{"id":97,"date":"2016-04-13T14:35:23","date_gmt":"2016-04-13T14:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/?p=97"},"modified":"2023-06-03T08:43:25","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T08:43:25","slug":"from-heiner-mullers-death-in-berlin-to-christoph-schlingensiefs-death-in-venice-metaphors-and-spectacles-of-illness-on-the-occasion-of-a-nobel-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/from-heiner-mullers-death-in-berlin-to-christoph-schlingensiefs-death-in-venice-metaphors-and-spectacles-of-illness-on-the-occasion-of-a-nobel-prize\/","title":{"rendered":"From Heiner M\u00fcller\u2019s Death in Berlin to Christoph Schlingensief\u2019s \u201cDeath\u201d in Venice: Metaphors and Spectacles of Illness on the Occasion of a Nobel Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vinia Dakari [1]<\/sup><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we speak of peace in Europe we speak of peace in war\u201d<\/em>
\nHeiner M\u00fcller<\/em><\/p>\n

The European Union has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for six decades of \u201c[contribution] to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe\u201d (\u201cNobel Peace Prize Awarded to European Union\u201d). The Norwegian Nobel Committee justified their choice: \u201cThe stabilizing part played by the EU has helped to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace\u201d (\u201cEuropean Union\u2013Facts\u201d). The \u201cdreadful suffering\u201d in World War II demonstrated \u201cthe need for a New Europe,\u201d beginning with the reconciliation of Germany and France after 1945 and later established after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the settling of ethnically-based national conflicts on what has been widely perceived as the European continent.<\/p>\n

Exposing the precarious transition from the utopia of European unity to the dystopia of European Union, Eurosceptic politicians questioned the timing of this award, occurring in the middle of the \u201cbiggest [economic and social] crisis\u201d in the history of the EU, which \u201chas made the Eurozone look more divided and fragile than it has for decades\u201d (\u201cEuropean Union\u2013Facts\u201d). This controversial award prompts a debate on whether the EU truly envisions \u201ca unity in diversity,\u201d as Anthony Smith states, or is a postmodern mutation of premodern nationalism under the rubric of a globalization-induced uniformity (70).<\/p>\n

Such an inner split has often been associated with an illness that devours the body\/nation\u2014in all its political allegory and thickness of flesh\u2014from within. Once experienced as self-destructive fascism, this disintegration is lately perceived as a cannibalistic recession in the South threatening the North with aggressive metastases.<\/p>\n

What essentially connects M\u00fcller and Schlingensief is that they both spoke of guilt not just before a German, but also a universal audience. M\u00fcller confessed in 1990: \u201cI feel guilty for Germany. And what surprises me most about recent events is not the tumbling of the wall but the resurgence of nationalism, racism and anti-Semitism. . . . A reunited Germany will make life unpleasant for its neighbors\u201d (qtd. in Holmberg). Schlingensief similarly approached illness as \u201ca symptom of what society has suppressed, of something [i.e. the National Socialist past] that breaks out because it can no longer be restrained\u201d (Malzacher 188). Helen Fehervary sees this guilt as \u201cthe pervasive cancer of German history\u201d that destroys the body (politic) from within (86). Susan Sontag accordingly states that, when attached to social and political criticism, the illness metaphor \u201c[is] used to judge society not as out of balance but as repressive\u201d (74).<\/p>\n

Heiner M\u00fcller\u2019s and Christoph Schlingensief\u2019s political alertness, radical theatrical visions, and personal experiences with terminal cancer provide rich ground for such a discussion. In M\u00fcller\u2019s case, the diseased body of German history consumes itself until it completely runs out of either flesh or ideology in Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> (1953-1971). In Schlingensief\u2019s case, the diseased\/dead body of the performer, in all its subjective, phenomenal terror, is politicized through its (dis)appearance in his posthumous award-winning exhibition at the 54th<\/sup> Venice Biennale (2011).<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller\u2019s Death in Berlin<\/em>: Cancer as Metaphor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Heiner M\u00fcller\u2019s Germania Death in Berlin <\/em>was written between 1956 and 1971, under the impact of ideological, historical, and political transformations. There is always a major conflict at the center, one that he described as the \u201crebellion of the body against ideas, or more precisely, the impact of ideas, and of the idea of history, on human bodies,\u201d especially the wounds they inflict on them (Germania<\/em> 50). It is no wonder then that the spectacle of post-human, quasi-mechanical figures that return from the dead of Germany\u2019s nationalist past to haunt a faltering socialist present, and eliminate true revolution until they dissolve, like a cancer-stricken body, into nothingness, was pressing on a raw nerve to the ideologically bankrupt post-war East German regime. The play was thus banned from stage and print in the GDR until 1988, two years before the reunification of Germany.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcller constructs his post-ideological universe by drawing on \u201cthe German schizophrenia\u201d (Hamletmachine<\/em> 28). The idea of rupture is obvious in the questioning of German identity and ensuing ideological conflict and internal violence as the play\u2019s thematic core; in the structural rifts conveyed through temporal discontinuities; in the way plot is fragmented in several short and mainly unrelated scenes; in dense intertextuality conveyed through a large cast of characters borrowed from German history, mythology, literature, and folklore; in spectacular violence conveyed through the violent spectacles of dismembered bodies, obscene creatures, terrorist acts, disease and death; and ultimately, in spectatorial alienation induced by these semantically dense and schematically unpresentable scenes.<\/p>\n

What the fragmentary nature and the intense physicality of the play indicate is a body \u201cunfinished,\u201d mechanical, and diseased, one that \u201creflects the historical development of the GDR in a transitional phase\u201d (Schivelbusch and Fehervary 104). This political debate is primarily grounded in the body-in-pain in all its pervasiveness and urgency, at once suffering and pain-inflicting, violated and violating, cannibalized and cannibalistic. This body is choreographed into a spectacle of terrorism, \u201cthe terror of Germany\u201d in M\u00fcller\u2019s words, on both hermeneutic and aesthetic levels. Sue Ellen Case maintains that, if \u201ctrue terrorism celebrates failure, unclear distinctions, error and confusion,\u201d then the cancer death of a communist worker in the final scene attests to \u201cthe barbarian within\u201d the ultimate form of internal disorder (72). The repeated failure and the systematic suppression of reaction are associated with the concept of \u201cGerman misery,\u201d the inability of the German people to sustain a successful revolution and a futile wait for a progress that is never realized (von Dassanowsky-Harris 26). Cancer then becomes an apt metaphor for the \u201caspects of [German] history [that] have been repressed for too long\u201d (M\u00fcller, Germania<\/em> 24).<\/p>\n

In Germania<\/em>, M\u00fcller attempts a reviewing of German history from medieval times to the early 1950s and the crisis in the German working class movement in a GDR setting, so as to unearth the true causes of its current social and political disintegration. To this end, he constructs paired scenes, with each first scene referring to Germany\u2019s historical or mythical past, and its double to East German reality. The failure of the peasants\u2019 war against Prussian monarch Frederick II in the sixteenth century appears as the precursor of the defeat of the Spartacist proletarian uprising in 1918 (as seen in the first scene, \u201cThe Street 1\u201d). The battle of Stalingrad (in the \u201cHomage to Stalin 1\u201d scene) becomes \u201ca metaphor for all futile historical battles,\u201d culminating in the most prominent ideological conflict in modern European history: Hitler\u2019s fascism against Stalin\u2019s communism (Ganter 126). The Workers\u2019 Strike in the streets of East Berlin in 1953 and its brutal suppression by the Soviet army (in \u201cThe Workers\u2019 Monument\u201d scene) signify the ideological disintegration within the communist movement. Dictatorial figures such as Caesar and Napoleon as man-eating zombies are paired with the Nibelung warriors, creatures found in Germanic myths, thus ascribing mythological depth to endless intra-European hostility. Another pair of scenes \u201cThe Brothers 1\u201d and \u201cThe Brothers 2\u201d dramatizes fratricide as \u201can old German situation\u201d as M\u00fcller said (Germania<\/em> 23). The conflict here is not one of protagonist against antagonist, but one of \u201cthe self at war with the self,\u201d which is also the ruling principle in cancer metaphors (Sontag 16).<\/p>\n

\"The
The bone merchant in \u201cHomage to Stalin 2\u201d scene from Germania Death in Berlin<\/em>. Photo: Silke Winkler<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The motif of profound self-destruction culminates in the eleventh scene, a pantomime with the title \u201cNightplay.\u201d As stage directions indicate: \u201cA person stands on stage. He is larger than life-size, perhaps<\/em> a puppet. He is wearing posters. His face is without a mouth\u201d (Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> 34). The puppet\/person is mocked by an offstage agent while trying to reach a bicycle\u2014a symbol of historical progress throughout German history (Ganter 213). After tearing his own legs and arms off, the puppet contemplates his despairing condition, his scattered limbs and the useless bicycle, lamenting his last lost chance to a successful revolution. Then, \u201ctwo Beckett-spikes at eye-level close in from left and right,\u201d and, with two movements of his head, the person\/puppet blinds himself. With lice crawling out of the empty sockets, the person screams \u201cand the mouth originates with the scream\u201d (Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> 34).<\/p>\n

This scene poses several challenges, as it is almost impossible to be staged, except if recited or cinematically projected as a surreal animation. Similar to Samuel Beckett\u2019s Act Without Words I <\/em>and II<\/em>, \u201cNightplay\u201d dramatizes the existential struggle of the self against a hostile universe (Kalb 166). Another obvious association can be made to Edvard Munch\u2019s painting \u201cThe Scream,\u201d where the \u201csonorous vibration\u201d of pain becomes visible through concentric circles on the surface of water (Jameson 63). As the physical mutilation of the puppet coincides with the crippled ideology it represents, however, M\u00fcller\u2019s absurd stage breaks from Beckett\u2019s \u201chistory-less world\u201d (Kalb 165). Dassanowsky-Harris interprets it as German self-destruction on a symbolic level, and considers it to be the play\u2019s most critical point (16). Even though \u201cNightplay\u201d seems to stand in the play unpaired, it is in fact the abstract double of the cancer-stricken worker\u2019s death throes in the final scene.<\/p>\n

Exploring the association between body and voice in torture, Elaine Scarry states that \u201cthe goal of the torturer is to make one, the body, emphatically and crushingly present by destroying it, and to make the other, the voice, absent by destroying it\u201d (49). Here, however, with the body gradually disappearing and the voice violently emerging, the analogies of defeat are reversed. The appearance of voice construed as a rebirth of identity has to come violently. But with no functional limbs, this rebirth is instantly deferred. Unable to be sufficiently substantiated into a revolutionary scheme, this suggestive cry is congealed into a \u201cmaterial signifier in isolation,\u201d just like Munch\u2019s scream: produced by a subject without ears, it is lost in the concentric circles of the water and into nature (Jameson 75).<\/p>\n

In this all-but-Cartesian universe of \u201cNightplay\u201d death is not an irreversible state governed by deterministic temporal frames, but rather an erratically expanding state of protracted liminality to the point of becoming a permanent condition. Arpad Szakolczai postulates that \u201cthe closing stages of a world war, especially the process of reconstruction that starts after such massive warfare, can be conceived as a rite of reaggregation. This is the moment to assess guilt and mete out punishment, but also to heal wounds, look towards the future\u201d (215). The pain as performed by the non-yet-human puppet articulates the horror of incomplete transition, the lack of effective restoration of order and peace, and, hence, M\u00fcller\u2019s own disillusionment with the failed ideological apparatus of the GDR. Caught in transition, the M\u00fcllerian puppet, like German communism, and the ever-expanding contours of Europeanization that were to emerge from the ruins of the Berlin Wall, represents what Johannes Birringer perceives as the redefinition of Europe: \u201ca highly complex work in progress\u201d (28).<\/p>\n

The final scene, \u201cDeath in Berlin 2,\u201d breaks away from surrealism and acquires real-life proportions. Hilse, a communist worker previously confined in a GDR prison, and whose opposition to strike is indicative of an ideological split within communist socio-politics, is dying of cancer. For Hilse, who is trapped in the past, cancer represents the impasse occasioned by his inability to reconcile his political beliefs with the new circumstances: \u201cI\u2019m only half of myself, cancer ate the other half. And if you\u2019re asking my cancer, things are just fine\u201d (M\u00fcller, Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> 36). No more safely framed by a body, the subject fails to maintain his ideological integrity. His incomplete body not only signifies Germany as a physically and politically split nation, as the Berlin wall would later prove, but it also suggests an ideological division within the East and the misappropriation of communist ideals, turning this aspiring experiment into a dystopia, even among its devotees, like M\u00fcller. The parade of cannibalistic and cannibalized bodies is suggestive of the battle within Hilse\u2019s body, a mise-en-abyme<\/em> of the self at war with the self. \u201cWe are a party my cancer and I\u201d Hilse says, and the rotten part could be either side of the coin, but always integral to the self until there is \u201cno flesh for the cancer of myth to feed on,\u201d Fehervary comments\u2014an ideological, dramatic, and symbolic stasis (92).<\/p>\n

Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> chronicles a profound disillusionment as it anticipates a dark prospect of the destruction of all utopias, M\u00fcller\u2019s own included. His personal predicament was \u201cthe two souls dwelling in [his] breast\u201d (Hamletmachine <\/em>15)\u2014the two Germanies. Embracing both sides, M\u00fcller admitted \u201cstanding with one leg on each side of the wall\u201d as the only way for him to go (Germania<\/em> 32-33). Sontag\u2019s analogy of cancer as constant transit between two worlds, as \u201ca dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick,\u201d rhymes thus with M\u00fcller\u2019s personal and political split: he died of cancer in 1995; and he was well known as an East German playwright with immense success in the West.<\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s \u201cDeath\u201d in Venice: Cancer as Spectacle<\/strong><\/p>\n

If M\u00fcller\u2019s Germania Death in Berlin<\/em> chronicles the quest for a national identity before the fall of the wall, Christoph Schlingensief\u2019s art showcases the same conundrum after reunification. While the wall represented the apex of modernist oppositions alongside a profound identity crisis emanating from such polarities, its fall did not provide any answers. It was some time around the foundation of the European Union soon after the fall of the wall and shortly before the Balkan massacre was to take place. This is the period of precarious unity, of globalized economy and its double standards and of a loosely defined peace among nations. And while warfare in its WWII conception has been (almost) eliminated, \u201c[the] widening gap in living standards between the prosperous North and the impoverished, chaotic, and self-destructive regions of the South\u201d have been some of the new political challenges, according to Jurgen Habermas (59).<\/p>\n

Christoph Schlingensief, West German filmmaker, performer, and director, also died of cancer in 2010, while working on an installation that would represent Germany in the 2011 Biennale in Venice. Early in his career, his work had been all but appropriate to be acclaimed as representative of his country, as he was criticized as an anarchist, while his art was initially rejected as pubertal and trashy. His early film work tackled contemporary taboos (i.e. Nazism, obscenities, disabilities, and sexual perversions), the guilt intertwined with German cultural memory, as well as the chain of events that led to the division and reunification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is evident in his Germany Trilogy in the early 1990s: 100 Years of Hitler<\/em>, The<\/em> German Chainsaw Massacre,<\/em> and Terror 2000<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Schlingensief did not glorify the fall, however, which he believed to be another victory of colonization on economic grounds. On a European\/global scale, he was interested in the West\u2019s apathy to violence as this is occasioned by postmodern media culture. At the same time, he questioned conventional aesthetics and experimented with the effect of alternative spaces on spectatorship. During his half-satirical\/half-serious art-actions, he would invite passers-by to vote for the deportation of asylum seekers in Austria, or he would propose to become the leader of a political party, or even declare his intention to attack politicians. Alternatively, he would board a ferry in New York in order to \u201csink the garbage of German history,\u201d which he carried in an urn, into the waters of the Hudson River. For what audience was he performing this ritual? Unaware tourists? The ever-present media? Or himself? Baring theatricality to its bones, he would thus energize the transformative potential of the gaze.<\/p>\n

\"CHANCE
CHANCE 2000 on the ’98 election campaign. Photo: Schlingensief<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anticipating the precarious unity of European states under principles of economic manipulation rather than meaningful support, Schlingensief belonged to a generation of politically alert artists who used the post-wall East German bankrupt socialism to \u201cmake\u2014as malignantly as possible\u2014the disease in the national body of Germany the subject matter of theatre and to create feelings of uncertainty,\u201d Frank Castorf said. In his pre-cancer work, therefore, illness becomes a symptom of what society and the individual have suppressed, bringing together the represented with the real. After his diagnosis with lung cancer in 2008, his preoccupation with sickness and death even crossed the borders of the metaphorical and essentially became a lived experience, one that he should not remain silent about. Schlingensief presented the unpresentable, the fear for the stranger in him. It was this existential as much as socio-political split this retrospective exhibition of the German pavilion at the Biennale negotiated.<\/p>\n

The German pavilion, a stone neoclassical \u201ctomb of history\u201d that was built in 1909 and redesigned by the Nazis, is a \u201csuspicious representational building,\u201d Schlingensief admitted. In it, he was working on what would prove to be his remaining life\u2019s commitment: the creation of an opera village in Burkina Faso, West Africa. It would consist of teaching facilities, recreation sites, and accommodation. The pavilion would therefore familiarize spectators with this project in its celebration of the Third World.<\/p>\n

\"Performer
Performer interacting with a video projection of Schlingensief in Via Intolleranza II, Theatertreffen 2011, Berlin, May 2011. Photo: David Baltzer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As those plans were disrupted by Schlingensief\u2019s death, the curator of the German pavilion decided to devote the exhibition to his career as symptomatic of a double-edged suffering, Germany\u2014the political\u00ad\u2014and cancer\u2014the personal (Diez and Reinhardt). The exhibition therefore combined the three milestones of Schlingensief\u2019s art: on the right wing there were projections of his early splatter films about Germany. The left wing was dedicated to his operation in Africa, featuring the projection of a filmed expedition to the construction site. Images of peaceful African landscapes were juxtaposed with scenes from his play Via Intoleranza<\/em>, in which Schlingensief himself, and, after his death, his filmed double, expressed his concerns about Africa and its pillaging by the West. Finally, the main hall was occupied by the sets of his 2008 Fluxus oratorio \u201cA Church of Fear vs. The Alien Within.\u201d The church-like setting dealt with his illness and the concomitant turn in his art from boldly political to painfully personal. During the mass\/performance, Christ-like Schlingensief would distribute the Eucharist to the crowded auditorium saying \u201cThis is not my body. This is your body.\u201d He would thus cross the borders of performance, by reminding those taking part of the dying performer and the incontestable reality of their own deaths.<\/p>\n

\"Christ-like
Christ-like Schlingensief distributing the Eucharist in The Church of Fear, September 2008. Photo: David Baltzer bildbuehne.de<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The day the pavilion\u2019s doors opened, however, the altar was empty of live actors. In their place were the artist\u2019s x-rays and a hospital bed. A domineering image of a beast with red lungs complemented the funereal atmosphere, while projections of the artist as a child counterposed those of him towards the end of his life, ravaged by illness. The main screen above the altar projected scenes from The Current State of Things<\/em>, where he was heard dictating disheartening medical reports. Deliberately attacking the audience\u2019s comfort zone and blurring the lines between \u201chonest sharing, exhibitionism, [and] emotional blackmail\u201d (Malzacher 191), Schlingensief posthumously made spectatorship a painful process by awakening the fear of one\u2019s own encounter with death.<\/p>\n

Being a heavily haunted space, the German Pavilion thus becomes at once an historical metaphor, a performative site, and a commodity that transpires and expires before an audience. The filmic reproduction of the artist\u2019s life, art, and suffering creates the same enclosed universe seen in Germania Death in Berlin<\/em>. Although at a first glance the pavilion\u2019s stage is empty of actors, the stage is the pavilion itself, as an international crowd of visitors populates it. Space is literally and figuratively given to them to mourn the national (German) and private (Schlingensief\u2019s) tragedies exhibited. Yet, as the author\/artist is literally and figuratively dead, spectators find themselves confronted by an unprecedented freedom. The spectacle is released from all meaning, allowing for a limitless perception and reception, as spectators gravitate toward the semi-ontological cleft caused by the absent artist.<\/p>\n

Schlingensief\u2019s performative absence subsequently poses a challenge on both aesthetic and hermeneutic grounds: what remains of performance once its generic constituents cease to apply? Does the death of the performer (actual and represented) equal the death of the spectacle? Since the ontological precondition of performance is the co-presence of actor and spectator, Being-ness is substantiated through the exposure to others, and \u201csociety becomes the spectacle of itself,\u201d Jean-Luc Nancy maintains (67). By means of their participation, spectators also turned themselves into spectacles and were left to complete the unfinished artwork on their own. Within this liminal space, spectators are clearly apart from the performer, as they are alive while he is not, but also in communion with him, as they are actively taking part in the spectacle he consciously created for them before he died. Negotiating the borders between the symbolic and the lived, Schlingensief haunted the already haunted site not as a man-devouring apparition, like M\u00fcller\u2019s ghost of history, but as the very body of history in transition, reflecting the very idea of Europe as an ongoing project.<\/p>\n

\"Schlingensief\u2019s
Schlingensief\u2019s posthumous exhibition at the German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 4 June \u2013 27 November 2011. Photo: Roman Mensing, artdoc.de<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Schlingensief thus gave a literal dimension to his aesthetics of the unfinished. According to Barthes, \u201cto give a text an Author is to impose limits on that text . . . to close the writing\u201d (147). \u201cThe birth of the reader,\u201d then, must occur \u201cat the cost of the death of the Author.\u201d This new orientation can no longer be personal; the reader, according to Barthes, is one \u201cwithout history, biography, psychology\u201d (148). Schlingensief\u2019s posthumous meta-art in Venice, as much as M\u00fcller\u2019s Germania Death in Berlin<\/em>, therefore, can be re-appreciated for their capacity to invite new readings and affect a timeless and universal audience.<\/p>\n

Politicizing the Personal: M\u00fcller\u2019s and Schlingensief\u2019s Open Endings<\/strong><\/p>\n

The fact that both M\u00fcller and Schlingensief died of a condition they had previously aestheticized intensifies the experience of reception. Sontag\u2019s response to the question of the aesthetic quality of cancer was downright negative, considering it to be too obscene, to woefully linked to undecorative dying to leave any space for etherialization and poetic sensibility. Interestingly, it was through a series of poems that M\u00fcller chose to speak about his own illness. In one of them, he wondered: \u201cWas I proud of my unvanquished\/Tumor\/One moment long flesh\/of my flesh\u201d echoing the ambivalent embrace of death anticipated by his ending to Quartet<\/em>: \u201cwe\u2019re alone now cancer my lover.\u201d (\u201cI Chew the Sick Man\u2019s Diet Death\u201d 109; Hamletmachine<\/em> 118). Schlingensief\u2019s reaction to cancer similarly exudes the pride of a megalomaniac, when he once said: \u201cI am convinced I\u2019ll get cancer . . . like Heiner M\u00fcller\u201d and later: \u201cI sometimes think that perhaps I instigated it somehow\u201d (qtd. in Malzacher 198). \u201cCould cancer be the new romantic disease?\u201d Malzacher asks. Or is it purely the outcome of a long repression of national and personal guilt, as Sontag would have been quick to notice?<\/p>\n

These aesthetic and political negotiations of the represented and the real as concurrent states disclose the ongoing appeal of the works of M\u00fcller and Schlingensief. And yet, they shared much more than their ideological opposition, obscene aesthetics, and private suffering. They both sought to escape from their country\u2019s (and Europe\u2019s) poisonous polarities\u2013and, symbolically, from their dying bodies. \u201cI\u2019m waiting for the Third World . . . this big waiting room, waiting for history\u201d M\u00fcller once said (Germania<\/em> 15, 33). Schlingensief likewise wanted the Opera Village to be a prosthetic lung, a place where he could breathe: \u201cThe opera house must be built out of those materials that can be found in Africa. That is the last breath I want to take.\u201d<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barthes, Roland. \u201cThe Death of the Author.\u201d In Image, Music, Text<\/em>, translated by Stephen Heath, 142-48. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
\nBirringer, Johannes H. \u201cA New Europe.\u201d PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art <\/em>25, no. 3 (2003): 26-41.
\nCase, Sue Ellen. \u201cDevelopments in Post-Brechtian Political Theater: The Plays of Heiner M\u00fcller.\u201d Diss. U of California, Berkeley, 1981.
\n<\/strong>Dassanowsky-Harris, Robert von. \u201cThe Dream and the Scream: \u2018Die Deutsche Misere\u2019 and the Unrealized GDR in Heiner M\u00fcller\u2019s Germania Tod in Berlin.\u201d New German<\/em> Review<\/em> 5 & 6 (1989-90): 15-28.
\nDiez, Georg and Nora Reinhardt. \u201cDeath in Venice: Resurrecting Schlingensief at the Biennale.\u201d Spiegel Online<\/em>. Mar. 06, 2011. Accessed Apr. 5, 2014.
\n<http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/zeitgeist\/death-in-venice-resurrecting-schlingensief-at-the-biennale-a-766151.htm<\/a>>.
\n\u201cEuropean Union (EU) \u2013 Facts.\u201d Nobelprize.org<\/em>. Nobel Media AB 2013. 5 Apr. 2014. <http:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/peace\/laureates\/2012\/eu-facts.html<\/a>>.
\nFehervary, Helen. \u201cEnlightenment or Entanglement: History and Aesthetics in Bertolt Brecht and Heiner M\u00fcller.\u201d New German Critique<\/em> 8 (Spring 1976): 80-109.
\nGanter, Theresa M. Searching for a New German Identity: Heiner M\u00fcller and the <\/em>Geschichtsdrama<\/em>. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008.
\n<\/span>Habermas, J\u00fcrgen. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays<\/em>. Translated and edited by Max Pensky. Cambridge: MIT P, 2001.
\nHolmberg, Arthur. \u201cIn Germany, a Warning from Heiner M\u00fcller.\u201d New York Times<\/em>, Jul. 08, 1990.
\nJameson, Fredric. \u201cPostmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.\u201d New Left Review<\/em> 146 (1984): 53-92.
\nKalb, Jonathan. The Theater of Heiner M\u00fcller<\/em>. New York: Limelight, 2001.
\nMalzacher, Florian. \u201cCitizen of the Other Place: A Trilogy of Fear and Hope.\u201d In Christoph Schlingensief:<\/em> Art Without Borders, <\/em>edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, 187-200. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2010.
\nM\u00fcller, Heiner. Germania Death in Berlin<\/em>. 1971. Translated by Dennis Redmond. 5 Apr. 2014. <http:\/\/members.efn.org\/~dredmond\/Germania.PDF<\/a>>.
\n—. Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage<\/em>, Edited and translated by Carl Weber. New York: Performing Arts Journal P, 1984.
\n—. Germania<\/em>, Edited by Sylvere Lotringer. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990.
\n—. \u201cI Chew the Sick Man\u2019s Diet Death.\u201d \u201cHeiner M\u00fcller Last Poems: 1992-95.\u201d Translated by Carl Weber. PAJ<\/em> 65 (2000): 105-10.
\nNancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural<\/em>. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
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\nSmith, Anthony D. \u201cNational Identity and the Idea of European Unity.\u201d International Affairs<\/em> 68, no 1 (1992): 55-76.
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\nUmathum, Sandra. \u201cTheatre of Self-Questioning: Rocky Dutsche,<\/em> \u201968,<\/em> or the Children of the Revolution.\u201d In Christoph Schlingensief:<\/em> Art Without Borders,<\/em> edited by Tara Forrest and Anna Teresa Scheer, 57-70. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2010.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Vinia_photo\"
\n<\/a>[1] Vinia Dakari<\/strong> is currently completing her doctoral thesis on illness aesthetics in contemporary cancer plays and performances (Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece). She has taught undergraduate courses on drama and critical writing. Her work has been presented at international conferences, and her essays have appeared in academic journals and edited collections. She is currently researching on Narrative Medicine techniques in theatre and performance, which she has implemented during workshop presentations and fieldwork in cancer hospitals.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2015 Vinia Dakari
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
\nCreative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vinia Dakari [1] \u201cWhen we speak of peace in Europe we speak of peace in war\u201d Heiner M\u00fcller The European Union has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for six decades of \u201c[contribution] to the advancement of peace and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":299,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays","","tg-column-two"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2016\/04\/Vinia_photo.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7rA5b-1z","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1050,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/1050"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/11\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}