Theatremachine - Faber

Heiner Müller (1929-1995) was a radical dramatist of the DDR (East Germany) who became widely acclaimed and influential in the West. I became interested in his writing through the music of the German composers Heiner Goebbels and Wolfgang Rihm using his texts:  Hamletmachine (Rihm)  and  Hörstücke nach Texten von Heiner Müller (Goebbels)  (see my reviews).Most of the English translations of Müller are by Carl Weber, who worked with Brecht before Brecht's death in 1956. But I find this 183-page volume, translated and edited by Marc von Henning (b. 1960), to be the best. He obviously did not know Brecht, but he met Müller before his death in 1995. He calls "Theatremachine" "...a selection of playtexts, poems, short prose and essays..."The theater texts are:Philoctetes (1964)Slaughter (1974)The Hamletmachine (1977)The Mission (1979)Quartet (1981)Waterfront Wasteland, Medea Material, Landscape With Argonauts (1982)The Road of Tanks (1984-88)The other writings include:ABC (mid-late 1950s)Explosion of a Memory (1984-85)The Woyzeck Wound for Nelson Mandela (1985 -- speech)Shakespeare a Departure (1988 -- speech)Heracles 13 after EuripidesAs Müller said, "The work of art is a letter addressed, it at all, to strangers, if need be, from other galaxies. Art itself perhaps humanity's last domain, the final autonomy, at its best DISTURBANCE." (xiv)*** *** ***This is a fine 1995 Faber & Faber paperback. There is nothing wrong with the binding or typesetting.

Amazon's copies are extremely poorly-printed print-on-demand copies, advertised as being exactly the same as the Faber editions. They're not. They don't open flat, the binding is terrible, the print is fuzzy and illegible, and the paper is cheap and feels awful.Heiner Müller, however, is an extraordinary writer, and it's wonderful to have some important works of his gathered in the same place.

So rapidly,and the book is amazing. I`ll suggest this book to my Modern German Theatre classmates~And it is required for that course.

superb