Analyzes not just Müller's texts but also the theatrical events that emerged from them, showing that from the beginning of his career Müller tried to create democracy both within and outside the theater.

Reflections on the laws of history from the standpoint of someone straddling the Berlin Wall. Heiner Muller, East German author of Hamletmachine and Medea, was the preeminent German successor of Bertholt Brecht at the end of the twentieth century. In this collection of essays, stories, and interviews conducted by Sylvere Lotringer, Muller reflects on the laws of history from the standpoint of someone straddling the Berlin Wall. Muller saw the wall as both repression and protection of his compatriots from the inevitable triumph of capitalism. His work evokes the wit and compactness of Brecht, with an added psychotropic dimension. Haunted by World War II, Muller was a leading figure in European contemporary literature, whose writing anticipates a future beyond the bipolarity of twentieth-century politics.

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it. Neoliberal Gothic explores that world, considering the ways in which the exponential increase in the cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. These include the triumph of free market economics, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of global biotechnologies, the increasing power of transnational corporations, the US-led 'War on Terror' and the global financial crisis of 2008. Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (from the Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which the representational strategies of the gothic mode are ideally suited to an exploration of the dark side of neoliberal enterprise.

The revised and enlarged edition of the first comprehensive English-language study of the work of Heiner Muller, widely regarded as Bertolt Brecht's spiritual heir and as one of the most important German playwrights of the twentieth century. "Kalb's quest to try and penetrate some of the surfaces of what he calls this 'glacially infuriating writer' is engrossing, and he negotiates his own ambivalences and reservations about Muller as theatre-maker and man with both honesty and adroitness...As a piece of scholarship [this] is a breathtaking tour de force." -Mary Luckhurst, New Theatre Quarterly

A volume of plays of the world-renowned author, Heiner Müller.

Is postdramatic theatre political and if so how? How does it relate to Brecht's ideas of political theatre, for example? How can we account for the relationship between aesthetics and politics in new forms of theatre, playwriting, and performance? The chapters in this book discuss crucial aspects of the issues raised by the postdramatic turn in theatre in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century: the status of the audience and modes of spectatorship in postdramatic theatre; the political claims of postdramatic theatre; postdramatic theatre's ongoing relationship with the dramatic tradition; its dialectical qualities, or its eschewing of the dialectic; questions of representation and the real in theatre; the role of bodies, perception, appearance and theatricality in postdramatic theatre; as well as subjectivity and agency in postdramatic theatre, dance and performance. Offering analyses of a wide range of international performance examples, scholars in this volume engage with Hans-Thies Lehmann's theoretical positions both affirmatively and critically, relating them to other approaches by thinkers ranging from early theorists such as Brecht, Adorno and Benjamin, to contemporary thinkers such as Fischer-Lichte, Rancière and others

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.