Worlds Elsewhere (18 page)

Soon after the war, Martin moved to the Netherlands and began his first opera. The text he chose was the same one Mozart had never completed:
The Tempest. Der Sturm
was finally finished in 1955, and premiered at the Vienna State Opera the following year. By that time, unable to get Shakespeare's luminous verse out of his head, Martin had already completed separate settings of the five songs sung by Ariel that punctuate the play.

They were, I thought, his masterworks. To some of the uncanniest, most piercing lyrics in the English language, Martin composed music of rare absorption and wonder, suspended somewhere between the mysticism of late Ravel and the diamond clarity of Stravinsky. All five songs were remarkable in their way: Martin took childish delight in giving the basses a doggy ‘bow-wow' in ‘Come unto these yellow sands'. But for me the finest was the second, a setting of words sung by Ariel to Ferdinand, words of agitated and haunting beauty:

‘The ditty does remember my drowned father,' responds Ferdinand in the play, flabbergasted by what he is hearing. Martin made the image absolute, draping undulating high chords in the female voices over a melodic line of phantom stillness – a shadowed corpse sunk deep beneath the rippling waves. At the close, he left the music deliberately unresolved, eerie tintinnabulations echoing around the choir before subsiding into silence.

I found it profoundly moving. As they finished, I attempted to hide my embarrassed snuffling from my neighbour.

Afterwards, with a couple of hours to spare before my train to Berlin, I drifted back through town. The afternoon was still and
soft; barely anyone was on the streets. As I retraced my steps across Königsplatz, I noticed something I had failed to the day before. What had been the Führerbau – the building in which the Munich agreement was signed, granting Hitler a swath of Czechoslovakia in 1938 – hadn't been razed along with the Temples of Honour, as I'd assumed: it was right here, massive and mournful, a monumental neoclassical structure in limestone the colour of sour cheese. There was a blank gap on the facade where a bronze eagle had hung, and telltale scars from shell damage. I had seen the building, but not realised what it was.

As I walked up the steps I passed a group of ballet dancers in bubblegum-pink cardigans and legwarmers, reclining in the spring warmth. From a half-open window there came the sound of a violin sawing away. After the war, the place had been given to the University of the Performing Arts. The room where Hitler had once given dictation was now a rehearsal studio.

For all the agonising among Munich's historians about how to incorporate the past into the present, this was one monument no one had needed to update or change. Art had got its revenge. I thought it by far the finest memorial in town.

IN BERLIN, I SHUTTLED BETWEEN APPOINTMENTS.
I went to the Freie Universität to meet a graduate student who had done research into productions of
The Merchant of Venice
after the Holocaust. I rattled out to Spandau on the S-Bahn to visit the actor Norbert Kentrup, part of the very first troupe to perform at the not-quite-completed reconstruction of the Globe theatre in London, and heard about his return visit to play Shylock, as a German, in English. I spent a few hours in the archives at the Deutsches Theater, looking at the promptbooks of Max Reinhardt, whose experimental, high-tech productions achieved legendary status in Germany in the 1910s. (After rejecting an offer of ‘honorary Aryanship', Reinhardt departed for the US in 1938.)

Still on Nazi duty, I spent a doleful morning in the Staatsbibliothek on Potsdamerstrasse, rootling among the personal papers of Gustaf Gründgens, Goebbels's favourite Hamlet, for any clue as to why that play had proved so popular. The curator and I drew a blank: the files from the 1930s until the late 1940s had mysteriously disappeared.

I went over to the Schaubühne theatre in Charlottenburg several times, to see a show and re-interview the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier, whose deconstructed, post-postmodern
Hamlet
I'd hugely admired when I'd seen it in Berlin and London a few years earlier. The production had since become a global sensation, performed nearly 200 times and travelling to locations as varied as Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Dublin – even Helsingør, like the English Comedians centuries before. They had recently taken
Hamlet
to Ramallah in the West Bank, Ostermeier told me, and conducted workshops at the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp. There they had found Prince Hamlets by the dozen – frustrated and angry young men battling with the question of revenge, not knowing whom, if anyone, to trust.

What did he think German Shakespeare was all about? ‘I don't think the Germans are good at Shakespeare,' he deadpanned.
‘Unser
Shakespeare? It's stupid, completely stupid.'

By the time I returned to the Deutsches Theater, this time to see a performance, I felt I was clutching at straws. A friend of a friend, Ramona Mosse, had kindly offered to talk about her work on postwar political theatre; we'd settled on combining this with a new production of
Coriolanus.
The show was even more self-consciously baffling than the productions in Munich: acted by five female performers wearing wigs to a soundtrack of corny eighties pop music, its logic largely eluded me.

One reason it was liberating to encounter Shakespeare in translation was that he could be the best of both worlds: both ancient and modern, both canonical and contemporary. The Romantic Schlegel-Tieck now being deeply un-hip in Germany, most theatres re-translated him each time they mounted a new production. Given everything I'd discovered about culture in the Third Reich, a suspicion of received wisdoms and the classical canon was understandable. But was this still Shakespeare? I felt we'd gone over the edge.

In all the interviews I'd done in Poland and Germany – twenty, perhaps more – one line kept boomeranging back: Ruth von Ledebur's suggestion that Shakespeare seemed to crop up at moments of political crisis or change. That was true in 1771, and true again more powerfully in 1864; it was grimly true during the second world war, when Shakespeare had been dragooned into propaganda battles on both sides, Allied and Axis. It had happened again during the cold war, with two different ideologies of German Shakespeare eyeing each
other over the Berlin Wall. But why? Why Shakespeare? Why
Hamlet
most especially?

Ramona paused for a second over her beer. ‘You are writing about Heiner Müller, yes? I haven't heard you mention him.'

I knew Müller's name and a little of his reputation as an East German playwright from my conversation with Roland Petersohn in Weimar, but he hadn't been high on my list. He was so little-known in Britain that I had never even seen one of his plays.

Ramona looked playful. ‘Ah, then you should get to know his work. He had some interesting things to say about Shakespeare. And
Hamlet
.'

This was an understatement, it transpired. Over a fifty-year writing career, most of it based in East Berlin, Müller had adapted numerous classics, among them Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex,
Laclos'
Dangerous Liaisons
and various texts by Brecht, but had returned insistently – it appeared compulsively – to Shakespeare, a playwright to whom he was often compared (one critic called him ‘a sort of socialist William Shakespeare'). Müller's 1971
Macbeth After Shakespeare
blurred the roles of director and adaptor to an unsettling degree, jettisoning the Witches, cutting the text to a machine-gun twenty-three scenes and compressing the action into a cycle of never-ending violence. Despite its focus on the suffering of Scotland's peasants, the production landed the playwright in trouble with GDR officials for its ‘historical pessimism'.

But this was as nothing, Ramona explained, to the reaction that greeted Müller's most infamous Shakespeare adaptation, 1977's
Die Hamletmaschine
(‘Hamletmachine'), which was outlawed by the East German authorities for being ‘decadent, anti-humanistic and pessimistic'. It was eventually premiered in Brussels in 1978. Allusive, enigmatic, savagely compressed,
Die Hamletmaschine
was a landmark text of ‘post-dramatic' theatre, nine pages of cryptic fragments, shorn of any plot, which might (or might not) bear some relation to Shakespeare. It was now considered a classic.

Ramona's eyes were shining. ‘It's an amazing text, a poem as much as a play. It can be broken up and performed in any way: it's like the ultimate distillation of
Hamlet
.'

The tale had a twist. Müller, far and away the most famous playwright of the GDR, had always wanted to stage
Die Hamletmaschine
in his homeland. In 1988, invited by the Deutsches Theater, the very theatre in which we'd been sitting earlier that evening, to direct
Hamlet,
Müller had decided to do so – on condition that he would also be allowed to
stage
Die Hamletmaschine,
as a kind of play-within-the-play. Permission had eventually been forthcoming. The production became known as
Hamlet/Maschine.

Nervous about how to direct the greatest play of all – a text, furthermore, that had been nagging at him for decades–Müller dithered. Initially he wanted to cast five separate Hamlets, one actor per act, until it was pointed out no theatrical agent would agree to it. Working closely with his designer, Erich Wonder, he nonetheless developed a concept every bit as epic, in which the production would open in a kind of ice age and slowly ripen into a scene of scorching apocalypse, as if at the end of history. Müller was determined that none of Shakespeare's text would be cut, being played at terrifically slow speed, so it was planned to stage the show over two evenings. Eventually that plan, too, was abandoned, but the performance still lasted a colossal seven and a half hours, beginning at 4 p.m. and ending near midnight.

As so often in German Shakespeare, history was waiting in the wings. When Müller and his cast went into rehearsals in August 1989, few realised that the GDR was beginning to topple. Yet when Hungary removed its border restrictions later that month, thousands of East Germans fled. Rallies sprang up in many cities, notably Leipzig, where police refused the GDR leader Erich Honecker's orders to clamp down on protestors chanting
‘Wir sind das Volk!'
(‘We are the people!'). When the fortieth anniversary of the GDR came round on 7 October, many feared that tanks would be on the streets. Miraculously, they failed to materialise.

Müller – a committed socialist who wanted to reform East Germany, not end it – did his best to plough on with rehearsals, but actors and technical staff kept disappearing to participate in protests. Gradually it became clear that, whatever they did on stage, it would be interpreted as a comment on a failing, flailing regime. On 4 November 1989, nearly a million people crowded into Alexanderplatz, a mile or so east of where Ramona and I were sitting, to demand change. Five days later, on 9 November, people began to stream across the opened Berlin Wall.

When
Hamlet/Maschine
finally had its debut the following March, a week after the GDR's first free elections, many saw the production as a requiem for a failed state. In the final days of rehearsals Müller, acknowledging that there was no way of keeping politics at bay, suggested that the invading Norwegian prince Fortinbras–who entered wearing a stiff business suit – was ‘the ghost of Deutsche Bank'.

Ramona's smile was enigmatic. ‘So I don't know whether this answers your question. Maybe there are no answers. I don't think this is what Müller intended, to put Hamlet on stage as the GDR ended. But it is true – Shakespeare has a habit of cropping up in Germany at strange moments in our history.'

Deutschland ist Hamlet
yet again: I hadn't reckoned on the phrase being so absolute. As a ten-year-old I'd visited Germany myself on a family holiday just after reunification, and walked around saucer-eyed at the battered Trabants cluttering the streets and the new white satellite dishes mushrooming on decayed apartment blocks. Eager for a piece of history, I'd lifted a chunk of cladding from an abandoned watchtower near the border, and told myself it was as good as having my very own piece of Wall.

I sorely wanted to find out more about Müller,
Hamlet
and
Die Hamletmaschine.
But I had a flight to London the next morning.

‘Then come back. How long to Berlin? An hour and a half, two hours?' Ramona rolled her eyes. ‘Pffft, you British. You're so terrible at travelling.'