




































American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences  

Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

ISSN 2643-0061   E-ISSN 2643-010X 

Published by American Center of Science and Education, USA 

 

9 

 

 

The German Shakespeare 
 

 

 

Oumeima Mouelhi  PhD 

Assistant Professor 

University of Al Baha, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 

E-mail: oumeima777@gmail.com 

 

 

Abstract 

Over The past four hundred years, Shakespeare has played a significant role within a European framework, 

particularly, where a series of political events and ideologies were being shaped. The birth of the nation during the 

late 18th and 19th centuries, the first and second world wars, the process of European unification during the 1990s, 

are a case in point. This part challenges the idea of an all-encompassing universal Shakespeare by demonstrating 

that Shakespeare and his plays transmitted across different histories, languages, and traditions meant something 

significantly different in these geographical contexts. Rejecting the existence of a universally absolute and singular 

Shakespearean meaning, I attempt to demonstrate that Shakespeare is always what he is imagined to be in a cultural 

and historical context. The various local and national appropriations and the universality of the cultural icon, 

“Shakespeare”, clash in the daily practice of interpreting, performing, and teaching his plays. This paper discusses 

Shakespeare’s appropriation and performance in East Germany. It focuses on the theatrical production and its 
cultural context in this country. 

 

Keywords: Shakespeare, East Germany, Appropriation, Performance, Context. 

In Berlin, the presence of Shakespeare’s plays was particularly dominant during the first years of the Nazi period, 

but he was a popular author during the war as well. In Germany, Shakespeare has been identified with national 

aspirations, the creation of national literary canon, and the mythology of a German national literature. He shares the 

fate of the German nation, from that Hamlet-like condition before German unification to the dismemberment after 

1945 of the Reich created in 1871. Germans in both parts of the once divided nation had all along been using the 
same text for their theatrical performances and their reading of Shakespeare. The great “classic translation by 

August Wilhelm Schlegel, itself a living proof to many on this side of the channel including Coleridge, Hazlitt, and 

Lamb” attest to the fact that, “Shakespeare legitimately achieved the status of a timeless German classic” (Habicht, 

1995, P.  3). 

From the beginning of the Weimar Republic in 1919 to the end of the German Democratic Republic 

(GDR), seventy years later, the German theatre was caught up in and often self-confidently raised its voice in the 

political discourse. For almost 150 years since the unique Schlegel translations at the turn of the 18th century, 
Shakespeare had been regarded as a German author (Marston, 1999, P. 132). The intense preoccupation with 

Shakespeare of practically all German writers, the classical and the Romantic movements had turned him into a 

landmark in German intellectual history. During the course of the 19th century, his plays had found increasing 

acceptance of the German stage and were by now the most performed of all dramatists, German or foreign. By the 

20th century, Shakespeare was an established fact in the German cultural history on many levels of German cultural 

life. Marston (1999) added that: 

It is against this background of Shakespeare’s undoubted significance to Germany’s cultural 

identity that the argument about his acceptability for a theatre at war has to be seen by the 
chauvinists whose customary greeting “Golt  Strafe England!” (May God punish the British!) 

registered the general anger at Albion’s perfidy (P. 132). 

In Germany, Shakespeare was considered as an icon. Nowhere was he more cherished than in Germany. Nowhere 

were his works better received and made alive than in this spot of the world. Germans revered Shakespeare and paid 

tribute to him through the frequent performance of his plays. According to Marston (1999),  

mailto:oumeima777@gmail.com


www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

10 

 

 

There is no nation, not even the British, which is more entitled to call Shakespeare   its own way 

than Germany. Shakespeare’s characters have become part of our world, his soul  has become one  

with  ours:  and  though he was born  and  buried  in  England, it  is  in  Germany  that  he  is  truly  

alive (P. 83). 

In the collective German memory, Shakespeare was part of the German theatrical repertoire that no other nation 

would dare to have. Shakespeare, though English of birth, was perceived more as German than English in the eyes 

of many by Germans.  

And above all Shakespeare! He is more frequently performed in Germany during a single year 

than during a whole decade in his native country. And, what is more important, he is incomparably 

better performed than over there. Our Shakespeare! Thus, we may call him, even if he happened to 
be born in England by mistake. Thus we may call him by right of spiritual conquest. And should 

we succeed in vanquishing England in the field, we should, I think, insert a clause into the peace 

treaty stipulating the formal surrender of William Shakespeare to Germany (Wilson, 2000, P. 89). 

The German theatre does not only, in Hamlet’s words, “show the very age and body of the time, his form and 

pressure” (III.2.22-23), it also, in Schiller’s words, functions as “the nation’s moral academy” (Puttenham, 2005, P. 

154). The German theatre entered the political arena of the 20th century during war time. Under the impact of the 

great traumatic blows to German identity, theatre and politics were locked in a close and usually antagonistic 

relationship. Shakespeare was at the heart of the struggle. His significance for the development of German literature 
and intellectual life in the 18th and 19th centuries is well known. In the 20th century, it was the theatre which referred 

to Shakespeare as ultimate proof and final arbiter. For German directors and dramatists, Shakespeare’s work was 

both “infinite continent and black hole” (Marston, 1999, P. 125). For Bertlolt Brecht and Heiner Muller (1989), 

Shakespeare was a “creative spur and trauma in one” (53). Muller’s conclusion that, “we have not yet come into our 

own as long as Shakespeare writes our play” hints at German dilemma in theatre and politics  (Ibid).  At a time when 

the political landscape of the country was changing rapidly leaving in most people’s minds a lasting doubt as to the 

reality of change, great numbers of people were fashioning themselves anew, creating for themselves different social 

roles, different associations and even more appropriate personalities. There was an undeniable gain in that the 

theatre had freed itself of the shadow of the classic. Socialist realism was defined as, “the art of the truth of life 

comprehended and interpreted by the artist from the point of view of devotion to Leninist party principles” (James, 

1973, P. 121). 

Muller proved uncompromising to the rigid ideological and aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism and 

worked to undermine it. In this, as in other dominant 20th century contexts, Shakespeare has been an active political 

presence resistant to attempts to be turned into an icon. Carried through history by each new generation of directors 

and audiences to this very day, his theatre has remained a source of hope, inspiration, and challenge. It was in these 

circumstances that the idea of “nostrification”, as coined by Franz Dingelstedt, was born. As early as 1858, 

Dingelstedt announced that the appropriation of Shakespeare had to be a “common property of the nation” and that 

Germany was in a position to “nostrify” him completely (Johnson, 2006, P. 249). 1 Derived from the adjective 

“proprius” meaning “one’s own”, appropriation can be examined both in its diachronicity and synchronicity A 
diachronic overview would survey how Shakespeare has been appropriated at different historical times (for example, 

the Shakespeare of the Restoration, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, etc.,), whereas a synchronic perspective would 

demonstrate the specific ways and areas in which this appropriation takes place (for instance genres, art forms, 

different ethnic communities, and ideologies of “recruiting Shakespeare”). Appropriation by other languages and 

cultures is one of the ways of “nostrification” giving expressions of linking Shakespeare to nation-formation from 

Eastern and Central European cultures  (Croyden, 2002, P. 69). 

As “world phenomenon”, Shakespeare is nobody’s property; to appropriate his work for the stage is an act 
of cultural assimilation which is demanding in more than one way. First of all, the bard remains in whichever form, 

“a literary value”, as Michael Bristol (1996) notes in his Big Time Shakespeare, that any literary value makes sense 

only on the condition that the worth of literary works is seen in terms of gifts rather than of commodities. And as 

gifts, “great literary works entail particularly complex and onerous obligations” (P. 144). With these provisions in 

                                                             
1 Christa Johnson, German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty First Century (Newark: University of Delware Press, 

2006), p. 249. 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

11 

 

 

mind, the concept of “appropriation” entails a sense of Aneignung. In other words, aneignunug, connotes more than 

taking a cultural work for one’s own purposes only. Rather, the obligation is to give the work our own, our best, 

most thoughtful response which concord with our own changing world. During the Nazi regime, for instance, 

Shakespeare was even used in wartime newspaper cartoon to underline the Reich’s cultural credits. Such Nazi 

appropriation was not a futile one. The Hitler youth sponsored a festival where all the history plays were performed 

at successive nights. Nothing like that had been attempted before anywhere in the world, as the organisers proudly 
pointed out. In the major playhouses, too, some of the Reich’s most memorable productions were Shakespearean: 

Werner Krauf’s Richard III; the rival interpretations by Rudolf Forster and Grundgens as Richard II, Grungens, as 

Hamlet; Heinrich George as Falstaff, or Krauf’s infamous Shylock (Wolfganga, 1989, P. 120).  Schiller’s famous 

phrase that Shakespeare was a, “moral institution” in the Third Reich reflected all too accurately “Germany’s moral 

collapse” (Ibid)  Gergart Hauptmann’s address “Deutschland Und Shakespeare”2, or “Germany and Shakespeare” of 

1915, elucidates some degree of identification with Shakespeare’s hero, Hamlet that few other cultures would dare 

to imitate (Delabastita, 2008, P. 270). There is something in the German political landscape that makes the figure of 

Shakespeare, and of Hamlet in particular, adequate as a national symbol. Under the exceptional conditions in the 

Germany of the twenties, it was imperative for all the arts to relate to the present.  

Most artists felt that there was no going back to the worn out formula that overtook Europe of the WWI. In 

fact, developing new means of expression and helping to construct a contemporary ethos were part of the process.3 

The trend to appropriate Shakespeare to the contemporary climate in politics and art was vehemently cherished. 

Remembering Goethe’s exhortation that every heritage must be reacquired by a deliberate effort, many actors and 

playwrights needed to repossess Shakespeare as a living heritage. Their inspiration was basically educational: a 

theatre directed to preserve a classical body of works in a time of flux and sensational re-evaluations. A large section 

of people favoured this moderately conservative treatment of the classics and supported efforts that went under the 

name of “kulturpflege”, or “Shakespearepflege”, i.e., the devoted cultivation and transmission of a valuable heritage 

(Marston, P. 162). The politics of Shakespeare appropriation looms as large as in most theatrical productions of 

Shakespeare in the European countries of the former Soviet bloc. The East German theatre, more often than not, 
tended to play out a type of cultural politics characterised by a desire to discover something new within and beyond 

the dominating Marxist analysis of history.  In these circumstances, it was not surprising that audiences, as 

Lawrence Guntner pointedly notes, “came to expect, and party cultural functionaries came to suspect that 

Shakespeare productions might just contain gift-wrapped critiques of the East-German version of the socialist 

system” (Guntner and Mc Lean, 1998, P. 3). 

The stage came to assume the role of a public forum where cultural ideology, and by extension the socialist 

claims and problems of the state, could be staged, debated, but also criticized. In some socialist countries in post-war 

Eastern Europe and especially in East Germany, the dominant politics of reception sought to emphasize the authority 
of the classical text as best compatible with realism in the theatre à la Stanislavski. Here the appropriation of post-

war subversive use of Shakespeare’s plays mirrored another facet of the new historicist/cultural materialist side, that 

of containment. In Stephen Greenblatt’s words, “Shakespeare’s plays are centrally and repeatedly concerned with 

the production and containment of subversion and disorder” (Greenblatt, 1988, P. 40). In what follows, I will apply 

the theory of containment precisely to that part of the world that has been cited as a prime experience of subversion. 

In East Germany, Hamlet has always been a significant play for Germans in political terms. According to Pfister 

(1994), 

There has hardly been one important phase in German history which was not discussed in terms of 
the Hamlet myth or reflected in interpretations and productions of the play. From the 18th century 

onwards, Hamlet in Germany has not been a ‘play like any other,’ but a screen on which to project 

the changing constructions of German nation identity […], nor has Shakespeare been a foreign 

dramatist like any other. His ‘nostrification’ involved much more than mere translation, 

interpretations, or idolization; in its fully-fledged form, it meant the claim that Shakespeare is 

essentially ours, essentially German (P, 176). 

                                                             
2 Cited in Drink Delabastita, Josef de Vos, and Paul Franssen, Shakespeare and European Politics, eds (Newark: University of 
Delware Press, 2008), p. 270. 
3 Wolfgang, Shakespeare in Nazi Germany, p. 123. 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

12 

 

 

Turning back the wheel of time to the historical turmoil of Berlin in WW II, Pujante and Hoenselaars show, in Four 

Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, how Shakespeare was seen as a force for social change in the then 

political chaos of Germany. The frequent staging of Hamlet shows how influential Shakespeare was in the cultural 

rebuilding of a split nation: East and West Germany. However different the motives were in both parts of Germany, 

Shakespeare was to play an eminent role in the political scene of the German Democratic Republic and the Federal 

Republic of Germany.  

In East Germany, theatre was expected to contribute to the establishment of a socialist culture based on a militant 

and optimistic socialist humanism. Under the strict control of party ideologues, there was no room for an art free 

from politics. Shakespeare was part of the official GDR culture and was proclaimed as a precursor of socialist 

realism. In the 20th century, the political use of Shakespeare in Eastern Europe increased sharply. The playwright of 

the 16th century was used for contemporary political dilemmas and helped define the national values and identity of 

Germany which remained a second home for him. It is in this sense that Shakespeare’s theatre in the 20th century 

was, first and foremost, political fitting the “taste” of the day. In Trevor Nunn’s words, it was a, “socially concerned 

theatre […] an avowed and committed popular theatre” and finally, “a politically aware theatre […] determined to 
reach beyond the barriers of income” (Holland, 1997, P. 200).  In his “German Hamletology and Beyond”, Manfred 

Pfister sought to widen and deepen the notion of the cultural specificity of meaning by showing that Shakespeare, in 

general, and Hamlet, in particular, are embedded in German history particularly as a result of the place it held in 

German romantic theory. Besides, because of its accounts of national identity, Hamlet is actually a different play 

from that known by English readers and is in close contact with reality (Pfister, P. 200). For that, Hamlet’s advice to 

the players, “to hold as it were the mirror up to nature” (V.2.23), was assumed to be at the heart of Shakespeare’s 

credo and the reception of his work in Germany, and the world over.  

In East Germany, a post-modern meditation on Hamlet written by East German playwright Heiner Muller 

in 1977, Hamletmachine, written in five Acts like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, was an avant-gardist work and an 

experimental take on Shakespeare’s tragedy. The work addresses diverse issues: some of them are undeniably 

political dealing  with a split Germany coming out of the shadow of world war and, thus, dealing with communism 

and the 1956 Hungarian revolt while other subjects, included in the production, tackle the issue of feminism and 

Hamlet’s dilemma could not pass unnoticed. Muller made use of Hamlet to portray the atrocity of our living with a 

plot acquiring a universal dimension as it becomes an epitome of Man’s suffering and political inaction. Hamlet and 

Ophelia turn into icons of the failing German revolution and the torment engendered by its inhibition. Most 

probably, it is this very fall that paved the way to “Germany is Hamlet” (Hortman, 1984, P. 23). “Hamlet,” 

Hortmann writes: 

is the longest play in world literature in terms of quantity of text. And we cut almost nothing […] 

and Hamlet was really the only thing that occurred to me, because I had the feeling this is the most 

relevant play at the moment in the GDR. (Muller, 1989, P. 41). 

Muller’s Hamletmachine explores the relationship between Shakespeare and East Germany. Shakespeare’s 

reception in Germany in general and in East Germany, in particular, tells the story of how Shakespeare was 

performed, criticized, and understood within the context of East German social history. East German theatre people, 
literary historians, audiences, and the ruling Socialist Unity Party always believed that theatre had something to do 

with politics. Those involved in the theatre felt their work would help to change people as well as society. So the 

theatre and its approach to staging Shakespeare was defined officially, redefined in performance, and then treated 

differently later when political conditions changed. What makes this process interesting is that theatre was in a 

continual state of change despite the fact that the GDR developed more and more into a close society. 

Yet, it was precisely this contradiction that provided East German directors, set designers, dramaturges, and 

performers with the dramatic materials they needed to redefine using Shakespeare performance to comment on the 
contemporary theatre situation in the GDR. The staging of Shakespeare’s plays was, to a large extent, critical of the 

GDR socialist system. They helped create a political sensibility and raised consciousness among the German people 

that fostered the 1989 bloodless revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But this focus may also be seen as 

paradigm for what happened to Shakespeare and other classics, to a certain degree, in other East European socialist 

societies, (this part will be discussed later). In the GDR, actors and theatre audiences learned to look at 

Shakespeare’s plays in a new way. Critics and playwrights set about rewriting classics in the light of the German 

political life. Brecht (2002) called the new emerging theatre, “Goring theatre” (P. 47), that is a theatre of prompt 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

13 

 

 

circumstances. Socialists and communists saw this situation as the chance to cut off the horrible twelve years of 

Nazism. For them, Germany was in the midst of a zeitenwende, i.e., a period of time in which the stage would play 

an important role as a political-pedagogical force, “a weapon and a tool for educating the masses for social change”, 

and Shakespeare was seen as the greatest stimulating force in the development of this tradition into account. This 

idea was best illustrated through the performance of Shakespeare on stage.  Heiner Muller, Brecht’s disciple, 

initiated a new epoch in German staging. Convinced that every historical age requires its own performance; Muller 
approached Shakespeare’s script as a performance material rather than a purely literary text. 

Redefinitions of Shakespeare’s drama in terms of the contemporary East German cultural politics can be 

traced in the reworking of Muller’s Hamletmachine (1977). A radical abbreviation and revision of the play relocates 

Hamlet, the character and Hamlet the play, in a post-modern society where there is no social, moral, or cultural 

authority. In 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin wall, Muller had told the German Shakespeare society that, 

“we have not arrived at our destination as long as Shakespeare is still writing our plays” (P. 124). To arrive at where 

he was going, Muller deconstructed not only “the socialist national culture”, but also tried his hand at deconstructing 

Shakespeare by demonstrating that hope for any kind of a future for humanity was a chimera for which, like Hamlet, 
time had simply run out; “No hope, no despair” as Muller deems: 

When I wrote Hamletmachine, after translating Shakespeare’s Hamlet for a theatre in East Berlin, 

it turned out to be my most American play, quoting T.S Eliot, Andy Warhol, Coca Cola, Ezra 

Pound, and Susan Atkins. It may be read as a pamphlet against the illusion that one can stay 

innocent in this our world. (Muller, P. 123) 

 A dedicated communist, Muller’s work was anti-fascist, humanist, and later so critical of the socialist 

regime in East Germany by recognising the repressive nature of Stalinism during the suppression of the Hungarian 

revolution in 1956. Rehearsals for a production combining Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Muller’s Hamletmachine 

started at the Deutsche Theatre in East Berlin in September 1989. At that time, the Eastern part of Germany seemed 

firmly in the grips of an old clan of Stalinist politicians endeavouring to prevent the intrusion of nations of 

democracy from the West. The opening of the Hamletmachine occurred on 24 March 1990. In the meantime, 

Germany witnessed a sequence of leaders’ downfalls, then a succession of new leaders who superseded the older 

ones, and ultimately the falling of the communist party. Six months later, Germany was reunited. Being aware, at the 

same time, that such phenomenal historic changes were occurring, Muller was constantly forced to reconsider and 

readjust his concept of tragedy. However, his Hamlet became the Shakespearean production of a doomed society 
and at the same time a foreboding for humanity. Kalb writes that: 

Packed with quotations and paraphrases from Eliot, Cummings, Marx, Benjamin, Artaud, Sartre, 

Shakespeare, the Bible, Muller himself, and others often strung together without connecting text. 

Hamletmachine tacitly renounces style but nevertheless acquires something like a style due to the 

humour and intelligence with which Muller applies the quotations and moulds Shakespeare’s 

characters and other borrowed figures to his purposes. (Kalb, 1998, P. 108). 

 Hamletmachine may retain the five-act skeleton of Shakespeare’s play, may indeed tell a story, but it is the 

story of a failure. There is no climax, no action, and no dialogue both on the level of motif and the level of structure 

the play enacts, as Kalb claims, the death of drama or more specifically the failure of traditional dramatic form either 

to express or to challenge the world. 4 This inadequacy reflects the death of history and the death of drama as Muller 

puts it, “With my last play, Hamletmachine, that’s come to an end. No substance for dialogue exists anymore 

because there is no history.” (Ibid). Understood as an allegory, Hamletmachine announces the death of history. The 

text is divided into five sections or acts; each separately titled “FAMILY SCRAPBOOK”. The opening act anticipates 

an exhumation of a past history through the most common of domestic archives. Yet, it also hints at a melancholic 

possibility, for it informs us that we will not see a family but its “scraps”. This might also take on its colloquial 
meaning, a fight or quarrel, making this “book” the fragmented story of struggle, conflict, or catastrophe. 

This sense of ongoing failure is further enhanced by Hamletmachine’s first line: “I was Hamlet” (Fischlin 

and Fortier, 2000, P. 211). The past tense here not only problematizes the identity of the speaker, but also implies 

temporally the end of the play. If the speaker was, but no longer is, the tragedy of Hamlet would end its run. The 

                                                             
4 Ibid. 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

14 

 

 

next line more than doubles the distance between the Hamlet speaker and this past tragedy, opening an abyss 

between them, “I stood on the ashore and talked with the surf BLA BLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me” (211). 

“Ruins” resonates meaningfully, here, becoming a rubric of the piling up of allegorical signs already under way. In 

“The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism”, which is perhaps the first fully developed 

understanding of postmodernist aesthetics as an allegorical mode, Craig Owens claims that what is most ‘proper’ of 

allegory is:  

its capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear […] A conviction 

of the remoteness of the past and a desire to redeem it for the present and these are its most 

fundamental impulses. (Owens, 1984, p. 215) 

In Muller’s Hamletmachine, our historical imagination is compelled back to the post-war remains of a shattered 
Europe or alternatively forward to some future past in which Hamlet and Europe have not only lost their relevance 

but their being, “Tomorrow morning has been cancelled” (212). For Muller, Europe is today more completely in 

ruins than Berlin was then. On an aesthetic level, the oppressive regime of the GDR forced Muller to take advantage 

of allegory’s inherent doublespeak thus: 

In many ways, Hamletmachine points out to the giving way (by Hamlet, Muller, Shakespeare, 

Brecht, Europe, men) to the revolutionary project of presently oppressed groups who hold the 

future in their hands. Stylistically and politically, Hamletmachine submits Shakespeare’s play to 

dismemberment and a radical influx of myriad historical forces and allusions. (Fisclin and Fortier, 
2000, P. 210). 

After some of his earliest plays were banned, Muller began coding multiple levels of meaning into his 

work; a technique easily decoded by the GDR audiences. Ironically, however, after he made his allegorical turn in 

his work, Muller’s plays began to gain enormous popularity in the West, a phenomenon that reached its zenith in 

Muller’s Hamletmachine. Kalb (1999) notes that: “The work won a place as a modern classic even before it was 

produced” (P. 121). Although the entire text might be conceived as Muller’s own monodrama, his self-critique of 

the intellectual is most clearly apparent in the Hamlet monologues of Acts I and IV. The second sentence of the first 
monologue stands out as a concise summation of the general nature of intellectual crisis, “I stood at the shore and 

talked with the surf BLA BLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me” (211). The image is striking, the “I”, who was 

Hamlet, speaks but to a vast extent of nothingness and says nothing. The ruins of the Western world invite us to 

complete the story by assuming that while Europe burned, Hamlet babbled. This gets the essence of the intellectual 

dilemma of self-doubt present in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  Muller changes the ending, introducing a poem by 

Zbigniew Herbert called, “Fortinbras’ Lament”, which includes the words, “this or any other way you were bound to 

fall, Hamlet you were not fit for life, you believed in crystalline concepts and not in human clay.” (Rogoff, 1986, P. 

54) 

Muller’s production offered a comment on the historical attitude of the day, and Muller’s staging is a 

reflection of his sombre view that history has become disjointed and senseless. The performance takes seven and a 

half hours. Spatial architecture and vast cycloramas are fused; one of the most prominent features is a massive 

concrete shelter. The lapse of time is a decisive feature in Muller’s staging. The enigma of Hamlet arises in part 

from the fact that historical time intruded into the dramatic time when the play was written argues Muller, “Time has 

run away from Hamlet, as it has from a whole social era. Life punishes those who come too late, said Gorbatchov. 

We all come too late says this Hamletmachine” ( Muller, 1989, P.12). Ulrich Muhe’s Hamlet (the actor playing 

Hamlet) is a slim, sensitive youngster wearing a double-breasted black suit too large for him. Already the black coat 

forebodes a tragic end, “Something is rotten in the age of hope,” (214) Hamlet says in Hamletmachine. In the latter, 

He never grows up to fill the suit, just as he is never willing to accept the political responsibility 

thrust upon them. He is burdened by the curse of thought. He is the man of Enlightenment who 

cannot deal with the harsh call to action: his failure is his intellectual paralysis in the face of the 

need to act. Hamlet is similarly paralyzed by his own position of privilege: he sees himself both 

inside the palace and down with the revolutionaries in the street-a position with which Muller, as 

renowned author identifies (Fischer and Fortier, 1989, P. 209). 

In Hamletmachine, Horatio is depicted as an ageless intellectual with a pale face who observes all the 

events from the edge. One who diffuses burning events through a throat microphone, one who is convinced of his 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

15 

 

 

own feebleness in view of the power politics around and who, in the end, reacts to the destruction of his world with 

mocking laughter. Hamlet, in this production, is made to traverse the history of the earth from Ice Age to Heat 

Death. Taking his cue from Francisco’s lines, ‘Tis bitter cold, /And I am sick at heart,’ Muller sets the beginning of 

the play, in a stage-high cube-to represent an enormous block of ice, whose melting produces a constant trickle of 

water and a pool in the middle of the stage. On a more personal plane, the production depicts the conflict individuals 

have to face when they get involved in political turmoil. Contemporary events are alluded to via the characters’ 
moves and sound effects. Thus, when the ghost appears on the stage, we hear a muted recording of the funeral 

ceremony at Stalin’s death; the “Little Father who is still haunting the realm, redirecting the murderous actions of 

coming generations” (217). Besides, in the ACTOR scene, the section begins with the entrance of three naked 

women embodied in the political personalities of Marx, Lenin, and Mao and together they quote Marx, “THE MAIN 

POINT IS TO OVERTHROW ALL EXISTING CONDITIONS” (211).  

In contrast to Hamlet’s patriarchal and authoritarian regression, it is Ophelia who emerges as the 

revolutionary “Other”. Ophelia represents, “all the aspects of life which are necessarily and systematically 

suppressed to allow the imposition and maintenance of that order”, writes Arlene Teraoka, “She is the force held 
captive in the asylums of the Enlightenment state”. (Teraoka, 1985, P. 122). Contrary to Hamlet’s egocentric 

romanticization, Ophelia’s heart is cold, hard, and mechanical. Unlike Hamlet, Ophelia shows no signs of bifurcated 

identity announcing clearly, “I am Ophelia. The one the river didn’t keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The 

woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SNOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head 

in the gas stove” (212).  Ophelia has emerged from historical oblivion, she embodies the coming back of the 

repressed in a newly physical form, the embodiment of all women forced to succumb to the “impurities and 

depredations of patriarchy”. (Ibid). Her heart/clock has been marking time throughout not “killing time” like the 

Hamlet figure, but keeping time until it becomes an explosive force. For Ophelia, that time is now as the present 

tense that her monologue indicates, “I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair, the table, the bed. I destroy the 

battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world” (212). Through 

a reading of the silencing of Ophelia and Hamlet’s schizophrenic experience, we come to understand Muller’s 
critique of the intellectual and his despair in a postmodern age. Muller’s Ophelia is not crippled by madness, nor 

does she commit suicide. This is the woman whose despair at the loss of a lover and the death of her father does not 

lead to insanity at the end of her life: 

I stopped killing myself […] with my bleeding hands. I tear the photos of the men I loved and who 

used me on the bed, on the table, on the chair, on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I threw my 

clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart. I walk into the street clothed in my 

blood (212). 

Near the end of Hamletmachine, Ophelia takes on the role of the avenging Electra. No longer willing to accept the 

river as her end, she becomes a terrorist Squeaky Fomme , whose words she speaks. She is the revolutionary who 

has nothing to lose, not even her life, since it has been taken from her and abused by men. Ophelia’s story is very 

different in Hamletmachine. It tells the violent necessity of change. Muller locates the potential for radical action in 

the lives of those most persistently oppressed and dispossessed. In Hamlet, this person is Ophelia. But Muller seems 

to be pessimistic at the end of the play; there are two men in white smocks who wrap the body of Ophelia. From the 

modernist perspective, the body is an object that can never be adequately contained by language. The body always 

exceeds the parameters of anyone discourse. In postmodernism, as defined by Kroker and Crook, the body is not a 

biological organism, but an entity only in the discourse and the context in which it is conceptualized as it is made 
clear by Lewis (2005), 

The body is a power grid, tattooed with all the signs of cultural excess on its surface, encoded 

from within by the language of desire, broken into at will by the ideological interpellation of the 

subject and all the while, held together as a fictive concrete unity by the illusion of 

misrecognition.5 

 The wrapping of Ophelia, the binding of the voice, of the other, is an extremely powerful image and a 

metaphor for the predominant response of those in power to the threat of radical change. It is this point of resistance 

that Muller critiques so rigorously in his play; recognition of the need for change does not necessarily mean a 

                                                             
5 Richard Lewis, Postmodernism: A Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), P. 75. 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

16 

 

 

willingness to change. Hamlet’s position within Hamletmachine can be understood as a conflict between his 

hesitation to change and the recognition of the urgent need for change. The romantic dream of overthrowing the 

father/state is illustrated by the appearance of two men in white smocks binding the voice of Ophelia whose breasts, 

thighs, and lap have become instruments of destruction. This is not Hamlet who binds the voice of Ophelia, but 

Heiner Muller: “two men dressed in surgeon’s gowns wrap muslin all around her and the wheelchair from the 

bottom of the top. Here speaks Electra” (214). Here, Ophelia announces a total break with the past, an absolute 
discontinuity. Her message is aimed at the “metropolitis of the world”, at industrial society. She speaks in the name 

of the victims-the women, the exploited masses, the suppressed peoples of the Third world.  

This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the capitals of the 

world. In the name of the victims. I eject the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts 

into lethal poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. I choke between my thighs the world […] I 

bury it in my womb. Down with happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt, rebellion 

and death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you’ll know the truth 

(P. 75). 

The wrapping of Ophelia does more than silence her voice, it insists upon her absolute otherness; it defines the 

boundaries of her subjectivity. Yet, the final image is one of the most memorable. The original purpose of Egyptian 

mummification was not simply to dispose of the body but to preserve it as a vessel for the life to come. So while 

millennia may pass, utopian hope remains in Ophelia and the history written on her body, is a corporal inscription of 

its own potential. This is the story of an avant-gardist play, “projecting the story of Hamlet into the 20th century, 

when the socialist dreams of several European generations are dashed by cruelty and terror: “something is rotten in 

this Age of Hope” (214).  

The totally disillusioned actor Hamlet refuses to play anymore roles and during an anti-communist 

insurrection, is swayed by divided loyalties between the rebels and the defenders of the state. He 

wants to become a machine without pain and thought […] Ophelia, after her metamorphosis from 

an aggressive anarchist into a whore performing striptease, is lashed to a wheelchair in the final 

scene […] declares her intention to reject the world Shakespeare had given birth to, invoking 

‘hatred, contempt, rebellion, death’. In the world where machines have taken control of human 

beings, violence breaks out as a spasm of oppressed humanity. (Stribrny, 2000, P. 138). 

References 

Brandt, G. (2007). Theatre and Poltics in Germany 1914-1945. New York: Palgrave. 

Bristol, M. D. (1996). Big Time Shakespeare. London: Routledge. 

Croyden, F. (2002). Appropriation and Intertext. Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press. 

Fischlin, D, and Fortier. M (2000).  Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology of Plays from the Seventeenth 

Century to the Present. Eds. London: Routledge. 

Greenblatt, S. (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 

Guntner, L, & Mc Lean.A.M (1998). Redefining Shakespeare: Literary Theory and Theatre Practice in the German 

Democratic Republic. Eds. Newark: University of Delware Press. 
Habicht, W. (1995).  Shakespeare in Divided Germany: 1949-1989. Shakespeare in Southern Africa 8, 30-39. 

Holland, P. (1997). English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press. 

Hortman, W. (1984).  Shakespeare in West Germany. Shakespeare Quarterly 35, 233-238.  

James, V. C. (1973). Soviet Socialist Realism: Origin and Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 

Johnson, C. (2006). German Shakespeare Studies at the Turn of the Twenty First Century.Newark: University of 

Delware Press. 

Kalb, J. (1998). The Theater of Heiner Muller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Lewis, R. (2005). Postmodernism: A Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. 

Martson, A. (1999). Shakespeare, Lessing, and Goethe. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 

Muller, H. (1989). Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage. Ed and trans. Carl Weber. NewYork: PAJ 
Publications. 

Craig O. (1984). The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism. In B. Wallis (Ed), Art after 

Modernism: Rethinking Representation. (P. 215). New York: Godine. 



www.acseusa.org/journal/index.php/aijhass         American International Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences          Vol. 2, No. 1; 2020 

 

17 

 

 

Pfister, M. (1994). Hamlets Made in Germany East and West. In Hattaway. M and Sokolova, B. (Ed) Shakespeare 

in the New Europe (P. 76). London: Sheffield Academic Press. 

Pujante, A.L, & Hoenselaars, T. (2003). Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe. 

Eds. Newark: University of Delware Press. 

Puttenham, A. (2005). Friedrich Schiller: Drama and Thought. New York: Palgrave. 

Rogoff, G. (1986). Review of Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller. Performing Arts Journal 2,59-73. 
Sawday, G. (2002). Bertolt Brecht: His Life and Art. New York: Palgrave. 

Stribrny, Z. (2000). Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 

Teraoka, A. A. (1985). The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Post-modernist Poetics of Heiner 

Muller. California: University of California Press. 

Wilson, F. (2000). Essays on Shakespeare. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Wolfgang, J. (1989). Shakespeare in Nazi Germany. Chicago: Chicago University Press. 

 

 
 

 

Copyrights  

Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. This is an 
open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license 

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 

 

 


