Carl Weber

A Picaresque Tale: East Germany's Last Act

he Berlin Wall was opened up in the late evening of November 9, 1989. This was an event that was totally unexpected, from Washington to Berlin to Moscow and places beyond. It happened, according to the press and later official statements, due to a press conference during which a prominent member of East Germanys ruling Socialist Unity Partys leadership, Giinther Schabowski, made a remark indicating that citizens of the East German Republic would henceforth be allowed to travel freely to the West. Within the hour, thousands appeared at the checkpoints where West Berlin could be entered. The border guards, without instructions from their superiors, felt compelled to open the gates, and West Berlin experienced a deluge of citizens from the eastern part of the city. The events of that chaotic night have still not been completely sorted out. What is certain is that this event heralded the end of the Communist system in Central and Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union.

Periods of precarious adjustment: Some notes on the theater's situation at the beginning and after the end of the socialist German state

The current restructuring of the German theatrical establishment, especially budget cutbacks, are threatening to bring an end to the long history of socially activist German theater, and particularly the theaters of the former GDR. Meanwhile, the availability of formerly unobtainable archival material has made possible new research into the roots of GDR theater. The Soviet‐inspired campaign against Formalism in the early 1950s victimized writers and composers who were themeselves dedicated Marxists, as in the Lucullus and Faustus affairs involving Brecht, Dessau, and Eisler. The latter case, which ended unhappily with the near‐silencing of Brecht and Eisler, is traced in detail. The contemporary scene, despite ideological changes, resembles the unstable situation of the early GDR as a period of readjustment and uncertainty as to the future.

Heiner Müller's Lysistrata Experiment

Among the manuscripts left at Heiner Müller’s death, a fragment was discovered, several handwritten pages that most probably were jotted down in 1970, according to Frank Hoernigk, the editor of Müller’s collected works published by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. The text first appeared in the January 2001 issue of the Berlin theatre magazine, Theater der Zeit, under the title Lysistrate 70, and the same year in volume 4 of the Suhrkamp edition.

Heiner Muller: Last Poems: 1992-95

T hese poems, written between 1992–1995 and printed here for the first time in English, were among those published posthumously in the volume Heiner Müller: Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), which contains all the poetry the author wrote during his life. Frank Hörnigk, the editor of the volume, stated in his preface that Müller “found his own language almost exclusively in poems during the last decade of his life.” And Müller dated nearly every poem during those years, a change from his previous habit of rarely if ever dating his texts.