Μάουζερ, στο Άττις [με αναφορά στους Μπύχνερ και Μπρεχτ]

Σταχυολογώ από παλιά δημοσίευση, αφού παρακολούθησα την καλή παράσταση του Τερζόπουλου στο Άττις.

Mauser is a particularly significant play, not only within the context of Heiner Mulller's work itself but within socialist drama as a whole. There is an obvious parallel to be drawn with Brecht's Measures Taken, the play which is the classic(and up to now most radical) statement on the contradictions of a communist ethic. The theme of Measures Taken, namely the tragedy of yet another failure of the revolution, occurs in other socialist plays as well: the revolution fails because it introduces its humanity prematurely (and this humanity legitimizes it as revolution). Although Vishnevsky's "Optimistic Tragedy" approaches this differently than Friedrich Wolf's "The Sailors of Cattaro", both plays treat the same problem: revolution or revolutionary action fails again because of premature humanity. In Measures Taken the tragedy of the revolution is radicalized in that the annihilation, brought about in the other plays by the enemy, is undertaken or done in advance by the comrades themselves.
The young comrade in Measures Taken, who endangers the revolution because of his premature humanity, is killed by his comrades so that the revolution will not fail again as it did in other tragedies of the revolution. Thus, destruction from "without" turns into destruction from "within",whereby the revolution loses its pre-Leninist innocence. In Measures Taken the Leninist agitators kill the young comrade because he is prematurely humane, and they kill him so that they can realize the materialistic humanity of the revolution, the humanity which is possible in reality. The inhumanity required (to kill the young comrade) then reemerges as humanity in the form of solidarity: the tenderness and love with which they kill.

This would be Brecht's statement on the contradictions of a communist ethic in 1930. Heiner Muller hooks up to Brecht in that he incorporates his level of consciousness in Mauser and goes beyond this by reflecting the historical experience and knowledge derived since 1930. Mauser begins where Measures Taken left off. There are so many obvious allusions to Brecht's play that one could, in fact, speak of a text about a text. The difference between Mauser and Muller's previous plays is evident in the subject matter alone. Neither a realistic topical play nor a parable dealing with Greek mythology or Roman history, the material of Mauser can best be described as "Soviet Classicism": an episode from the Russian Civil War. With this reorientation of his subject matter, Muller achieves two things which were lacking in his previous plays: the possibility of portraying "great" collisions and of grounding them in socialist history. Great collisions and tragic endings would not have been typical of his plays about industrial production. And, while Muller was able to construct a great collision and a tragic ending in his mythological parable "Philoktet", he did this at the expense of historical concreteness. By drawing on material from the "heroic period" of socialism, Muller is able to unite the great collision with historical concreteness.

Mauser is a relatively short text consisting of sixteen typescript pages. It has two individual roles, character A and character B, as well as a chorus. Like Measures Taken, this play presents a trial. The chorus informs A that he must be shot for his weakness (at this point his weakness is not specified). A is a professional revolutionary appointed by the party (the chorus) to take charge of executing enemies of the revolution. B then appears (although stage directions are not provided, individual characters apparently step forward from the chorus to speak, as in Measures Taken).
B is A's predecessor as head of the execution squad. B was shot because he also had shown weakness. Out of compassion he had released three peasants who were "unwitting enemies of the revolution." B steps back, and the deliberation of A's case continues. It is reported and enacted so that we see how A has avoided B's mistake of compassion. He kills in the service of the revolution. For him killing is "work, the same as all other work;" and yet, "unlike all other work." After a time he no longer feels capable of this work. He asks the chorus to be relieved. The request is denied for reasons which he accepts: the work has to be done "by this person or the next." The work of killing continues. A kills out of a consciousness that follows the
chorus' directives for action: because the human being does not yet exist, human beings have to be killed so that the new human being might come into existence. But A cannot hold up under the work of killing. In the end he kills a human being who is not an enemy of the revolution but is a human being. Therefore, A is to be shot, with his consent, because of this weakness-as an "enemy of the revolution."
This suffices for the content. What place, then, does Mauser have in the development of Heiner Muller's work? How does it develop the problematic nature of Measures Taken?

Mauser can definitely be characterized as an extremely radicalized continuation of the plays of industrial production such as "Lohndrucker", "Korrektur" and "Bau". These early plays demonstrate how labour for the building of socialism produces alienated personalities in those who sustain it. Muller thereby points to what is new in socialism and what at first appears as negative: because socialism is interested in the whole human being-in contrast to capitalism which is only intetested in human labour power-it destroys the whole human being in the initial period of building socialism.
The work of the professional revolutionary A in Mauser, which consists in killing enemies of the revolution, is a radicalized form of the work which alienates the individual in Muller's plays of industrial production. A experiences this alienation as the nullification of humanity while performing the work of killing. This is confirmed by the chorus: "You are no longer / Your labour has consumed you. You must disappear from the face of the earth. / The blood with which you have defiled your hand /When it was a hand of the revolution / Must be washed away with your blood / From the name of the revolution which needs every hand / But no longer yours."
The tool of the professional revolutionary A is the revolver. It is no accident that the words revolver and revolution have a common root nor that the particular type of pistol, the Mauser, appears in the title and thus sets the basis for the play. In the Russian Civil War the Mauser represented a status symbol for the Soviet commissar and the professional revolutionary.
In Mayakovsky's "Left March" the Mauser is personified as "Comrade Mauser." Besides the allusion to the heroic period of the Soviet Union, the title allows for other possible interpretations. The word Mauser ("molting") can serve as a metaphor for revival through decay. And finally, it is possible to see the word Mauser as an anagram for the word Massnahme ("measures taken"), since the references to Brecht's play are so obvious and the import of Mauser can be assessed only against the background of Measures Taken.
In Measures Taken, as in Mauser, the chorus is the judicial authority that makes a critique of the revolutionary work of individuals and sets forth a concept of correct revolutionary work-although it is not shown to be involved in this work. Mauser shifts the line of critique aimed at the young comrade (in Measures Taken) to the position taken by the chorus of the three agitators in that same play. The concept of praxis, not discussed in Measures Taken, is treated in Mauser and particularly reflected in the case of character A. The brief appearance of character B establishes the continuity from Measures Taken to Mauser. B is A's predecessor and was killed because his spontaneous humanity made him an enemy of the revolution. B represents a reappearance of the young comrade, not in order to deal with the problem of premature humanity in a new way, but in order to fix the point of departure of the discussion from which Mauser is to proceed. From this point on, Mauser summons the central figure of Measures Taken as the "predecessor" and thereby makes it clear that the main question concerns the "successor." B's premature humanity is not made problematic again. The conclusion reached in Measures Taken appears in Mauser, as alesson learned which continues to be part of praxis.
Now let us turn to the new perspective on A, that is, the position represented in Measures Taken by the three agitators. The necessity of revolutionary Realpolitik had not been problematic for Brecht, in view of the urgent need to question the idealism of the bourgeois left within the left movement in 1930; however, it is problematic for Muller in 1970. Does Mauser then have to be termed a pessimistic or a fatalistic play because both positions-that of premature humanity and that of the revolutionary consumed by practical revolutionary work-are now portrayed as disastrous for the revolution? Mauser can be considered a fatalistic play only if one expects drama to present didactic and binding directives for correct political action. If, on the other hand, Mauser is understood as a dialectical exercise in the Brechtian sense, then this play proves to be a great optimistic tragedy, where in truly dialectic fashion the optimistic moment is made possible only through tragedy.
An example: the chorus states that A has "abandoned" himself, for "the dead plagued him no longer" (that is, he no longer made himself conscious of the fact that each individual victim was a human being); the same chorus continues with the consolation: "The revolution will not abandon you. Learn to die. / What you learn makes our knowledge greater. / Die in learning. Don't abandon the revolution." While these lines might be interpreted as the party's cynical negation of the individual, in actuality, they express the solidarity of the collective which absorbs the individual who has failed in his social purpose. The revolutionary who has been consumed by his work is "taken in" with just as much solidarity, love, and tenderness
as the young comrade in Measures Taken whose humanity made him an enemy of the revolution. The optimistic moment is at once a tragic moment: revolutionary work which foregoes humanity in the service of the revolution and is not viewed as problematic in Measures Taken now reveals itself as disastrous. This is tragic from the point of view of the individual who was given no other alternative. It is optimistic, however, when viewed from the position of the chorus: the collective. The chorus which in Measures Taken had liquidated humanity for reasons of Realpolitik now directs itself against the necessary inhumanity of Realpolitik, and does so in order to sustain the consciousness of communist humanity. If Measures Taken and Mauser are to be considered tragedies, then it must be added that they are tragedies of individuals. The young comrade and character A are tragic figures because, as individuals, they are incapable of social action which consists of a unity of the contradictions humanity/inhumanity. These contradictions, which must be unified for social action, destroy individuals because individuals in their particularity can never bring about this unity. In the chorus, on the other hand, the unity of contradictions is sustained. Hence, while the development and intensification of the problematic taken from Measures Taken becomes a greater and more intensified tragedy for the individuals in Mauser, for the chorus it is an optimistic step forward; and, while the chorus in Brecht's Measures Taken merely corrects the premature humanity of the young comrade, the chorus in Muller's Mauser corrects both the premature humanity (character B) and the inhumanity resulting from revolutionary work (character A). Muller's chorus represents the unity of contradictions in that it makes a critique of humanity and a
critique of inhumanity. In view of the position of historical consciousness in Measures Taken, this must be understood as an optimistic step forward, for the chorus as representative of the party (and the party as representative of communist Realpolitik) no longer appears solely as the agent of the necessary inhumanity as well-presenting these dialectical opposites as equally justified and implementing them with equal radicalism.
The comparison of Measures Taken and Mauser shows how Muller is able to present a more advanced level of historical consciousness on the basis of more advanced historical development and historical knowledge. Moreover, it shows how problems which do not arise or are only hinted at in Measures Taken can now be fully unfolded, because historical knowledge and experience, which in 1930 were only in a state of germination, have since reached maturity.

If this kind of historical development can be traced in the plays of Marxist writers in 20th century, it would be fruitful to consider the approach taken in presenting the tragedy of a revolutionary by a bourgeois writer of the 19th century. The dialectics of the revolution, which consists in losing revolutionary goals on the way to these goals, was portrayed for the first time by Georg Buchner in "Danton's Death" (1835). Buchner's image of the revolution as Saturn devouring his own children refers to those revolutionaries who, as individuals , believe that the goals of the revolution have been realized without understanding that revolution for all the people has not yet been achieved. Thus, they become enemies of the revolution. Danton is this kind of tragic revolutionary. His epicureanism is objectively counter to the revolution; however, given his historical perspective, Buchner can only portray the objective necessity of revolution for all the people, which goes beyond Danton's concept of revolution, by
means of contradiction. Buchner's relationship to his hero Danton is ambivalent. On the one hand, he is sympathetic toward him (some of Danton's statements are taken literally from Buchner's letters) because, in contrast to Robespierre, the ascetic, his enlightened epicureanism represents an aspect of the revolution that has been realized. Within the context of the play as a whole, however, Danton appears in a critical light.
But Buchner does not make a conscious critique of his character; his critique can be likened to Balzac, the Royalist, who is critical of aristocratic characters with whom he sympathizes ideologically. Danton's epicureanism and revolutionary passivity take the form of ennui . In his refusal to flee, Danton's ennui manifests itself as an unexpressed willingness to die. This unexpressed willingness to die becomes in Brecht and Muller a conscious understanding and acceptance of death by the revolutionary who has lost his function.
Another point for comparison is provided by the positions antagonistic to the hero. In Buchner's play opposition is posed on the one hand by Robespierre and St. Just; on the other, by the people. Georg Lukacs has shown that Danton is proven wrong not so much by Robespierre as by the mass scenes. The people in Buchner's play are fickle and purposeless and by no means represent a conscious historical force motivating the revolution. Nevertheless, the condition of the people in Danton's Death is so desperate that Danton's epicureanism and his contempt for the masses are exposed as treason against the revolution which, of course, is supposed to bring about the liberation of the people. Here again, an objective truth is portrayed, behind the author's own back as it were. Lukacs understands the role of the people in Danton's Death as the role of the chorus, "which supplies the individual tragedies with a social base."
Given its confusion and purposelessness, the people's chorus in Buchner's play can in no way assume the form of the chorus and can only indirectly assume its function . In Brecht's and Muller's plays this chorus materializes itself as the conscious representation of social truth, that is, the unity of contradictions. The development of historical consciousness from Buchner to Brecht and Muller can be described in short as the development from Jacobin to Marxist-Bolshevist consciousness. Buchner and the heroes of the French Revolution did not have a materialistic consciousness of the class character of the revolution, of revolutionary work, etc. This knowledge is a result of historical development through Marxism and Leninism; as the comparison of Biichner's aesthetic method with Brecht's and Muller's shows, it leads to a reversal of values unleashing a new range of possibilities. For Buchner the individual hero clearly takes priority over the people. He is the central point of the play, and hence by contrast, the people appear in a limited light. The individual hero, however, already bears the stigma of passivity and ennui.

For Brecht and Muller the relationship between individual heroes and the people has been reversed. The deficiency which Buchner ascribed to the people now characterizes the individual heroes who must justify themselves and their actions before the chorus. The ennui and underlying death wish of Danton, the revolutionary, who deserts the revolution, have become transformed in Brecht's and Muller's plays. Here revolutionaries recognize how they have hindered the revolution and consciously affirm the necessity of their own liquidation by the revolution. As chorus, the people become representatives of this social truth.


[Source: New German Critique, No. 2, Special Issue on the German Democratic Republic,(Spring, 1974), Optimistic Tragedies: The Plays of Heiner Müller, pp. 104-113]