Heiner Müller and the ‘unwirklicher Hauptstadt’

Andrei Kiselev profiles the GDR’s most controversial playwright…

“It’s a privilege for an author to see the fall of three states during one lifetime. The Weimar Republic, the fascist state, and the GDR,” wrote Heiner Müller in his autobiography. He lived through the collapses of Weimar and the Nazis elsewhere, but experienced the GDR almost in its entirety in Berlin, unwirklicher Hauptstadt.

Heiner Müller was born in Eppendorf on 9 January 1929. He spent the pre-war years in Eppendorf, Bräunsdorf, and Waren where he was enlisted for Reichsarbeitsdienst in 1944. After the war he returned to Waren and later moved to Frankenberg where his father was appointed Bürgermeister. After his Abitur he worked at Landratsamt and as a library assistant.

Müller arrived in Berlin for the very first time shortly after the war, in a coal car. “My first Berlin image was the Anhalter Bahnhof, 1946. The old building was still there, parts of it.” He spent several days in Wilmersdorf and met the writer Müller-Osten, probably his first literary connection there. “Müller-Osten at his typewriter and the bombed-out Anhalter Bahnhof, that was Berlin.”

In these early Berlin days, apart from writing, Müller’s main activities were looking for money or work and adjusting to big city life: “In Saxony when we saw a girl we came up and flirted. And I did exactly that at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. I chose the one I liked, but she said: “Mein Herr, you’re on the wrong track.” That was Berlin for me.”

Heiner Müller’s later move to Berlin was connected with two escapes: his father Kurt’s escape from the East to the West, and Heiner’s own escape from his girlfriend’s pregnancy. His father, an SED functionary, fled to avoid the growing pressure of the Soviets. When Müller found out his father was in Berlin he seized the opportunity: “So off I went, because I wanted to get to Berlin, among other things. I was done with Frankenberg, and that was reason enough.”

This time he came to stay. Kurt left for the West while Heiner chose the East. His escape was no success, though: bumping into his pregnant girlfriend at a railway station forced Müller to cut his single life in Berlin short. After a pre-arranged wedding ceremony in Kleinmachnow he moved into a furnished room in Pankow where his wife paid him occasional visits. As a Charité nurse she lived in a nurses’ residence and had many night shifts, which made their married life complicated. In 1953 they divorced, only to get married again half a year later.

Heiner Müller labeled his early life in Berlin as “nomadic” and “the time of preparation and waiting.” He had no money, no place to live, and no residence permit. He stayed with his school friend near Ostkreuz, a district where the notorious Gladow gang operated. “My first Berlin impression was the S-Bahn, especially the Ring, where one could take the same train through Berlin and around Berlin. The first thing that caught my eye: Leninallee, Zentralviehof, and Stalinallee stations in succession on the eastern side of the Ring, the ominous sequence.”