmitt’s copy (ending on p. 118) contains copious marginal notes,many of them voicing his approval (cf. RW 265, No. 390).

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ligrath’s “Hamlet,” Kavafis’s poem “King Claudius,” Gottfried Benn’s “GewisseLebensabende,” and Müller’s own essay “Shakespeare eine Differenz,” as a textassisting the actors (“Schauspielermaterial”) in comprehending the idea of timein the play when the Deutsches Theater staged The Hamletmachine in 1990 in Ber-lin.57 In addition to Hamlet or Hecuba, Müller was also versed in Schmitt’s laterTheory of the Partisan 58, which he considered a “key text”59, and was familiar withSchmitt’s central notion of the state of exception, claiming to have explored inVolokolamsk Highway (Wolokolamsker Chaussee) such a situation “in Carl Schmitt’ssense”.60 When directing his own drama Mauser (1970), which was never per-formed in the GDR and was only staged in Berlin in 1991, Müller included in theprogramme notes a lengthy passage on brotherhood, enmity and fratricide fromSchmitt’s Ex captivitate salus (1950)61; he was also acquainted with Schmitt’s con-cept of the Katechon and with the main ideas of the latter’s texts on leadership,the Volk and the Nazi movement written in the 1930s.62 In his autobiographyWar without Battle, the title for which he borrowed from Ludwig Renn’s 1957eponymous novel63, Heiner Müller elevated Schmitt – along with Ernst Jünger 64

57 See folder D 677a in the Heiner Müller-Nachlass in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste,Berlin, which documents the production history. It is also worth noting that Jean Jourdheuil, thefirst-ever director to stage Müller’s Hamletmachine, later became the co-translator, with Jean-LouisBesson, of Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba into French (1992).

58 Horst Domdey has suggested that Müller’s essay “New York oder das eiserne Gesicht der Frei-heit” contains traces of Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan (H. Domdey, “Die Tragödie des Terrors.Heiner Müller – letzter Poet der Klassenschlacht,” Theater Heute, Jahresheft 1991, 104), and Jean-Pierre Morel has made a case for Sasportas, one of the protagonists of Müller’s 1979 drama The

Task (Der Auftrag), using words alluding to a passage in the same book (cf. J.-P. Morel, “Out ofjoint: Die Revolutionen in Der Auftrag,” in Heiner Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, 71–2). A frag-ment of the text referred to by Morel also appears, in a rather similar version, in Müller’s Anatomie

Titus Fall of Rome. Ein Shakespeare-Kommentar.59 H. Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 272 (“war ein Schlüsseltext für mich”); cf. also 314.60 “[I]m Sinne von Carl Schmitt” (Krieg ohne Schlacht, 347); see also Müller’s contribution to the 1990

discussion “L’état d’urgence chez Carl Schmitt et La décision chez Bertolt Brecht,” in Brecht après la

chute, ed. W. Storch, Paris: L’Arche, 1993, 33–44.61 See R. Herzinger, Masken der Lebensrevolution. Vitalistische Zivilisations- und Humanismuskritik in

Texten Heiner Müllers, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992, 236 n. 45. On the Schmittian destruction ofthe idea of brotherhood in another play by Müller, The Battle (“Die Schlacht”), see Hans-ThiesLehmann, “Zwischen Monolog und Chor. Zur Dramaturgie Heiner Müllers,” in Ian Wallace etal. (eds.), Heiner Müller : Probleme und Perspektiven. Bath-Symposium 1998, Amsterdam and Atlanta:Rodopi, 2000, 11–26, here 20.

62 Cf. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 25 and 84.63 See G. Gemünden, “The Author as Battlefield: Heiner Müller’s Autobiography War Without

Battle,” in Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and History, ed. G. Fischer, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995,126 n. 7.

64 For a recent comparison of Jünger and Müller and a critical evaluation of the literature on them,see Th. Weitin, Notwendige Gewalt: Die Moderne Ernst Jüngers und Heiner Müllers, Freiburg: RombachVerlag, 2003.

352 Galin Tihanov

and Brecht – to the status of a cult figure; in 1987 he even undertookresearch in the Schmitt archive during a stay in Düsseldorf65 and spoke, a fewyears later, of a “Carl-Schmitt Renaissance”.66 What is more, in an interviewgranted in 1983 Heiner Müller repeated Schmitt’s statement about the impossi-bility of inventing tragic constellations in drama.67 But instead of assertingSchmitt’s defense of authenticity, Müller construes the impossibility of inventionas an appeal for a postmodern extension of intertextuality.68

Thus it should come as no surprise that the very language of the play demon-strates Müller’s disinterest in authenticity. The texture of Hamletmachine, evenmore than that of Müller’s previous dramas, notably Herakles 5 (1964) and Phil-

oktet (1958/64), is deliberately intertextual, with quotations from T. S. Eliot, Pas-ternak, Hölderlin, and Cummings, thinly disguised references to, or paraphrasesof Benjamin, Dostoevsky, Marx, Warhol, Artaud, and some of Müller’s own

65 Cf. Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Heiner Müller oder das Prinzip Zweifel. Eine Biographie, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2001, 510; Manfred Lauermann has witnessed Müller’s enquiries about Schmitt with theSchmitt expert Günter Maschke (M. Lauermann, “Politische Theologie des Klassenkampfs. DieLektüre von Brechts Die Massnahme durch Carl Schmitt – ein soziologischer Versuch,” in Mass-

nehmen. Bertolt Brecht/Hanns Eislers Lehrstück “Die Massnahme”. Kontroverse. Perspektive. Praxis, ed.I. Gellert et al., Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 1998, 58 n. 25); Müller mentions his acquaintance withMaschke and comments on him in “Die Küste der Barbaren,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 25 Septem-ber 1992 (reprinted in Gesammelte Irrtümer, Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag der Autoren, 1994, Vol. 3,168–71). On Müller and the political Right after the Wende, see R. Herzinger, “Geisterbeschwö-rungen im deutschen Augenblick. Heiner Müllers Antiwestlertum und die Neue Rechte,” Sprache

und Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1993, no. 2, 73–85; cf. Müller’s reactions to Herzinger inGesammelte Irrtümer, Vol. 3, 193, 201.

66 “Jetzt sind eher die infernalischen Aspekte bei Benjamin wichtig. Gespräch mit Heiner Müller,”in M. Opitz and E. Wizisla (eds.), Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her. Texte zu Walter Benjamin,Leipzig: Reclam, 1992, 348–62, here 362. Cf. also the numerous brief mentions of Carl Schmittin Heiner Müller’s estate in the Archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (nos. 3812, 4802,4817, 4936, 4942, 5061, 5195).

67 H. Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1986, Vol. 1, 138.68 Müller’s stance with respect to postmodernism deserves attention beyond the scope of this ar-

ticle. At times, he was demonstrably distrustful of the very concept of postmodernism; whenasked what constitutes postmodernism in literature, he replied half-curtly, half-jokingly: “Theonly Postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office”(“19 Answers by Heiner Müller,” in Hamletmachine and other texts for the stage, ed. C. Weber, NewYork: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984, 137); see, however, his address at the1978 MLA Convention in New York, “Reflections on Post-Modernism,” New German Critique,1979, no. 16, 55–7. On Müller and postmodernism, also with relation to Hamletmachine, see e.g.A. Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller,New York: Peter Lang, 1985; N. Zurbrugg, “Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility:Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson”, Modern Drama, 1988, Vol. 31, no. 3,439–53; S. Wilke, “The Role of Art in a Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The The-atre of Heiner Müller,” Paragraph, 1991, Vol. 3, 276–89; S. Taubeneck, “Deconstructing theGDR: Heiner Müller and Postmodern Cultural Politics,” Pacific Coast Philology, 1992, Vol. 26, nos.1–2, 184–92.

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plays (Cement, The Resettler, The Construction). Just like the text, history no longeroperates by producing singular and unique events, but rather by feeding into theplay fragments of past and present (often deliberately discrepant)69 events, whichno longer determine the fate of the characters. Indeed, the very notion of dra-matic personae is radically destabilized. While Schmitt sees in Hamlet the lastmythical figure of our time, Müller denies the status of myth and heroism notjust to Hamlet, but also to all protagonists of German and Central-Europeanhistory alluded to in the play.70 Hamletmachine thus displays the workings of aworn-out machine of history and text-production in a situation where the powerof myth is exhausted and the order of causality is broken and given up. Whileseeking justification in Schmitt’s thesis that tragic conflicts and situations cannotbe invented, Müller goes further to claim that they have always already been nomore than just taken up, modified and played on; he thus radicalizes Schmitt’sthesis of the limits of artistic invention in drama to question the very possibilityof an authentic tragic situation.

For many a contemporary critic in the West, this amounted to opposing theinertia and hypocrisy of political life in East Germany in the late 1970s; in theGDR, Die Hamletmaschine was perceived to be a sign of ideological confusion andcreative fatigue on the part of its author.71 History was no longer called upon tobreak in solemnly into the time of the play, for the very notion of time had nowbecome stagnant, messy, and disillusioned. Twenty years after the crushingof the Budapest resurrection and some ten years after the short-lived PragueSpring, the hope of change appeared to Müller to be no more material than wasHecuba to the invisible cohort of Schmitt’s readers, whom he did not trust toknow who she was.

Thus Müller asserts the irreducible heterology of history in drama, an artisticform that in his recasting can provide neither comfort nor existential solutions,but remains ideally placed to nurture one’s curiosity as to how contingency andnecessity are generically framed and negotiated in art.72

69 Cf. e.g. D. Barnett, “Some notes on the difficulties of operating Heiner Müller’s ‘Die Hamletma-schine’,” German Life and Letters, 1995, Vol. 48, 75–85.

70 Cf. Jean-Louis Besson, “Hellsicht und Undurchsichtigkeit im Werke Heiner Müllers,” in Heiner

Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, 128.71 For the wider context, see M. Hamburger, “Are You a Party in this Business? Consolidation and

Subversion in East German Shakespeare Productions,” Shakespeare Survey, 1995, Vol. 48, 171–84.72 An earlier version of this article was presented at the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory

Colloquium in Dubrovnik and as a lecture in the Department of Comparative Literature at YaleUniversity. I wish to thank Vladimir Biti and David Quint, as well as their colleagues, for the hos-pitality and the ensuing discussions. Research towards this article was supported through anAHRB research leave and a Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.I am also grateful to Prof. Dr. Becker for allowing me access to the Schmitt Nachlass in Düssel-dorf.