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The Mission (play)
Encyclopedia
The Mission: Memory of a Revolution (Der Auftrag: Erinnerungen an eine Revolution), also known as The Task, is a postmodern
drama
by the (formerly East
) German
playwright
Heiner Müller
. The play was written and first published in 1979. Müller and his wife Ginka Cholakova co-directed its first theatrical production in 1980, at the intimate 'Theatre im 3.Stock' studio space of the Volksbühne
in Berlin
(opening on the 16th November). Müller also directed a full-house production in 1982 at the Bochum Theatre
in West Germany.
" dramaturgical
structure
, the play stages intertextual
relationships with a range of classics from the modern theatre, each dealing with the models and ethics
of revolution
ary action: Brecht
's The Decision (1930), Büchner
's Danton's Death
(1835), and Genet
's The Blacks
(1958), among others. The play also uses motifs
from Anna Seghers
' story "The Light on the Gallows" (which Müller had treated in a poem of 1958) and, Müller adds, "biographical
events are involved, a trip to Mexico
among others that was very important for me in connection with the play." In addition to its drama
tic and often self-consciously theatrical
scenes, the play is punctured by several lyrical
and narrative elements. A lengthy narrative section bisects
the play, arriving unmotivated within the immediate terms of a traditional dramatic logic. It is written in the first person
as a 'stream of consciousness' but it lacks a discernible character-assigning speech-heading (this strategy, which leaves the text 'open' or 'writable' in Barthes
' terms, is characteristic of Müller's dramaturgy). Adopting a 'Kafkaesque', subjective
perspective (the outlook, as Brecht put it, "of a man caught under the wheels"), the protagonist
of this section narrates a nightmarish dream sequence
in which time and space become unhinged and dislocated as he travels in an elevator to receive, he anticipates with both pride and alarm, an important mission from the 'boss' ("whom I refer to in my mind" he says with epistrophic
emphasis, "as No. 1"). While recalling Kafka
's similar dislocations of time (in "Give It Up!", for example) and the subjective anxieties and alienated
horrors of the expressionist drama, this section also has a more directly referential
origin; in a prefatory note taken originally from his autobiography
, Müller explains that:
The play's structure, in which these different texts and experiences are articulated, is complex. "[T]he form or dramaturgy
of my plays," Müller explains, "results from my relation to the material" (a relation which Brecht would call a 'Gestus
'). He goes on to suggest that it may be the play's activation of many different historical periods (his own 'post-revolutionary' time, the late twenties of Brecht's Lehrstücke
, that of post-revolutionary France) that has produced its collage-like "deviation from some dramaturgical norm." Müller links his dramaturgical experimentation explicitly with the attempt, given its most programmatic formulation by Strindberg
eighty years earlier, to render a dream-logic in dramatic terms:
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
drama
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of literature written by a playwright, usually consisting of scripted dialogue between characters, intended for theatrical performance rather than just reading. There are rare dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, who have had little preference whether their plays were performed...
by the (formerly East
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
) German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller
Heiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
. The play was written and first published in 1979. Müller and his wife Ginka Cholakova co-directed its first theatrical production in 1980, at the intimate 'Theatre im 3.Stock' studio space of the Volksbühne
Volksbühne
The Volksbühne is a theater in Berlin, Germany. Located in Berlin's city center Mitte on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in what was the GDR's capital....
in Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
(opening on the 16th November). Müller also directed a full-house production in 1982 at the Bochum Theatre
Schauspielhaus Bochum
The Schauspielhaus Bochum is one of the largest and most notable theatres in Germany. It is located in the city of Bochum....
in West Germany.
Dramatic structure
Composed with a "collage-likeCollage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
" dramaturgical
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Dramaturgy is a distinct practice separate from play writing and directing, although a single individual may perform any combination of the three. Some dramatists combine writing and...
structure
Dramatic structure
Dramatic structure is the structure of a dramatic work such as a play or film. Many scholars have analyzed dramatic structure, beginning with Aristotle in his Poetics...
, the play stages intertextual
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
relationships with a range of classics from the modern theatre, each dealing with the models and ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
of revolution
Revolution
A revolution is a fundamental change in power or organizational structures that takes place in a relatively short period of time.Aristotle described two types of political revolution:...
ary action: Brecht
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...
's The Decision (1930), Büchner
Georg Büchner
Karl Georg Büchner was a German dramatist and writer of poetry and prose. He was the brother of physician and philosopher Ludwig Büchner. Büchner's talent is generally held in great esteem in Germany...
's Danton's Death
Danton's Death
Danton's Death was the first play written by Georg Büchner, set during the French Revolution.-History:Georg Büchner wrote his works in the period between Romanticism and Realism in the so-called Vormärz era in German history and literature...
(1835), and Genet
Jean Genet
Jean Genet was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing...
's The Blacks
The Blacks (play)
The Blacks: A Clown Show is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Published in 1958, it was first performed in a production directed by Roger Blin at the Théatre de Lutèce in Paris, which opened on 28 October 1959....
(1958), among others. The play also uses motifs
Motif (narrative)
In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
from Anna Seghers
Anna Seghers
Anna Seghers was a German writer famous for depicting the moral experience of the Second World War.- Life :...
' story "The Light on the Gallows" (which Müller had treated in a poem of 1958) and, Müller adds, "biographical
Biography
A biography is a detailed description or account of someone's life. More than a list of basic facts , biography also portrays the subject's experience of those events...
events are involved, a trip to Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
among others that was very important for me in connection with the play." In addition to its drama
Drama
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance. The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" , which is derived from "to do","to act" . The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a...
tic and often self-consciously theatrical
Metatheatre
The term "metatheatre", coined by Lionel Abel, has entered into common critical usage; however, there is still much uncertainty over its proper definition and what dramatic techniques might be included in its scope...
scenes, the play is punctured by several lyrical
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
and narrative elements. A lengthy narrative section bisects
Bisection
In geometry, bisection is the division of something into two equal or congruent parts, usually by a line, which is then called a bisector. The most often considered types of bisectors are the segment bisector and the angle bisector In geometry, bisection is the division of something into two equal...
the play, arriving unmotivated within the immediate terms of a traditional dramatic logic. It is written in the first person
First-person narrative
First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...
as a 'stream of consciousness' but it lacks a discernible character-assigning speech-heading (this strategy, which leaves the text 'open' or 'writable' in Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
' terms, is characteristic of Müller's dramaturgy). Adopting a 'Kafkaesque', subjective
Subjectivity
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
perspective (the outlook, as Brecht put it, "of a man caught under the wheels"), the protagonist
Protagonist
A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...
of this section narrates a nightmarish dream sequence
Dream sequence
A dream sequence is a technique used in storytelling, particularly in television and film, to set apart a brief interlude from the main story. The interlude may consist of a flashback, a flashforward, a fantasy, a vision, a dream, or some other element. Commonly, dream sequences appear in many...
in which time and space become unhinged and dislocated as he travels in an elevator to receive, he anticipates with both pride and alarm, an important mission from the 'boss' ("whom I refer to in my mind" he says with epistrophic
Epistrophe
Epistrophe , also known as epiphora , is a figure of speech and the counterpart of anaphora. It is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences...
emphasis, "as No. 1"). While recalling Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's similar dislocations of time (in "Give It Up!", for example) and the subjective anxieties and alienated
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
horrors of the expressionist drama, this section also has a more directly referential
Reference
Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
origin; in a prefatory note taken originally from his autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
, Müller explains that:
- "[a]n experience that became a part of this text is one of my approaches to HoneckerErich HoneckerErich Honecker was a German communist politician who led the German Democratic Republic as General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party from 1971 until 1989, serving as Head of State as well from Willi Stoph's relinquishment of that post in 1976....
in the House of the Central Committee, going up in the paternosterPaternosterA paternoster or paternoster lift is a passenger elevator which consists of a chain of open compartments that move slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers can step on or off at any floor they like...
. On every floor a soldier with a machine gun sat opposite the entrance to the paternoster. The House of the Central Committee was a high security jail for the captives of power."
The play's structure, in which these different texts and experiences are articulated, is complex. "[T]he form or dramaturgy
Dramaturgy
Dramaturgy is the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage. Dramaturgy is a distinct practice separate from play writing and directing, although a single individual may perform any combination of the three. Some dramatists combine writing and...
of my plays," Müller explains, "results from my relation to the material" (a relation which Brecht would call a 'Gestus
Gestus
Gestus is an acting technique developed by the German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht. It carries the sense of a combination of physical gesture and "gist" or attitude...
'). He goes on to suggest that it may be the play's activation of many different historical periods (his own 'post-revolutionary' time, the late twenties of Brecht's Lehrstücke
Lehrstücke
The Lehrstücke are a radical and experimental form of modernist theatre developed by Bertolt Brecht and his collaborators from the 1920s to the late 1930s. The Lehrstücke stem from Brecht's Epic Theatre techniques but as a core principle explore the possibilities of learning through acting,...
, that of post-revolutionary France) that has produced its collage-like "deviation from some dramaturgical norm." Müller links his dramaturgical experimentation explicitly with the attempt, given its most programmatic formulation by Strindberg
August Strindberg
Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography,...
eighty years earlier, to render a dream-logic in dramatic terms:
- "I have always been interested in the structure of stories within dreams, how it is free of transitions, and associations are overlooked. The contrasts create acceleraton. The whole effort of writing is to achieve the quality of my own dreams. Independence from interpretation, too. FaulknerWilliam FaulknerWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
's best texts have this quality."
Works cited
- Benjamin, WalterWalter BenjaminWalter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
. 1973. Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London and New Yorl: Verso. ISBN 0902308998. - Kafka, FranzFranz KafkaFranz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
. 1994. Collected Stories. Ed. and trans. Gabriel Josipovici. Everyman's Library Ser. London: David Campbell. ISBN 1857151453. - Müller, HeinerHeiner MüllerHeiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
. 1979a. The Task. In Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. Ed. and trans. Carl Weber. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. ISBN 0933826451. p. 81–101 - Müller, HeinerHeiner MüllerHeiner Müller was a German dramatist, poet, writer, essayist and theatre director. Described as "the theatre's greatest living poet" since Samuel Beckett, Müller is arguably the most important German dramatist of the 20th century after Bertolt Brecht...
. 1979b. The Mission. In Theatremachine. Ed. and trans. Marc von Henning. London and Boston: Faber, 1995. ISBN 0571175287. p. 59–84. - Müller, Heiner. 2001. A Heiner Müller Reader: Plays | Poetry | Prose. Ed. and trans. Carl Weber. PAJ Books Ser. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801865786.
- Strindberg, AugustAugust StrindbergJohan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, novelist, poet, essayist and painter. A prolific writer who often drew directly on his personal experience, Strindberg's career spanned four decades, during which time he wrote over 60 plays and more than 30 works of fiction, autobiography,...
. 1991. Author's Note to A Dream PlayA Dream PlayA Dream Play was written in 1901 by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. It was first performed in Stockholm on 17 April 1907. It remains one of Strindberg's most admired and influential dramas, seen as an important precursor to both dramatic Expressionism and Surrealism.-Plot:The primary...
. In Strindberg: Plays Two. Trans. Michael Meyer. London: Methuen. ISBN 041349750X. p. 174. - Weber, Carl. 1984. Note on The Task. In Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. by Heiner Müller. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984. ISBN 0933826451. p. 82–83