Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee 9781501346156, 9781501346149, 9781501346187, 9781501346170

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee

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33 1/3 Global 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

33 1/3 Japan Series Editor: Noriko Manabe Spanning a range of artists and genres—from the 1970s rock of Happy End to technopop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Shibuyakei of Cornelius, classic anime series Cowboy Bebop, J-Pop/EDM hybrid Perfume, and vocaloid star Hatsune Miku—33 1/3 Japan is a series devoted to in-depth examination of Japanese popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Supercell’s Supercell by Keisuke Yamada Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack by Rose Bridges Perfume’s Game by Patrick St. Michel Cornelius’s Fantasma by Martin Roberts Joe Hisaishi’s My Neighbor Totoro: Soundtrack by Kunio Hara Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour by Brooke McCorkle Nenes’ Koza Dabasa by Henry Johnson Forthcoming Titles: Yuming’s The 14th Moon by Lasse Lehtonen Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yellow Magic Orchestra by Toshiyuki Ohwada Kohaku utagassen: The Red and White Song Contest by Shelley Brunt

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33 1/3 Brazil Series Editor: Jason Stanyek Covering the genres of samba, tropicália, rock, hip hop, forró, bossa nova, heavy metal and funk, among others, 33 1/3 Brazil is a series devoted to in-depth examination of the most important Brazilian albums of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Caetano Veloso’s A Foreign Sound by Barbara Browning Tim Maia’s Tim Maia Racional Vols. 1 &2 by Allen Thayer João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto by Brian McCann Gilberto Gil’s Refazenda by Marc A. Hertzman Dona Ivone Lara’s Sorriso Negro by Mila Burns Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’s The Corner Club by Jonathon Grasse Racionais MCs’ Sobrevivendo no Inferno by Derek Pardue Forthcoming titles: Jorge Ben Jor’s África Brasil by Frederick J. Moehn Naná Vasconcelos’s Saudades by Daniel B. Sharp Chico Buarque’s Chico Buarque by Charles A. Perrone

33 1/3 Europe Series Editor: Fabian Holt Spanning a range of artists and genres, 33 1/3 Europe offers engaging accounts of popular and culturally significant albums of Continental Europe and the North Atlantic from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky by Ross Hagen Ivo Papasov’s Balkanology by Carol Silverman

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Forthcoming Titles: Modeselektor’s Happy Birthday by Sean Nye Various Artists’ DJs do Guetto by Richard Elliott Bea Playa’s I’ll Be Your Plaything by Anna Szemere and András Rónai Los Rodriguez’s Sin Documentos by Fernán del Val and Héctor Fouce Mercyful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath by Henrik Marstal Massada’s Astaganaga by Lutgard Mutsaers Nuovo Canzoniere’s Bella Ciao by Jacopo Tomatis Czesław Niemen’s Niemen Enigmatic by Ewa Mazierska and Mariusz Gradowski Amália Rodrigues’s Live at the Olympia by Lilla Ellen Gray Ardit Gjebrea’s Projekt Jon by Nicholas Tochka Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi by Maria Sonevytsky Édith Piaf’s Recital 1961 by David Looseley Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis by Aram Yardumian

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee Philip V. Bohlman

Series Editor: Fabian Holt

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Philip V. Bohlman, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bohlman, Philip V., 1952– author. Title: Wolokolamsker Chaussee / Philip V. Bohlman. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3 Europe | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "By gathering historical and musical fragments from a Europe torn apart by the Second World War and the Cold War, East German playwright Heiner Müller and West German composer Heiner Goebbels created Wolokolamsker Chaussee as a musical panorama that stretched across modern European history at a moment of international crisis. The question at the heart of the recording was prescient in the waning years of the Cold War, but it remains no less critical for the "crisis of Europe" today: Is it possible for Europe to be unified? A vast range of musical styles-from folk song to hip-hop, from the symphonic canon to heavy metal-coalesce in the five acts, which expose the wounds of European history while struggling musically to heal them. This extraordinary recording from 1989/90 not only captures the sound of a historical moment, but also powerfully enacts responses to it"-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021013256 (print) | LCCN 2021013257 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501346156 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501346163 (epub) | ISBN 9781501346170 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501346187 Subjects: LCSH: Goebbels, Heiner. Wolokolamsker Chaussee. | Müller. Heiner, 1929–1995. Wolokolamsker Chaussee. | Bek, Aleksandr, 1903–1972. Wolokolamsker Chaussee. | Radio plays with music–20th century–History and criticism. | Socialism–Europe, Eastern–20th century–Drama–History and criticism. | Europe, Eastern–History–1945–1989– Drama–History and criticism. | World War, 1939–1945--Soviet Union--Drama–History and criticism. | World War, 1939–1945–Soviet Union–Literature and the war. Classification: LCC ML410.G56 H47 2021 (print) | LCC ML410.G56 (ebook) | DDC 781.5/44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013256 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013257 ISBN:

HB: 978-1-5013-4615-6 PB: 978-1-5013-4614-9 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4617-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-4616-3

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Series: 33 1/3 Europe To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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In memoriam Rudolf Pietsch (1951–2020) So often we stood together before crossing between East and West

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Contents Acknowledgments x Sources and Translations xii Preface xiv Introduction: Sounding the Wounded Dialectic 1 1

Russian Gambit 27

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Forest near Moscow 39

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The Duel 53

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Centaurs 69

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The Foundling 85

Epilogue: The End of Epic as Its Beginning 97 Bibliography 105 Index 109

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Acknowledgments I have traveled the literary and musical highways that converge in Wolokolamsker Chaussee for over thirty years, following a journey to which have accrued the dimensions of pilgrimage. It has been my good fortune never to travel this pilgrim’s journey alone, but rather to be joined at various stations along the path by fellow sojourners, some keen to accompany me for a substantial stretch, others simply willing to listen to me as I spun the tales of my frequent forays across the fissures in modern European history that, in the twenty-first as in the twentieth century, remain unhealed. My debt of thanks to these sojourners goes first to Elisabeth Frey, who plied me with an audio cassette of Wolokolamsker Chaussee in the earliest days following its recording as a Hörstück. As I began to integrate the sonic world of the ECM LP into my teaching at the University of Chicago, Brian Currid was eager to listen with me, and then to join me in the excursions leading to a coauthored essay in 2001 that benefited in countless ways from Brian’s own life journey to Berlin. In the wake of the turn-ofthe-millennium, the European schisms that provided the historical undercurrent for Wolokolamsker Chaussee seemed momentarily to heal, occasioning a respite from the anxieties of the previous century. The new century, however, would not prove to afford the security of a utopia, and the very seams that were in need of suturing at the convergence of a novel, a radio play, and a recording began unraveling again by the 2010s. As I felt the need again to take up my pilgrimage, one of the wisest of all my fellow sojourners joined me, describing the

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new 33 1/3 series dedicated to European recordings he was editing. He invited me to contribute a volume, leaving the option of a recording to me, but knowing full well pilgrims always return to the passions that inspired their original journeys. For his faith in the pilgrimage that brings me to this book, I can’t thank Fabian Holt enough. There is much about this book that has become extremely personal. The historical journey that provides the leitmotif for the texts and the music on Wolokolamsker Chaussee is one that crosses between East and West in Europe, incessantly so, yet rarely unencumbered. Over the course of thirty-three years, from 1987 until his death in 2020, no one accompanied me more frequently on the journeys across the borders separating Europe than Rudolf Pietsch. It might have been by chance that we stood together at the border between Austrian Burgenland and Hungary as the caravan of East German Trabant automobiles first breached the Iron Curtain in July 1989. We traveled again and again to the nations of the East, in search of the music that would serve us in our different lives as musicians and scholars. It is because of our many crossings together that I dedicate this book to the memory of Rudi Pietsch. I close, as always, by acknowledging my indebtedness to, and love for, my family—Christine, Andrea, Benjamin, Danielle, and Riley. You always recognized that, when I traveled, it was always in search of ideas with the potential to heal even the most persistent wounds. What a miracle it is that we travel together. Acknowledgments xi

Sources and Translations Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels drew upon a wide range of sources for the recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee that is the subject of this book. Their literary point of departure was a novel of the same name by the Russian writer, Alexander Bek (Алекса´ ндр Бек), first published in a Soviet edition in 1944, but widely translated in various adaptations over the course of the next twenty years. The translation and edition used by Müller for his radio play appeared in 1962 and served as the official version in East Germany through the 1980s. For my textual analyses and comparisons, I use the same edition as Müller. The literary sources for the final three tracks also enjoyed a significant presence in the history of German literature, and, again like Müller, I use these in their original German for the present book. The editions that served me appear in the list below. German-language sources also provide the basis for the translations and spellings I use throughout the book. I largely adopt the German transliterations of Russian names and terms that appear in the Müller/Goebbels project, unless there are generally accepted spellings for Russian names in widespread circulation. Similarly, because I draw upon all literary sources in their original German, as did Müller and Goebbels, I retain German spellings, unless terms circulate widely in English spellings. All translations in this book are my own.

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Literary Sources for the Müller/ Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee Bek, Alexander. 1962. Die Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Trans. Rahel Strassberg. Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Goebbels, Heiner. 2012. Hörstücke, nach Texten von Heiner Müller. 3 CDs. ECM 1452-54. CD 3 = Wolokolamsker Chaussee I–V. Kafka, Franz. 1915. Die Verwandlung. Stuttgart: Wolff. von Kleist, Heinrich. 1984 [1811]. “Der Findling.” In idem, Sämtliche Erzählungen, 229–49. Stuttgart: Reclam. Müller, Heiner. 1988. Die Schlacht, Wolokolamsker Chaussee: Zwei Stücke. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Sehgers, Anna. 2007 [1965]. “Das Duell.” In idem, Erzählungen, 1958–1966, 242–73. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.

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Preface At the beginning we marched on cobblestones, but thereafter there was a highway paved with asphalt that led to Moscow. That is Volokolamsk Highway, along which the fascists advance as a horrible threat. Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (237) Lord, that 61 Highway It the longest road I know, oh She run from New York City Down the Gulf of Mexico Mississippi Fred McDowell, “Highway 61 Blues”

God say, “You can do what you want, Abe, but The next time you see me comin’ you better run” Well Abe says, “Where you want this killin’ done?” God says, “Out on Highway 61.” Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

Thirty years later, it now seems both fitting and uncanny that my first encounter with the recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, the first time I was swept up by its complex sound world, was in the tiny VW Polo I drove between my sabbatical home in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany and the research center (Deutsches Volksliedarchiv) in which I was working during Autumn 1990. These were heady days in the Germanys, still East and West, yet suspended between the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the reunification as a single state that

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would take place later in the year. It was during those days that I was actively exchanging audio cassettes with Freiburg’s considerable collective of political activists, for me also a new circle of friends on the political Left loosely gathered around the Jos Frits Bookstore. We did not think much about where we obtained the material for the cassettes—from the radio, from LPs, from the underground concert scene, from other cassettes— but rather we sought to circulate as much material as possible, as widely as possible. Each of us had something distinctive, even special to offer. I was researching Yiddish folk song in linguistic border regions, and at the same time, my family and I were assembling an archive of children’s songs on cassettes. The cassette running in the tape deck of my car, therefore, was and was not a bootleg recording. It didn’t really matter, because those who had cobbled the recordings together had cast their nets widely to capture the sound of the historical moment. Of the five tracks from Wolokolamsker Chaussee, some had come from radio broadcasts, some also from the new ECM LP, though this remained unacknowledged in the minimal documentation we used. Framing the recording were commentaries and pronouncements from political and musical figures on the German Left. Wolf Biermann (bn. 1936), the singer-songwriter famous because he had been stripped of East German citizenship and forced to perform only in West Germany, spoke about the events of November 1989, connecting the absence of Soviet tanks at that moment with their presence as a motif throughout the multiple versions of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The sound quality varied, but in this sense it was maximally versatile, always responsive to rewinding and fast-forwarding, above all to listening in wonder to a musical work that seemed to accompany me and many others in the real-time of the historical moment.

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In that moment, it was particularly important the cassette rendered history both mobile and immediate, enacting the conditions for what Andrea Bohlman, writing about a roughly parallel moment in 1980s Poland, calls “the cassette culture of the second circulation, [whose] cassettes reveal diverse repertories and creative editing techniques that belie the assumption that music was politically impotent” (A. Bohlman 2020, 19). The cassette itself bore witness to the mobility and the materiality of the media that its sound replicated, Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee, the subject of this book. As we witness in the pages that follow, that recording was not a recording of one work, but rather of many; it did not fix them in one or even several versions affording authenticity, but rather released the dynamic narratives of history in the present no less than in the past. The cassette in my Polo tape deck, therefore, moved between and among many texts, just a few of which I mention here. First of all, it moved among the original texts, Alexander Bek’s 1944 novel in Russian, and the 1962 translation into German in East Berlin. The East German playwright, Heiner Müller, created yet another text in the 1980s, writing a series of five acts in epic-poetry form, making another leap in history and genre, in both radio performances and a published version of the play (Müller 1988). The published version provides the foundation for Heiner Goebbels’s musical reimagining, which textually remains very close to Heiner Müller’s published form, but proliferates as radically contemporary sound worlds when recorded in 1989/90 at three of the most important radio studios in Germany, Südwest Rundfunk (Baden-Baden), Hessischer Rundfunk (Frankfurt am Main), and Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich). My audio-cassette further moves among multiple technologies: the original ECM LP, which was released

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at a transitional moment between ECM’s original and “New Series”; the digitized CD recording, released in 2012 as the third CD in Hörstücke (Goebbels 2012); and the analog techniques of the tape cassette. Circulating at the same time was another audio-cassette, published in 1996 after the author’s death, upon which Heiner Müller himself reads the text of his Hörstück, literally a “listening play,” but also more figuratively a “teaching piece” (Müller 1996). The recording ontology itself—what Wolokolamsker Chaussee is as performed and published under that name—differs in all these instances. The broad outlines of the historical moments charting the divisions between European East and West were clear in the texts gathered for Wolokolamsker Chaussee by the playwright and composer to whom the recording is attributed. Heiner Müller (1929–1995) was at the time East Germany’s most distinguished writer for the stage, as well as a public intellectual of international acclaim. His dramatic works both recognized the challenge of rebuilding the GDR and criticized the methods and bureaucracy that enforced the state, and accordingly he was both celebrated and excoriated by official cultural organizations. His role as an unofficial successor to Bertolt Brecht became official after reunification, when he ascended to the directorship of East Germany’s most influential theater company, the Berliner Ensemble. In the 1980s, Heiner Goebbels (bn. 1952) was a rising star in the West German scene of experimental music. His personal, musical, and intellectual biography was steeped in the study and exploration of working-class culture, from his university days at the University of Frankfurt, where he studied sociology and music in the tradition of Theodor W. Adorno, to his engagement with the musical institutions of West Germany’s major industrial region, the Ruhrgebiet. Goebbels describes his early musical activity in

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the 1970s as “primarily making street music” (Goebbels in the accompanying booklet to Goebbels, Ensemble Modern, and Bierbichler 2002, 5). Like his creative counterpart Müller, Heiner Goebbels developed his voice as a performer and public intellectual through an engagement with the Other Germany. By creating a work that transformed the division of the Germanys into dramatic and musical symbols for what had become the historical longue durée of the twentieth century, Müller and Goebbels themselves joined a long tradition. Postwar German writers applied various metaphors to the tradition, many of which afforded the possibility of renarrating history as story, thus blurring boundaries that were literary as well as geopolitical. Among the best known of such metaphors was the representation of the Germanys occupying a common territory and history under what Christa Wolf (1929–2011) called “der geteilte Himmel” (glossed as both “the divided sky” and “the divided heaven”) in the title of one of the most widely-read novels of the Cold War (Wolf 1963). Wolf’s novel is a love story about an East and a West German, whose relationship is divided by the building of the Berlin Wall beginning in 1961. Wolf was very much a protégé of the doyen of GDR fiction writing, Anna Seghers (1900–1983), whose contemporaneous short story, “The Duel,” affords the narrative motif for the middle movement of the Müller/Goebbels recording (Seghers 1965). It was also during this historical moment that the German translation of Alexander Bek’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee appeared (Bek 1962). It is that translation, published by the Military Publishing House (Militärverlag) of the GDR, that would become the central literary work for Müller and Goebbels. Just as the division of the Germanys in the early 1960s formed a historical fulcrum for the Müller/Goebbels collaboration, the dissolution of the division in the late 1980s

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would provide the second major fulcrum. The relation between the two fulcrums became a transition from text to performance, from the fixity of the former to the flexibility of the latter. Whereas passage between the Germanys was encumbered at the first historical fulcrum, it was unleashed at the second. The diverse uses of text and performance would ensure the contrast and contradictions of these two historical processes. For his retelling of Wolokamsker Chaussee, Müller turned to a novel that occupied the East German literary landscape since the building of the Berlin Wall, enjoying at least some measure of success. In the translation by Rahel Strassberg several versions of the novel were available to German readers, an abridged version of slightly more than 100 pages, and an unabridged version of 546 pages. It is the latter that I use for the present book, first because the full narrative expanse is important for understanding the ways in which new narratives accrued through the Müller/Goebbels collaboration, and second because it is possible to project a degree of popularity through fairly robust sales figures—82,000 in the sixth printing from 1979, from which my antiquarian copy came—hence continued widespread reception into the 1980s. The retellings of the late 1980s, therefore, were predicated on the novel’s continued success. Alexander Bek’s (1903–1972) novel serves as another historical fulcrum for the Müller/Goebbels collaboration. More detailed analysis of the novel appears in the introductory chapter that follows this preface, but suffice it to say here that Bek, who served in the Soviet army during the Second World War as a writer/soldier, chronicled the war in real-time. The battle along the highway running through the city of Volokolamsk in Autumn 1941 would prove crucial for halting the German offensive against Moscow, the turning point in the

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war’s Eastern Front. The novel sustains the real-time of the battle itself, using critical dates as narrative signposts. Bek transformed his chronicle quickly into written form, writing the novel in 1943/44 and publishing it in 1944, the penultimate year of the Second World War. Story and history again converged to produce the narrative moment. In a bizarre, speculative way, it is possible to suggest that the highway between Volokolamsk and Moscow can be imagined as a historical fulcrum also in the present, rerouting the historical narrative to the New Cold War of our own day. Today, Volokolamsk is once again famous because of its relation to Moscow, but notoriously so, for the primary garbage dump and landfill for the Russian capital now lies outside the contemporary Volokolamsk, whose ca. 24,000 inhabitants have increasingly fallen victim to serious illness because of bureaucratic denial (Nechepurenko 2018). I’m surely stepping beyond the limits of my story by retrieving Volokolamsk for a historical moment in the present. Then, again, the borders and boundaries of this story form a counterpoint and dialectic between fixity and flexibility throughout the pages that follow. The cassette recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee that accompanied me in 1990 opened a time and space of intimacy, sonic traces made familiar by the convergence of highways in the sources of the recording and my own life journeys. Already in my childhood, I lived alongside great continental highways— Highway 61, dividing the United States as it paralleled the Mississippi River, but also passing directly through my small Wisconsin hometown, Boscobel. In each of the two homes in which I have now lived for many years, Oak Park, Illinois, and Berlin, I also live only a few houses from great continental highways, “Route 66” in the USA and the “B1” (Bundestraße 1, that is, European Highway 1, in Berlin-Friedrichshain the great

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boulevard to the East, Frankfurter Allee). History and song accrued to these highways, generating narratives mythical and modern. Highway 61 did not run to New York City, as Mississippi Fred McDowell sings in “Highway 61 Blues,” and it was not the site for the “Binding of Isaac,” or Akedah, story in Genesis 22 of the Bible, as Bob Dylan sings in “Highway 61 Revisited.” The Akedah weaves the central myths of the Abrahamic faiths together, not least among them, the origin myth about the invention of music as symbolized by the horn of the ram sacrificed in Isaac’s place, and it is this tale of origin that makes it worthy of musical revisiting along Highway 61. It is both myth and fact that the exchange of Enlightenment knowledge between Eastern and Western Europe followed the B1 as its earlier local and provincial routes were re-engineered into what were called Chausseen after the French chaussée, or highway in the sense of a major thoroughfare. The history of these great continental highways also contained chapters through which armies moved, Napoleon’s imperial forces in the march toward Moscow in one century, the convoys of soldiers from south to north along Highway 61, as they prepared for deployment to Germany during the Cold War, where they could then defend Europe against the armies of the Soviet Bloc. As grand as these highways are, most of us experience them locally and intimately, gathering our own songs and stories, whose many narratives together form a mix and network of connections, at once contradictory and contrapuntal. In 1989/90, Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee came into being at one of the most intimate of these historical moments. The recording of the Müller/Goebbels project took place at the confluence of two tributaries in the long collaboration between playwright and composer. The first of these forms

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around performances and recordings in which Goebbels used texts by Müller, situating them centrally in the text of a narrative, or mixing them with the work of other authors to provide essential literary and historical context. Among the early writers to whom he turned, Goebbels clearly had several favorites—Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Harth, as well as lyrics by Bertolt Brecht in Hanns Eisler songs and numerous texts from Greek and Roman mythology—but Heiner Müller was unquestionably the primus unter pares. It was with Müller that Goebbels developed what Barbara Kordes calls “forms of musical reading” as the signature sound of the Hörstück (Kordes 2009). For Goebbels, thus, Müller texts were imbued with potential for “sound materiality” (Klangmaterial), whereby they were released from the page, from written form, to join with music in the immateriality of sound worlds (for analysis of this phenomenon in the collaborations of Müller and Goebbels, see Souksengphet-Dachlauer 2010). The second tributary was that of creating sound worlds for recording projects with ECM. In the course of his now-long career, Goebbels has not recorded only with ECM, and yet Manfred Eicher’s label consistently and periodically provided him with a home for both innovative approaches to recording and sound editing. Goebbels turned to Müller’s texts already for the first of the recordings he did with ECM, Die Befreiung von Prometheus (The Liberation of Prometheus; CD 1 on Goebbels 2012), as well as those of the period from ca. 1995 to 2012, in which the final ECM recordings with Müller texts appeared. Goebbels’s text sources were consistently diverse, drawn from Antiquity, especially Greek, and Modern sources, especially Müller, alike. The stylistic borders between folk, popular, and art music blurred, to be replaced instead by a contemporary historicism of timelessness. The sound of a global geography of the present was audible from moment

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to moment in the shifting sound shapes of indeterminate time and place, remarkably so in the performance project known as Surrogate Cities (Goebbels 2000). Throughout this thirty-year period, there were other collaborators who appeared on Goebbels’s ECM recordings, among the most notable Ensemble Modern as performers, and Hanns Eisler as the éminence grise of German composers crossing the class and national borders of the Cold War, for example, in Eislermaterial (Goebbels, Ensemble Modern, and Bierbichler 2002). Together, the ECM recordings provided a collective that made both fixity and flexibility possible, forging them into the approach to recording that would open the central position of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee that provides the central focus of the present book occupies a double role in the Müller/Goebbels/ECM dramaturgy. Recorded in German radio studios during 1989 and 1990, and then produced as an album by ECM, Wolokolamsker Chaussee stands at the historical center of a moment of dramatic change. To a large degree, the recording itself could only represent that moment, for what lay beyond—“after 1989” as Seth Brodsky presciently reflects on the possibility of chronicling the uncertainty and unconscious of European history (Brodsky 2017)—was known only to the degree that it could not completely be wrenched from the past. The five acts of the Müller/Goebbels recording, therefore, pile one upon the other, becoming history all the way down. Part 1 (“Russian Gambit”) might retain indices to battle between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, but performed breathlessly against the musical background of the metal band, Megalomaniax, it is sounded in the historical present of the recording itself. Müller draws his motifs from stories that have no common history, but he sutures them together across all five acts into a work unified by the techniques of Greek epic,

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thereby creating a single text for the historical moment from disparate fragments. Goebbels, too, juxtaposes fragments against the very possibility of a musical whole. Some musical motifs span the entire five tracks, but they do so by entering and exiting the historical stage, charging the listener to listen to and remember the past, but undermining the longue durée of European history by calling out in Part 5, “The Foundling,” the reality that human permanence lies only in forgetting. Wolokolamsker Chaussee is also distinctive among the Müller/ Goebbels ECM projects because it expands the process of recording beyond the moment of its production. Every choice about text and motif pushes the narrative of European division and unification into different pasts, retrieving it for an ongoing present. Music is created, borrowed, and deployed for reasons of historical specificity, for example, Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony for Part 4, “Centaurs,” but also for the ways it points toward an unknown and uncertain future, for example, the hiphop group, We Wear the Crown, for the concluding Part 5, “The Foundling.” The release of Wolokolamsker Chaussee as the third of three Heiner Goebbels CDs in the 2012 recording, Hörstücke, nach Texten von Heiner Müller, is chronologically the final CD of the Müller/Goebbels ECM project. The many forms of the recording, apart and together, merge in what Andrea Bohlman (2020, 30) describes as “media density,” providing a complex and diverse collective of narrators that sounded the historical moment of 1989/90: the reunification of Germany, and by extension the suturing of a Europe divided into East and West by the Cold War. The history Wolokolamsker Chaussee records, thus, is not yet foreclosed. The many fragments of Europe torn between East and West are instead gathered to represent the reunification that was happening in real-time history of 1989/90, and in 2012 and

beyond they remain in real-time. Significant and distinctive among the Müller/Goebbels recording projects is that Wolokolamsker Chaussee does not simply represent narratives that are torn apart, but rather that the recording itself forms a structure of narrative unity and historical continuity, even as these remain inchoate in the real-time of our own day, thirty years beyond German reunification.

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Introduction: Sounding the Wounded Dialectic The Birth of Epic and the Struggle for History From its very beginnings Wolokolamsker Chaussee spills across a vast historical landscape that sounds the struggle of epic. As a novel, a radio play, a pastiche of official and unofficial cassette recordings, a series of radio broadcasts, an initial LP, and a revival shared with other CDs, Wolokolamsker Chaussee chronicles the journey across the sonic landscape of struggle, realized as a historical record that sounds the wounded dialectic of a divided nation and continent—of the divided humanity across modern Europe. In their ECM project Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels record not only history, but they also sound the lives of those who enact it, from their appearance at the first moment of fissure on Track 1, played out in the defense of Moscow during the Second World War, to the ultimate disease of and death from the wounded dialectic on the eve of what would be called, hopefully and desperately, reunification. In a single recording project with many parts, Müller and Goebbels gather the lives of those who seek to overcome the wounded dialectic of European history, who struggle for survival. Wolokolamsker Chaussee sounds that

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee 2

struggle, capturing its futility on the recording that the present book chronicles. The literary foundation for the Müller/Goebbels recording project is Alexander Bek’s novel of the same name, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, published in 1944 in the Soviet Union. Bek (1903–1972) was a well-respected writer and journalist, who drew his themes from the social, industrial, and military history of the Soviet Union. The novel itself is a literary chronicle in real-time, researched and written while Bek was a soldier and war correspondent at the Russian Front during the Second World War. He was present with the Soviet Army already at the time of the defense of Moscow in 1941, and he remained with the army until its eventual entry into Berlin in early 1945. At its deepest level the story of the Soviet struggle against Germany in the Second World War, the novel was one of the most popular works of Russian historical fiction, with a literary life that spanned almost the entire war. Bek wrote the novel from the perspective of participants in battle, utilizing the voices of two narrators, his own as a war chronicler, and that of Lieutenant Baurdschan Momysch-Uly, a cavalry officer from Kazakhstan. The novel enjoyed widespread impact in the closing years of the Second World War and in the years of uncertain peace that followed during the 1940s. Translations appeared in many languages, not only editions for European readerships, but also in the languages of nations for whom socialism and communism were of growing importance as response to the fascism of Germany and the Axis armies during the war (e.g., Hebrew and Chinese). The original editions and translations, thus, served military purposes of various kinds, leading to the publication of two sequels by Bek, Several Days and General Panfilov’s Reserve, both published in 1960. Translators approached the original novel’s expansive real-time narrative

Introduction

in different ways, to a large extent to engage readers after the war. The official translation into English (Bek n.d.), appearing in the immediate aftermath of the war in the central Foreign Languages Publishing House, was widely influential in the West, despite the fact that it was barely more than half the length of the original novel and that several critical episodes disappear. German editions, too, appeared quickly after the Second World War, but it was the official edition published in 1962 that would have the greatest impact on East Germany, when it was introduced by law as required reading for soldiers in the GDR army. It is this edition that I have read for my analysis and reflections in the present book. It is this edition, moreover, that signified a shift from the Soviet wartime canon to a central position in Cold War German literature. Alexander Bek’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee is an expansive work of fictionalized history. The two main characters, Momysch-Uly and Panfilow, were real military officers who played critical roles in the autumn 1941 defense of Moscow. The two narrators of a novel written entirely as a first-person account, Bek and Momysch-Ully, provide the text with their voices for the entire novel, and the story they tell is based on real interviews conducted by Bek. Many descriptions of individual battles and the struggle to muster sufficient weapons and food represent the facts of the defense to various degrees of accuracy. Bek provides specific dates and statistics about troop strength and loss, highlighting strategic places in the text with these, for example, when the penultimate chapter in the book, an account of the ultimate battle, bears the title, “The Night of November 18” (Bek 1962, 524). The details and facts notwithstanding, Bek consciously writes a novel that will engage the reader and inspire patriotism. The widespread reception of the novel in multiple

3

languages, for national and international readerships, from the end of the Second World War surely testifies to the success of his literary endeavor. To my own great surprise as a lifelong pacifist, reading the book was a pleasurable experience, despite its surfeit of battle scenes, most of which spared few bloody details. Bek takes great rhetorical pain to expose qualities of basic humanity, at times investing these with psychological complexity. As a reader, I came to value Momysch-Uly for his memories of the Kazakh steppes and the care and devotion he dedicated to his horse, Lyssanka. Main characters and those playing lesser roles frequently come alive on the pages, and despite my personal pacifism and abhorrence of war, I found the book almost entirely appealing.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Texts and Tales

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Alexander Bek’s 1944 novel, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (Russian: Волоколамское шоссе), chronicles the Soviet army’s defense of Moscow on many different levels, which together provide the counterpoint of epic. The text of the novel encompasses two timeframes. The most expansive of these are the weeks of the defensive action itself, October 16 to November 23, 1941. The military focus of the novel begins more broadly in midOctober, when the German army intensifies its offensive toward the city of Volokolamsk as a focal point. Though they are outnumbered, the different Soviet units of which we read in the October part of the novel skillfully devise a series of skirmishes that offer temporary success, at least in slowing the German advance. A period in which both German and Soviet troops regroup prior to a decisive onslaught on Moscow follows (realized in

Introduction

part by Heiner Müller as Part 2, “Forest near Moscow”), before the chronicle narrows to a focus on the battalion commanded by Baurdschan Momysch-Uly, which has been reduced to ca. 120 soldiers. The lessons, as well as the losses, during the October defense have seasoned the troops for the five days of battle in November, now prepared to exercise guerrilla-like tactics to push back the Germans who had surrounded them at the final bulwark before Moscow. Discipline and loyalty to the Soviet state afford Momysch-Uly’s troops with the tools they need, and they emerge as victors at the end of the struggle, while the Germans fail to reach Moscow. The parallel timeframe for Wolokolamsker Chaussee is that of epic, which Bek and then Müller and Goebbels employ for narrative form and function. In the opening pages of the novel, Bek introduces the two narrators whose dual chronicles we follow throughout, sometimes a common voice, at other times two storytellers separated by their different roles before and after the battle. As a war correspondent and the author of the novel, Bek is the narrator who commits the chronicle to print. As a Kazakh soldier leading a battalion for the Soviet army, Momysch-Uly assumes the role of first-person narrator to transform his deeply personal reflections about his past and present service to the Soviet Union into detailed accounts about the actions of the comrades who enter and exit the dramatis personae of the larger epic. Both narrators speak in the first person, and at times their voices elide, deliberately blurring the distinctions between the two main characters, as well as between oral and written tradition, and between story and history. Such elision, moreover, confirms the rhetorical roles of the narrators in epic, even as epic singers, for example, in the calm prior to the final defensive battle in which Momysch-Uly and Panfilow’s troops thwart the German

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee 6

advance on Moscow, the novel’s narrator casts Momysch-Uly as an epic singer, preparing for battle. The overlapping voices of the dual first-person narrators bestow the novel with its underlying form and function as epic, which Müller and Goebbels seize for their performative purposes. Each act of the radio play contains dual narrators, and each track of the recording contains dual voices in counterpoint. As in the novel, the voices of the dual narrators sound as one, even as the distinction between them is laid bare and increasingly exposed as discordant. Symbolically, the presence of the dual narrators persists through successive tales, acts, and tracks, representing the discordant fissures of modern European history itself: Germany and the Soviet Union in the novel; West and East in Europe and the Germanys; state systems that exert power and the human beings who fall victim to the excess and abuse of that power. The dual narrators further connect the chiasmic moments in the novel, radio play, and recording to the overarching political decay of the era, to which I give the name, wounded dialectic, in the present book. From this concept I develop a basic theoretical argument for understanding the meaning of the recording I myself now chronicle: it is not the identity of the narrative object—a theater scene, a piece of music, the lyrics of vocal music—that becomes the subject of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, but rather the recording of that sonic object. Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels are themselves dual narrators, thus they gather materials that previously existed as object and subject in the epic upon which they build, the stories in the voices of Alexander Bek and Baurdschan Momysch-Uly. Müller and Goebbels represent the stories they gather in ways that transform sound into materiality. The recording, therefore, becomes the work of art, and as such it transcends

the tales with which its narrators began. The recording itself becomes the material substance of historical narrative, mediated through acts of performance that proliferate to fill the materiality of the audio cassette, LP, and CD. Sound, when afforded the materiality of recording, becomes mobile, drawing the listener into the time and place of the recording of each track, conveying the historical moment as recorded materiality.

The Epic longue durée

Introduction

Heiner Müller drew upon widely different texts for the radio play, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, paradoxically so, however, in order to chart a literary and theatrical path that would unfold as a common historical narrative for the Germanys in the midand late twentieth century. The literary work unifying the five parts at the largest level is Alexander Bek’s 1944 novel, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, from which the play and its musical transformation take their names. Müller adapts materials from the novel only for the first two parts of the play (“Russian Gambit” and “Forest near Moscow”), though themes from the novel, particularly the epic struggle between Germany, East and West, and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century, appear in different narrative forms in the final three parts. Müller’s choice of literary sources, nonetheless, also challenges, even belies, any single path of unity Bek’s novel might otherwise provide. Part 3, “Das Duell” (The Duel), cleaves closely to a short story of the same name by Anna Seghers (1900–1983), one of the most influential GDR intellectuals, whose works chronicled the human struggles of the Second World War, which she survived as a Jewish writer in Mexican

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee 8

exile, and then largely turned her writing to the recovery of Germany, especially as a workers’ state, in the postwar years. Whereas Seghers’s “The Duel” is clearly legible in Part 3, Franz Kafka’s novella, “Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung), would be scarcely recognizable in Part 3, “Kentauren” (Centaurs), were it not for Müller’s subtitle, “A Horror Story in the Saxon Dialect of Gregor Samsa” (Ein Greuelmärchen aus dem Sächsischen des Gregor Samsa). Gregor Samsa’s tale of waking in his own home to discover he had been transformed into an insect may suggest a parallel to the centaurs of the title, the half-human and half-monster beings of Greek mythology, but there is little else in the narrative to clarify specific narrative connections. In the published version of the play, in fact, Müller felt compelled to supply a brief endnote to clarify who the centaurs were, the only reference of its kind in the entire published play (Müller 1988, 65). The final part, “The Foundling” (Der Findling), seemingly moves historically and as literary genre even farther from Bek’s novel, rerouted by Müller’s attribution to a motif by Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) in a short story about family loss and violence during years of plague in medieval Italy. The historical chronicle whose path moves from Berlin to Moscow along Volokolamsk Highway at a critical moment during the Second World War and follows the text of Alexander Bek’s novel in the opening scenes increasingly diverges to become narratively disparate in the final scenes. The whole assured by national and ideological struggle during world war seemingly falls apart, slipping into fragments that signify in different ways. The play’s beginning, still present in diffuse symbols, recedes farther and farther into the past. Such narrative collapse, nonetheless, is precisely what Heiner Müller seeks to circumvent, and he does so by turning toward classical ideals of form and genre. By so doing, he also reaffirms the

ways in which the narrative fragments cohere as the historical unity of epic. The transformation to epic, moreover, provides Heiner Goebbels with the opening he would need to conjoin the dramatic and the musical through historical record. The diverse genres of the sources and motifs gathered for Wolokolamsker Chaussee notwithstanding, Heiner Müller realizes the text in classic—and classical—epic form. Although all his literary sources employed prose, Müller transforms these into the poetic form of epic, especially in the forms stretching from Greek Antiquity to modern practices in Europe and the Mediterranean (see Lord 1960; Beissinger, Tylus, and Wofford 1999; Bohlman and Petković 2012; for the continuing presence of epic in the shaping of contemporary European literature, see Weber 2020, the 2020 winner of the distinguished Deutscher Buchpreis). Each scene in the play, therefore, unfolds stichically, that is, as line-by-line structures from beginning to end. Individual lines contain either ten or eleven syllables, formally consistent decasyllabic structures. Every stich, or line, contains two parts, which are separated by a caesura, therefore producing hemistiches. Part 1, “Russian Gambit,” parses thus: Table 1 Wolokolamsker Chaussee, Part 1, opening 4 lines Wir lagen zwischen / Moskau und Berlin

5 + 5 = 10 syllables

Positioned between / Moscow and Berlin Im Rücken einen Wald / ein Fluß vor Augen 6 + 5 = 11 syllables A forest behind us / a river before Zweitausend Kilo- / meter weit Berlin

5 + 5 = 10 syllables

One hundred twenty / kilometers Moscow

5 + 6 = 11 syllables

Introduction

Two thousand kilo- / meters to Berlin Einhundertzwanzig / Kilometer Moskau

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Table 2 Roman Jakobson’s Overview of Internal Structural Borders in Epic Song (1) Isosyllabism, or equal metric value for each syllable (2) Line breaks signify syntactic borders (3) A caesura, or word boundary, falls between the fourth and fifth syllables (4) Metric rhyme, or zeugma, meaning that the fourth and tenth syllables belong to the same words as the third and ninth syllables (5) Two-syllable words should begin on the odd-numbered syllables in a line (6) The ninth syllable receives the primary accent in a line (7) Even syllables provide anacrusis, odd syllables crusis, producing trochaic feet

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

(8) Avoiding closed syllables at the ends of lines in preference to open syllables, creating a sense of overlap between lines

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In a classic study of the form and structure of European epic texts, Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) provides an overview of the rules epic singers observe in performance (Table 2; cf. Jakobson 1966; P. Bohlman 2012, 91). A linguist of enormous importance, Jakobson laid the foundations for the structuralist paradigm of modern epic theory. Heiner Müller observes these rules quite religiously, with poetic license, throughout all five parts of the radio play, adapting very different literary texts to them, none of which was originally composed as an epic. Heiner Goebbels underscores the epic structure with complementary musical decisions, for example, by employing declamatory musical

genres to capture the melodic structure of epic. Müller’s spare use of punctuation also emphasizes the orality of Greek epic. Instead of the dense use of punctuation that characterizes the German language, sentences are marked only by the use of upper-case at their beginnings. German syntax or poetic convention, therefore, never interrupts the flow and framework of stichic structure (for studies of Greek and Balkan epic, see Lord 1960; Bohlman and Petković 2012). To realize the full potential of epic as genre and form, finally, the narrators of Wolokolamsker Chaussee cast all those who enact the dual roles connecting the novel to the recording as the heroes and anti-heroes of Classical epic.

Epic and the Death of Heroes Death pervades the closing scenes of Alexander Bek’s novel and Heiner Müller’s play. General Panfilow, who had orchestrated the Autumn 1941 defense of Moscow, dies as epic heroes do, leading his troops to moral victory by sacrificing himself. His lieutenant, Baurdschan Momysch-Uly, delivers the eulogy as a first-person narrative, which celebrates the end of the battle along Volokolamsk Highway, but prepares for the Soviet Union’s battles yet to come. The epic hero must die in order that the nation will live on: General Panfilow’s soul was filled with a powerful idea. This idea lived in every word we heard from him: the powerful fire of Lenin. He was a general and a communist, a son of the Party, who taught us to struggle on behalf of the Soviet lands. He was a general of truth. The memory of Iwan Wassiljewitsch

Introduction

idea of the revolution of the oppressed and the laborer, the

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Panfilow will continue to live in our deeds, in the heroic deeds of his division! Bek 1979, 545

The epic of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, thus, comes to its end with the successful defense of Moscow, but the struggle to defend the Soviet Union continues. The defense redirects the Red Army toward Leningrad, taking their struggle to the Leningrad Chaussee. With that new story—the beginning of a new epic—the novel/epic comes to its end. One could write another book about the defense of Leningrad with the title, In Old Russia [в старая русса, Bei Starja Russa]. But this book has reached its end.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Ibid., 546

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The dead who litter the battlefields of German postwar history in the closing scenes of Heiner Müller’s play would be heroes too, had they not suffered the far greater historical fate of falling victim to the two Germanys’ collective amnesia. FORGETTING AND FORGETTING AND FORGETTING cries the chorus—the hip-hop musicians of We Wear the Crown in Heiner Goebbels’s setting—in response to the epic singer’s accounts of those who have died in struggles for and against the rule of the authoritarian state. A best friend is shot trying to escape across the Berlin Wall, and the ghosts of those mourned in the past haunt the present. As the enjoinder to forget drones emphatically on, heroes are erased from memory, and their deaths are rendered meaningless. There is no return to life, only the hopelessness and helplessness of a story that cannot end. As the three versions of Wolokolamsker Chaussee reach their respective endings, Bek, Müller, and Goebbels remind us that

epic is persistently a site of violence and death, particularly for the hero. Many epics end with the death of their eponymous heroes, among them Moses in the Torah, the Cid in the Spanish national epic. Death musically enters the epic, even intruding upon its form. There is a change of voice and genre—to the narrative of strophic form—for example, in the final moments of the fifth book of Moses, “Deuteronomy,” when Moses confronts his own mortality at the threshold the Promised Land, which he will never reach. In epic death becomes the agent for translation from eschatological to soteriological language. The final section of Bek’s novel, an epilogue, makes this clear with its title, “He Will Live Again.” Songs and lyrics about the “end of things” are transformed to hold out hope for “the return to life,” most frequently allegorically so for the nation in whose service the hero has been fighting. Alexander Bek confirms the soteriological return. Heiner Müller, in contrast, condemns his epic heroes to the eschatological rubble of the failed nation.

In the Company of Epic Singers In this book I am but the conscientious and diligent scribe. “Not so,” said Baurdschan Momysch-Uly forcefully, “I shall not tell you anything. I detest people who write about the war using the story of strangers.” Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, opening lines

Our backs against a forest, facing a river in front of us Heiner Müller / Heiner Goebbels, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, opening lines

Introduction

We were located between Moscow and Berlin

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee 14

The voices of epic singers initiate the opening lines of all three versions of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, and they do so fully in both singular and multiple identities. Alexander Bek’s enunciation of an “I” as scribe establishes clearly that his tale will have two first-person narrators, the anonymous author of a novel, whose identity is that of a scribe, and Baurdschan Momysch-Uly, whose voice we hear distinctly as he protects a story that he will narrate in his own words. The two voices employed by Bek are modulated to the first-person plural by Müller and then by Goebbels. “We” begin these tales together. The distinction between writer and speaker now shifts to the common space of playwright and singer-musician, Bek and Momysch-Uly replaced by their avatars in a radio play by Müller and Goebbels. Listening to the tales these voices will sing, we know that we shall be entering the lyrical space of epic. The modulation from “I” to “we” opens the space of epic in several additional ways. The copresence of two narrators, telling and retelling the same story to multiple listeners, attunes us to the proliferation of voices in the epic tales. Wolokolamsker Chaussee is to be a work with many voices and a vast dramatis personae, all capable of seizing the roles of “I” and “we”. There are times when such roles are clear, for example, when Bek’s author and Momysch-Uly pause between battles, and Momysch-Uly recounts a tale that happened at another time and place. The blurring of “I” and “we” is critical to the ways narrator and chorus perform in Part 3, “The Duel,” in the Müller/ Goebbels recording. There are many other moments in which the proliferation of first-person narrators is so extensive that it is almost impossible to know who “I” is, or rather, which “I” is singing at a given moment. Critical to the ways in which all three works unfold as epics is that first-person narrators also perform in different ways.

Momysch-Uly not only tells his tale to the novel’s scribe, but he also begins to contribute to the history of the story by producing written reports about individual battles for General Panfilow and his staff. The written reports do not come easy to MomyschUly, but as the final battle approaches, it is clear that he has mastered his craft. In different, more distinctively musical, ways the singers of tales in Müller/Goebbels also move between genres and between oral and written tradition. Writing affords those who adhere to order the chance to survey: “Whoever writes can remain!” states the narrator of Part 3, “The Duel.” In the nightmare, into which the narrator of Part 4, “Centaurs,” awakes, written tradition offers the cruel assurance that things might really be as they are, “our people are really like the ways / they are in books and in newspapers” (lines 6–7, p. 59). The movement between oral and written tradition further opens the spaces into which epic is sung. Among the identities of the first-person narrator, that of an epic singer is unequivocal at critical structural moments, such as the opening of the chapter in which the scribe, Bek, listens to Momysch-Uly on the eve of the novel’s final great battle. Momysch-Uly and I sat in the bunker at the very front. The battalion commander [M-U] looked through the tiny window just below the ceiling. Outside, it was nighttime. What was he thinking about? Where were his thoughts leading him? At that point, he began to sing softly to himself. Ever since we had known each other—a period that was hardly casual, but also not particularly intimate—I had often noticed that Momyschsongs, old ballads [Romanzen] and opera arias. Sometimes, he would just begin singing one melody or another. Bek 1962, 422

Introduction

Uly possessed a good ear for music, and that he knew many

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The epic singer, not only Momysch-Uly, but the multiple “I” and “we” narrators in Müller/Goebbels, gathers many songs and genres, fragments and stiches from oral tradition that adhere because they cohabit the moments of performance that together sound the historical longue durée intoned by the many epic singers of Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

The Lessons of War I had already once heard Panfilow’s position. Doesn’t the war demand analysis from us? My troops, they are my academy. Your battalion, that’s your academy.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, 386

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In the course of Alexander Bek’s novel two characters represent the allegory of the socialist state and its defense against the fascist enemies that would ideologically and militarily dismantle them in war. The first of these, Baurdschan MomyschUly, the Battalion Commander and First Lieutenant, is also the primary first-person narrator of the novel, and it is therefore his perspective on defending the Soviet homeland that provides the most extensive unity to the text. The second, General Iwan Wassilijewitsch Panfilow, is the senior commander of the troops charged by the Soviet Army with defending Moscow, and in that role he enters and exits the novel at moments when he gathers his officers at field headquarters in order to plan the defense strategy. The two soldiers have completely different backgrounds, and these are critical for the different aspects of allegory they represent in the novel and then in the variations they assume in Heiner Müller’s radio play and Heiner Goebbels’s music for it.

Introduction

Momysch-Uly has risen through the ranks in the Soviet Army, guided always by the lessons of his working-class upbringing in Kazakhstan. Panfilow, in contrast, entered the army with the privileges of the elite officers’ class. Socially and politically, Momysch-Uly represents a bottom-up trajectory, while Panfilow views the battalion at his command from the topdown perspective of the Soviet state and its ruling Communist Party. The general symbolizes the rule of order, his field commander the value of loyalty. In battle after battle, at each line of defense in the novel, the two soldiers lead their troops in ways that express their contrastive narrative roles. Panfilow is primarily concerned with maintaining the major lines of defense, in which the city of Volokolamsk is key, whereas Momysch-Uly devotes himself to protecting the safety and lives of his individual soldiers, each one of whom is crucial if the many points of defense are to hold. As central as they are in the novel, neither Momysch-Uly nor Panfilow appears in the radio play. Parts 1 and 2 largely contain Momysch-Uly’s first-person narrative, but he himself is never named, even though soldiers with whom he interacts do have names, especially the battalion physician, Belenkow, who is stripped of his officer’s rank for abandoning wounded soldiers in Part 2. It is, nonetheless, because the two figures do not directly appear in the radio play that their allegorical roles stretch across the play and serve to unify text and music not only in the parts growing directly from Bek’s novel, but also in the final three parts, with their different textual and musical sources. In some cases, the intertextual connections to Momysch-Uly are evident, especially in “The Duel,” Part 3, with its conflict between two mathematics instructors whose training, too, was in two different academies. In the opening four lines of “The Foundling,” Part 5, we find ourselves witnessing the ideological instruction of

17

similar allegorical characters, this time in the Bautzen prison for political dissidents in East Germany: He sat across from me during the time for lectures I had already spent five years in the prison at Bautzen He preached WITH THE TONGUES OF MARX AND ENGELS About his workers’ paradise. Müller 1988, 67

The contrast between Momysch-Uly and Panfilow also enters the radio play as a distinction between first-person and thirdperson dialogue, for example in the opening lines (3–6) of Part 4, “Centaurs,” when the narrator addresses the monstrous character in his nightmare by giving his “comrade” the attributes of total order: I had a dream It was a nightmare I awakened and everything was in order. Comrade Commander everything is in order There is nothing out of the ordinary No resistance to orderliness.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Ibid., 59

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Musically, the contrastive role of Bek’s main characters forms the basis for the two main soundtracks that underlie each of the five parts in the music Goebbels has used for the recording. The narrator for each part becomes the musical voice for Momysch-Uly, expressive and passionate. The narrator’s music adapts to the different genres of the individual parts, most often utilizing a speaker’s rather than a singer’s voice. The listener is drawn to the voice of the people, the vox populi, the individuals who occupy the vast range of history

stretching from the Second World War to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. The music representing the themes related to Panfilow retains its attention to the rules governing genre and performance of the historical moment. Heavy metal is meant to be heavy metal in Part 1; the slow movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Leningrad Symphony” marches along incessantly in Part 4. Critically, the biographies of Bek’s characters also depended upon one another, necessarily so if the defense of Moscow was to succeed. So, too, do the two musical voices that run through the five movements of Goebbels’s recording converge and depart, the dialectic of consonance and dissonance providing synthesis between text and music in the service of a larger historical narrative.

Of Tanks and Horses

Introduction

Throughout the novel, Alexander Bek represents the modernity of war with two sets of metaphors, used dialectically to portray the sharp contrasts between the Soviet and German armies. The German army marches toward Moscow led by tanks— “panzers” in both German and English—which enable them to advance quickly, break through the Soviet lines, and capture Volokolamsk before moving with mechanical inevitability toward Moscow. When he portrays the enemy, referring to them most often as “the fascists,” Bek rarely humanizes them, but rather describes them anonymously, wanting for any real humanity in their armored vehicles. The reader never meets the opponents of the story’s narrators. The Soviet army, in contrast, maintains its defensive position without recourse to machines and modernized mobility. Instead of tanks the Soviet army relies on horses, who by

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee 20

extension represent the humanity of the troops themselves. Horses are personalized, even humanized, to a remarkable degree. The central narrator of the battles, Momysch-Uly, enters the story on the horse he brings from the Kazakh steppes, to whom he always refers intimately and allegorically as Lyssanka. The horses of other officers, too, have names, and they move across the battlefields and the story, lovingly portrayed as if characters with human feelings in the novel. Vehicles of all kinds, especially those of the field hospital or bearing the wounded in the second part of the novel and Part 2 of the radio play, are drawn by horses, who like the soldiers they transport are at times hopelessly weary and broken. The dialectic encompassing tanks and horses establishes a series of critical metaphors representing space and time for Alexander Bek, and then for Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels. German tanks move along the main roads, which connect Berlin to Moscow, a space that is at once extensive—“2,000 kilometers from Berlin, 120 kilometers to Moscow,” as the first track opens— and restricted to well-paved surfaces, especially those of the main thoroughfare, Volokolamsk Highway. The horses are capable of moving across the fields and through the forests. They, like the German tanks, come from far away, many of them from the steppes of Kazakhstan, where they could run in total freedom across a landscape whose horizons could never be reached. The contrast between tanks and horses generates a constellation of leitmotifs that afford unity to the larger narrative that stretches from Bek’s novel across the five parts of the recorded work of Müller and Goebbels. The time and space identified by these motifs are sometimes specific—“if the tanks had not given us birth a second time,” in lines 7 and 8 of Part 3, or “in the year of the tank, 1968,” in line 11 of Part 5—but even more consistently they are embedded in symbols that Heiner

Goebbels translates into musical metaphor. In Part 4, “Centaurs,” the symbols rise to the mythological and the modern. The Greek centaurs of the title were half human, half horse, together treated often as monsters; the insect that is the oblique reference to Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in the subtitle, “a horror story in the Saxon dialect of Gregor Samsa,” becomes a more modern metaphor for the monstrosity of humanity in its animal forms. In each track of the radio play, musical sound is deployed by contrasting recording techniques that evoke the mechanical and those that embody the musical sound. As in the novel and Müller’s teaching piece, the counterpoint of tanks and horses remains allegorically intact in Goebbels’s use of recorded sound and original music, the humanity of music inseparable from the machines that reproduce it.

Of Uniforms and Uniformity

Introduction

Of the many symbols and motifs that provide moments of unity to the multifarious texts gathered by Bek, Müller, and Goebbels from the many literary and musical sources in Wolokolamsker Chaussee, none appears with more frequency and diverse forms than the uniform. Throughout the novel, Bek provides obsessive references to uniforms, weaving details about fabric, rank, and class into the narrative at all levels. Uniforms belong to the everyday world of the Russian soldiers, providing them warmth against the arrival of winter weather and offering comfort when they rest and sleep in the course of battle. Uniforms are the register of a soldier’s labor and class, requiring attention when soiled by muddy fields and roads, and providing protection against the weapons of the enemy, the unrelenting fascists.

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Uniforms also distinguish the military and party elite class in Russia from the soldiers and officers who come from the nonRussian Soviet republics. General Panfilow dresses impeccably, often wearing the officer’s distinctive half-fur uniform, complemented by highly-polished boots. Even the account of Panfilow’s death from shrapnel in the final pages of the novel turns his uniform into the metaphor of passing across the border of life. Panfilow collapsed. Arsenjew ran to support him. Panfilow’s fur uniform was ripped open on the left side of the breast. Arsenjew unbuttoned the uniform. His fingers no longer obeyed his wishes. A haze fell across Panfilow’s eyes, but he was still able whisper: “It’s nothing, it’s nothing . . . I’m going to live.”

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Bek 1962, 543

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Momysch-Uly’s uniform was that of a Kazakh warrior, who engaged in battle not to display military rank or party loyalty, but rather to fight in the service of the great Soviet nation. Most commonly, Momysch-Uly refers to his uniform as a jacket from the steppes, and his side weapon, which he describes with great pride but never uses in battle, is a sable. As distinctive as they are, uniforms provide Bek with a narrative of uniformity rather than difference. The uniform makes the soldier; the uniform makes the nation. It is precisely this symbolic unity upon which both Müller and Goebbels seize in order to extend the field of common metaphors and motifs from the novel to the radio play. Uniforms provide fragments at dramatic moments in all five parts, and they lie at the core of the parable in parts 2 and 4 (“Forest near Moscow” and “Centaurs”). The uniform is the symbol of the nation, whole and fragmented. Throughout the radio play there are scenes in which one

narrator commands another to remove the uniform with the same refrain, “zieh den Mantel aus!” (remove your coat!), as an act of humiliation or preparation for the loss of humanity and life itself. In the final exchanges between narrators at the end of the radio play, Müller strips the nation of its uniform exposing its total emptiness, its collapse, and its death. Goebbels heightens this moment, as he does with each occurrence of a uniform tale, with an aggressive, violent turn in the music. Remove your coat You are soaked to the bone Put on my jacket It fits you Or I don’t believe that your jacket fits me I’ve picked you up from the rubble Müller 1988, 69

Your burial spot in the cemetery has already been bought I laid my head in her lap Which was not my homeland Because no mother gave birth to me My father was an empty uniform And sometimes a ghost at my neck Ibid., 72

Chiasma and Recording the History of Wounded Dialectic Introduction

Wolokolamsker Chaussee, the wartime novel, succeeded over the course of East-West history in Europe from the mid-1940s until the late 1980s because Bek deftly combined the rhetorical practices of story and history, of fiction and fact, transforming the novel itself into a literary process of chiasma, in which

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different narrative strands intersect and cross. Historical and fictional moments, therefore, reflect each other, at once drawing upon details that document the reality and fiction that amplify their meaning. As Brian Currid and I have discussed in our study of literary form in the Müller/Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee, the use of chiasma in the novel affords the playwright and the composer a broad range of dramatic and musical techniques for the creation of the texts and performances they would record with ECM in 1989/90 (see Bohlman and Currid 2001, 685–86). Whereas the radio play and recording use sections from the novel whose name it takes for all five acts, Müller turns to other works of literature, closely and obliquely, in the final three parts. Part 3, “The Duel,” reworks a short story by Anna Seghers, Part 4, “Centaurs,” moves along a circuitous, at times detached, path through Franz Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis, and Part 5, “The Foundling,” takes Heinrich von Kleist’s short story of the same name as its literary predecessor, albeit as traces and fragments. Woven together, these different stories allow Müller to construct a larger history of modern Germany, from the Second World War in the first acts, the early and later GDR in the third and fourth acts, and the final dissolution of the GDR in the final act. Schematically, the chiasma of story, history, and music in the tracks of the ECM recording unfolds thus (Table 3):

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Table 3 Musical and Textual Narratives in Heiner Müller/Heiner Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee Track 1: Russian Gambit Text: Part 1 of Alexander Bek’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee Time and place: Initial defensive maneuvers of Soviet troops as the German army accelerates its siege of Moscow (early autumn 1941)

Music: Ernst Stötzner as narrator; the band, Megalomaniax, performs heavy metal Track 2: Forest near Moscow Text: Mid-novel transition from Part 1 to Part 2 in Bek’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee Time and place: Moment of regrouping the Momysch-Uly battalion prior to the final defensive action Music: Singer-songwriter style of the German folk revival; Ernst Stötzner as narrator, Megalomaniax as instrumental accompaniment Track 3: The Duel Text: Anna Segher’s short story, “Das Duell,” restaged to represent the two Germanys in the Cold War Time and place: Conflict between old and new order in 1950s East Germany Music: Ernst Stötzner in dual narrator’s role; Horbach Chamber Chorus Track 4: Centaurs Text: Allusion to a “horror story” in the Saxon dialect of Gregor Samsa, the main character of Franz Kafka’s novella, Metamorphosis; a GDR bureaucrat is transformed from a human into his desk in service to the state Time and place: The extended era of order and force following the building of the Berlin Wall Music: The “Invasion Theme” section from the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7, op. 60, in C Major (1941); punctuation of the orderly backdrop of the symphonic ostinato by machine-like sounds Track 5: The Foundling

Introduction

Text: Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 short story, “Der Findling,” set in Italy during the plague years of the medieval Black Death Time and place: Relocation of the narrative to the final years of the GDR in the mid- and late 1980s Music: The hip-hop band, We Wear the Crown, with Ernst Stötzner, as narrator, performing multiple roles

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As a composer whose creative palette contains a wide range of genres and styles, drawing upon historical works and pushing the boundaries of experimental performance, Heiner Goebbels uses sound to draw the listener’s attention to the chiasmic moments that conjoin time and place as chronotopes shared by Bek’s novel and Müller’s expansion of it as a radio play and published text. Each track of the recording, thus, unfolds as many different chiasmic moments, capable of referring to a specific time and place in the track, while also serving as an index of other times and places in the other tracks. Though Bek’s novel, for instance, serves as the textual basis only for tracks 1 and 2, chiasmic moments in the final acts retrieve and relocate chronotopes from the novel for the final three tracks. Refrains in which authority figures command soldiers/workers/citizens to remove their uniforms—“zieh’ deine Jacke aus” (take your coat off )—musically punctuate all five acts, drawing the listener, nonetheless, to the underlying use of humiliation during war in Part 2, “Forest near Moscow.” By spreading such chiasmic moments across the entire musical work, Goebbels employs a variety of techniques to deepen the unity of a recorded whole seemingly constituted of many fragments. It has been one of my goals in this book to establish the ways in which the wholeness of Wolokolamsker Chaussee emerges from the interconnectedness of chiasmic moments. I have done so by creating what I call a “chronotope census” for each act and track, which in turn allows me to chart the vast historical and narrative landscape of the entire work and extend it across twentieth-century European history, even until the present.

1 Russian Gambit Again, we rode on in silence. Again, I listened to the German music, the prelude to the day. Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1962 [1944], 308) The war was at its beginning, they are at their end New songs arise from the valley Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 32)

In the Beginning, Silence Then Chaos The first track of the Heiner Müller/Heiner Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee begins in silence. Symbolically and rhetorically, for a recording to begin in silence is not to begin at all. Many listeners surely initially wonder whether they have even started the recording. In search of sound, they might return again to the track’s beginning, and again there is silence as, or instead of, a beginning. With the third attempt it is time to turn up the volume, just in case the problem lies in the amplifier or CD-player. Patience gives way to confusion, and we linger a bit longer, adjusting the volume and checking the settings, until, almost imperceptibly, the march-like percussion and string underpinnings that accompany the middle section, the socalled “Invasion Theme,” of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, gently course through the first half-minute of the

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recording, its gradual crescendo seemingly consummating a beginning for the recording journey upon which we are about to embark. Enter, the track’s two narrators, Ernst Stötzner and the metal band, Megalomaniax, the former affirming that we have arrived at the beginning of the track, the latter opening the sonic curtain with the explosions of heavy artillery shells, if still at a distance beyond the battlefields of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. And then, all hell breaks loose. Megalomaniax unleashes the full fury of its heavy metal sound to enunciate time and place to affix the real beginnings for the narratives that will unfold across the five tracks of the recording: “two thousand kilometers from Berlin / one hundred twenty kilometers before reaching Moscow” (Müller 1988, 29). The soldiers of the Red Army find themselves in a dystopian world, in which the German offensive against the Soviet capital threatens imminently to accelerate and break through the Soviet lines, fully and finally. Beginnings and endings elide, blurred and eventually broken by the chaos that overtakes them at the historical moment presaging the rise and fall of other beginnings in the tracks that follow, swelling relentlessly until swallowed by the chaos on the final track. The silence of beginning will ineluctably yield to the chaos that disrupts and diverts the narrative path of the recording that has now begun. Already in the initial lines of text performed on the first track, Müller and Goebbels make it clear where and when the episode of “Russian Gambit” takes place in Bek’s novel. We find ourselves between parts 1 and 2 of the novel, between the victories won by diversionary tactics and the concerted offensive attack on Moscow, which exceedingly diminished Soviet troops will need to thwart with new tactics, forged largely from newly won discipline. Parts 1 and 2 of the Müller/ Goebbels recording take place during this period of respite

and regrouping. Upon moving through that period in the first two tracks, Müller and Goebbels do not return directly to the Bek novel again. The two tracks contrast with each other in almost every way, metonymically representing the extensively dual quality of the wounded dialectic. Track 1, sounding chaos, draws us into the space between the two parts of the defense of Moscow by representing it as dystopia. The many first-person narrators who constitute the dramatis personae give voice to roles that are more dissonant than consonant. The vocal registers cut across each other, often argumentatively, as if the characters are not listening to each other. To capture the attention of others, it is necessary to scream, to transgress vocal boundaries and seize the machinery of the metal band. Track 2, as we see in the chapter that follows, enters a parallel sonic world in the novel’s narrative as if landing on the shores of utopia. The first-person narrators are the same as on Track 1, Ernst Stötzner and Megalomaniax, but they exercise restraint and evoke calm. The contrast between the two tracks is for us critical because of the ways it situates the beginnings and endings that define the chiasmic moments whose sonic worlds we enter and exit in the course of Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

Of Laments and Love Songs I stood there in my coat, freezing in the wind The noise from the frontlines was like a love song.

The narrative of Part I, “Russian Gambit,” is the most concise and focused of any of the five parts of the radio play and recording.

Russian Gambit

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 37)

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With the backdrop of regrouping the Soviet troops for a cobbled-together battalion that Baurdschan Momysch-Uly will command in final defense of Moscow, the playwright and composer adapt one of the catalytic scenes from the center of the novel and situate it at the beginning of the radio play, where it allows them to launch a more extensive journey along Volokolamsk Highway. At the center of the episode is the encounter with a deserter from the skirmishes of the first part of the novel, who has shot himself in his hand so he might join the wounded in retreat from the frontlines. After accusations and counterclaims about whether the soldier did indeed shoot himself, the primary narrator makes clear that he must follow military regulations and execute the deserter “according to the laws of war” (ibid., 39). Appeals for sympathy and demonstrated willingness to rejoin the battalion to fight again at the frontline notwithstanding, the officer orders the soldier’s execution, requests he be stripped of his soldier’s uniform, and commands that he be buried. The track’s narrative concludes as the primary narrator, the battalion commandant, reflects on the meaning of death in war, whether all who die merely fulfill the inevitable consequences of war, willingly or unwillingly. As these reflections verge on madness and paranoia, the companion primary narrator, Megalomaniax, closes the final text of the track by intoning its beginning: “two thousand kilometers from Berlin / one hundred twenty kilometers before reaching Moscow” (Müller 1988, 29). Both Müller and Goebbels utilize the first track to identify and then establish most of the leitmotifs that will spread across the subsequent tracks. The central themes of order and authority pervade the narrative, as both are at once asserted and challenged. In the end, order must be maintained, for it maps the path out of chaos; only through the exercise of

authority can the wounded dialectic be healed. The sacrifice of the citizen’s body to the socialist state also takes the form of different motifs, and it does so by its contrast with the machinery of the state. Sound in its dialectical dimensions— human and mechanical—surfaces as a recurring leitmotif throughout the track. The Soviet soldiers recognized their enemy because “during the day we heard the frontlines . . . the planes and the tanks that sounded the arrogance of the Germans” (ibid.). The soldier accused of desertion, in contrast, could “only speak through closed lips,” his humanity thus silenced by his body (ibid., 39). Song, however, did not disappear from the dystopian chaos of the first track. Its locus, too, was the body and the voice, protected against the thunder unleashed by the machinery of the state, still recognizable as a love song.

From Chaos Arises Epic Steppes and city together yield a battalion Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 36)

Russian Gambit

The surfeit of voices mustered in chaos notwithstanding, the playwright and composer transform the first track into the literary and musical genre of epic, and they do so by linking form and performance to Greek tragedy. The chaos that encompasses the beginning of the track necessitates that the listener sort through the mass of sound unleashed by the multiple narrators and the metal band, searching with active listening from the fragments that cohere as the chiasmic moment of story and history. There is risk in beginning the first track with chaos, for it might effectively alienate the listener,

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obscuring rather than affirming the formal and structural foundations of the entire recording. Heiner Müller averts that risk, however, by transforming text from the novel so that the listener can follow a poetic path along the unfolding hemistiches unambiguously to find firm sonic footing for the journey that follows. In order to achieve this formal end, he crafts a text that sounds not only the structure of epic, but also opens the common aural space heterophonically resounded by epic speech-song (see P. Bohlman 2012). It is into that aural space that Heiner Goebbels moves deftly and brilliantly with the musical forces he conjoins for the recording. The chaos of the first track, thus, becomes a literary and musical metonym for the “Russian Gambit” itself, which multiplies the moments of what Barbara Kordes calls “musical reading processes” (musikalische Lesarten) that distinguish the Müller/Goebbels collaborations (Kordes 2009). Müller’s elevation of chaos to epic materializes at three different levels, each requiring a distinctive combination of poetic and dramatic techniques. First of all, Müller identifies the pertinent narrators in the novel’s tale of desertion and degradation, and he realizes these as first-person narrators in “Russian Gambit.” Whereas the novel relies almost entirely on the dual narrators’ voices of the author, Bek, and the battalion commander, Momysch-Uly, Müller lets each character in the story speak for himself. In this way, Müller resets the stage for a radio play, effecting a transformation of one literary genre to another. As specific and indebted to the novel as “Russian Gambit” may be, Müller also anonymizes the narrators by allowing their voices to blend together. We witness here, too, a process of opening toward the acts and tracks that follow by creating a common narrator’s space that stretches across the entire play and recording.

The careful reworking of text from the novel to fulfill the stichic, line-by-line structure of epic affords Müller a second level of transformation. It is sound itself—of individual words and the rhythms they form when joined through carefully crafted syntax—that guides Müller as he sutures textual fragments together. The caesurae that divide each line into hemistiches are clearly evident because of the ways they act as a sonic mirror for the text on either side. Sound takes priority over grammar in Müller’s location of the caesura, as for example in the following lines in the opening minutes of the track, in which sound is beautifully balanced, even as sense is sacrificed to the structure of epic hemistiches: Der Deutsche Habt ihr / ihn gesehn Wie kämpft er The German Have you / seen him How he struggles Der Deutsche Habt ihr / ihn gesehn Gesehn The German Have you / seen him Have you seen Müller 1988, 29; lines 21–22

Russian Gambit

The third level of transformation is the introduction of the chorus, with its deliberate and distinctive allusion to Greek tragedy as a historical and performative genre that combines poetry, drama, and music. It is as a chorus that Megalomaniax establishes its presence in the time and space of Part I. The band, both vocally and instrumentally, is identifiable as the collective “we” that sets the act in motion already with the first line (“we lay between Moscow and Berlin”), and then reasserts that position with the periodic return of the refrain chronotope (“two thousand kilometers from Berlin / one hundred twenty kilometers before reaching Moscow”), which closes the act, the same time and space with which it began. As the chorus, Megalomaniax assumes numerous roles and articulates them

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dramatically in different, often unpredictable and disruptive ways, therefore also suggesting that it is the chorus that sustains the chaos. The opposite, however, is true, for the chorus interposes with commentary that increasingly connects the heterophonic strands of chaos to generate the epic structure that opens upon the entire recording (see P. Bohlman 2012).

Epic in the Time of Metal Each hour lasted my entire life A brief sixty minutes was his entire life Every minute an eternity

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 36)

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How incongruous it might at first seem to sound the first episode of an epic tale with music that is far removed in time and place from it, indeed, a musical style that is at dramatic odds with the historical moment it sounds on the first track. With the track itself beginning by specifying the chronotope of “Russian Gambit” with coordinates between Berlin and Moscow, the metal onslaught from Megalomaniax moves to dislodge the time and place of the epic even as the playwright and composer set its telling in motion. The first-time listener does not yet know anything about the formal and structural properties of epic’s unfolding line-by-line structure. The semantic balance that affords the text its rhythm and that the narrator’s voices will magnify into complex, at times intricate, metric patterns remains inchoate for minutes into the track, developing only slowly as listeners gradually take notice of the craft with which the prose of a novel has been changed into the poetry of epic. The full-throttle pulse and full-voice volume

Russian Gambit

of metal divert the listener’s attention, rerouting the journey of the recording in chaos before order has been given a chance to assert itself. Propelled by metal music, the epic can now return to its time and place as the journey through the chiasmic moments of modernity begins. The seeming rush of Megalomaniax into chaos notwithstanding, we quickly begin to perceive a much more concerted orderliness. The band itself, as instrumentalists producing a highly charged electric sound and as vocalists who intervene as a chorus in Greek tragedy, swiftly establishes its role as one of the track’s dual narrators, affirming musically with that affirmation the band’s own indebtedness to speed metal. The other narrator’s role on the track is audible in the speech, song, and speech-song of Ernst Stötzner. In “Russian Gambit” both narrators—solo vocalist and collective metal band—must perform in multiple voices, assuming many roles, sometimes speaking to and with each other, at other times articulating the conflict between Momysch-Uly as the symbol of order, at other times the deserter and the general fear about the impending battle against an enemy possessing overwhelming advantage on the field of battle. The sound palette from which each set of narrators draws its roles and voices enunciates a sonic bridge from the novel to the epic. The metal sound of Megalomaniax represents the machines and weaponry that the German army employs for its offensive, occasionally, as in the instrumental prologue and epilogue deliberately sounding explosions and artillery bombardment. As the opposing narrator, Ernst Stötzner employs remarkable vocal dexterity to move between and among the roles that an epic singer would more traditionally intone. The contrast with the metal band is critical, for it enables Heiner Goebbels and the musical performers to create formal

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distinctions at a micro- and macro-level. Contrast between narrators often takes place at both sides of the caesura in the individual line. The first hemistich frequently begins as an exaggerated marcato punched out by the vocal narrator, only to be seized by the instrumental narrator to spill across the caesura as a rush toward the end of the line. The track as a whole is divided into three major sections, in effect dramatic scenes, by the four iterations of the geographical coordinates between Berlin and Moscow, in each instance repeated twice by Megalomaniax to emphasize narrative and musical transition. On its sonic surface the music throughout is deceptively chaotic and straining under an overabundance of metal gestures. Below that surface the music strains in a different way, suturing parts and fragments together, powerfully so because of the craft composer and performers have endowed upon the performance.

Of Chiasma and Caesura Give him his coat again and bury him And with that my battalion took its first steps On the journey from Moscow to Berlin

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 39)

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The sheer welter of sound that wells up in the final minutes of the first track seemingly leads toward a moment of collapse, to the chasm that lies beyond the chaos and the epic tale with which the narrators seek to navigate waters ahead. In Bek’s novel the Soviet troops have begun to establish their defensive positions along the banks of the Ruza River, but it will be the German army that determines where the final battles of the

Russian Gambit

defense of Moscow will take place, the corridor along which the machines of modernity mobilize war, Volokolamsk Highway. The radio play and recording, too, arrive at the time and place of chiasma and caesura, beyond which the journey of the subsequent tracks will diverge, some toward utopia, others soon mired in dystopia, the chronological chronotope of inevitable collapse when all highways between Berlin and Moscow converge in the final track fully presaged. The performance of chaos on the first track by Ernst Stötzner and Megalomaniax is critical for the epic at its many levels— novel, radio play, ECM recording, allegory for the history of the Cold War—because it establishes a sound lexicon for the dramatic path along both sides of the caesura that runs through the entire work, the major artery that connects Moscow and Berlin. Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels create a sonic contrast between the historical actors and fictional characters who move along the allegorical journey, advancing and retreating. In “Russian Gambit” it is the Germans who use modern weapons of war, especially the tanks and heavy artillery, becoming first the sonic signature of the metal band, but reimagined by Goebbels in the instrumental voices on the subsequent tracks, fulfilling the role of the narrator always confident in the order of the socialist state. Momysch-Uly’s soldiers, even as they are battered and decimated by the machines of war, hold true to the traditional, more human ways of waging war from an earlier era. As the central voice among the vocal narrators, Momysch-Uly wages war in the midst of his troops, moving about the battlefield on his horse (and companion), Lyssanka, to whom he always refers by name in Bek’s novel. The sonic worlds on opposing sides of the caesura is a story that will be sounded again, staging the ideological conflict in the third track, “The Duel,” and channeled

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through Ovid and Kafka into the third track, “Centaurs.” Routed and rerouted through the chiasmic moment shared by utopia and dystopia, the voices of narrators and choruses join together and fall apart, ironically also together as the recording reaches the final moment of historical dissolution and destruction, the betrayal and revenge filling the fifth track, “The Foundling.” Musically, we’ll know that we’ve been there before, already in the recording of the first track. Epic, as we remember only too well, reaches its ending only to return to its beginning.

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2 Forest near Moscow I am the commander of a battalion That is cut off from the army In this forest that is an island In the German sea burning up our homeland A Soviet island and a Soviet forest —Heiner Müller, “Forest near Moscow” (1988, 49)

The Shores of Utopia Having endured the turbulent metal storm that propels the opening battle scenes of Part 1, the sojourner/listener of Wolokolamsker Chaussee arrives at the shores of an island of tranquility in Part 2, “Forest near Moscow.” Heiner Müller employs the image of an island in the midst of a sea of violent battle at the opening and closing of Part 2, providing literary boundaries for one of the geographical metaphors affording unity and contrast within the narrative arc of the entire radio play. Heiner Goebbels seizes musically on the image, enhancing its function of drawing boundaries between the violence and tranquility of the longer epic journey. Islands become both metaphorical and metonymic, especially in Part 2. In the course of battle, whether in the sea or in a forest near Moscow, islands provide respite from the battle, and they transform moments of sovereignty. Antecedents from Classical Greek literature, especially the

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various sojourns of Odysseus and his troops on Aegean islands, provide one set of allusions for Müller. More immediate, however, is the literary allusion to Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, an island set apart from the world, an invention of literary imagination in More’s neologism, utopia, that was geographically a “no place” (ουτοπος [utopia]) and a “good place” (ευ῏τοπος [eutopia]). The literary island of Utopia thus realized a common space between two worlds, one degraded by the emerging modernity of the sixteenth century and beyond, the other offering an idyll in the middle of the sea. In Track 2 we are moored on the musical journey along Volokolamsk Highway along the shores of just such a utopia. “Forest near Moscow” occupies a sonic world that in many respects lies outside the other four tracks. Rather than opening outward into the larger history of military conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the subsequent era of intra-German struggle during the Cold War, Part 2 chronicles a single episode in Alexander Bek’s novel, which appears in a chapter entitled “Medical School Education” (362–72). At the heart of the story is the confrontation between two officers in the Soviet army, the battalion commander, Baurdshan Momysch-Uly, and the battalion’s head medical doctor, Captain Belenkow, during the lull in active conflict that surrounds the regrouping of defensive forces in the forest. Though the defense of Moscow provides a backdrop for this singular story—Belenkow has retreated from the frontlines with the wounded soldiers in his care, and Momysch-Uly seeks to remove the doctor from his officer’s post for what he claims is desertion and subordination— the story itself is really about the acts of leadership that effectively maintain Soviet sovereignty and order. In the expanse of Bek’s novel, the story is one of only minor consequence, providing literary filling at the moment of

utopian respite. For Heiner Müller the confrontation between battalion commander and physician provides the final moment in the direct literary use of Bek’s novel. The story and the music that represents it change dramatically thereafter with the departure from the island of utopia, the forest near Moscow, to the future of the final three tracks, in which time and place irreversibly become more and more dystopian.

Authority and Its Discontents

Forest near Moscow

“Forest near Moscow” is a tale about the claims of absolute authority and by extension the exercise of such authority by those acting in the name of the state. Throughout Bek’s novel and the Müller/Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee authority is tested only to assert the right of the soldiers, bureaucrats, or political class to wield authority with impunity. In Part 2 the challenge to and triumph of authority take place in the chiasmic moment of a track in which two primary characters reverse positions in their symbolism and exercise of power. Such reversal becomes a literary trope for Bek and a musical, dramatic leitmotif for Müller and Goebbels, once again providing them with creative tools to elevate the impending disorder of historical events into an overall unity in the subsequent chapters, acts, and recorded tracks. The authority wielded by Momysch-Uly in the face of Belenkow’s desertion grows as the narrators of both novel and radio play return to it insistently, elevating it to a trope of ceaseless repetition. The confrontation between a Soviet military doctor and the commander of a diminished battalion was only one of many episodes in which the claims of authority provide the underlying narrative for an episode in Wolokolamsker Chaussee,

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and it was by no means the most dramatic. In the first part of the novel, Momysch-Uly responds to what would appear to be an act of desertion by executing a soldier. The most extended episode, however, takes place in the second part of the novel at the moment the Soviet soldiers from companies that had suffered significant losses are mustered for the final defense of Moscow, which, in turn, will lead to the close of the novel. Panfilow must organize order from chaos, and Momysch-Uly must enact that order with the troops in his battalion. Once again, a soldier is accused of abandoning a defensive position in an act of cowardice, but this time it is a more elite member of the officers’ corps, Comrade Semjon Sajew. Momysch-Uly conducts a court-martial in the field, with himself as a judge committed to strict maintenance of military protocol. Condemned to execution, Sajew undergoes the symbolic humiliation of removing all signs of military rank so that he is left without a uniform. Sajew also displays numerous signs of contrition, while not denying that the military law is clear. The other soldiers, among them those who must execute Sajew, express uneasiness, even horror, at the prospect of killing one of their own. In the hours before the execution, however, General Panfilow arrives to assist in plans for the defense, but first commutes Sajew’s sentence, thereby exhibiting an even higher level of Soviet authority. By sparing Sajew execution, Panfilow also makes a providential decision. Returning to the battalion, now as a common soldier, Sajew would soon become one of the bravest of the soldiers, whose tactical leadership proved crucial to the success of the defense. Heiner Müller’s decision to concentrate the various assertions and recalibrations of authority in Part 2 provides him, and then his musical collaborator, Heiner Goebbels, with a significant means of connecting the historical moment of

Bek’s novel to the future events that will stretch across the history of the GDR to the moments of its dissolution. The exchange between an officer upholding the laws of the Soviet Union and a military doctor no less committed to saving the lives of the soldiers who serve under those laws unfolds as the wounded dialectic of utopia and dystopia, increasingly suffering in the narratives filling the final three tracks of Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

A Delicate Balance

Forest near Moscow

The tranquility of the second track rests in the delicate balance with which Müller constructs his text and Goebbels expresses it musically. The narrative of Part 2 is more focused than that of any other act. Whereas the title of the track suggests that it will occupy a much more expansive narrative from Bek’s novel, in which the retrenchment of the Soviet battalion in the forests near Volokolamsk occupies a catalytic role in preparation for the final and victorious defensive battles, Müller chooses only a single story for his text, the demotion of the medical officer accused of cowardice because of his decision to remain behind the battle lines with the wounded and hungry. The contrast with Part 1, with its massive opening into the entire historical moment, is striking, all the more so because the single story at the core of Part 2 serves as a pivot away from the novel toward the narratives of the final three parts, none of which directly sustains Bek’s chronicle of defending Moscow. We enter the sonic world of Wolokolamsker Chaussee in miniature, a moment now timeless, yet filled with expectation for the transition that will follow. Epic itself provides Müller with a poetic framework for the delicate balance he instills in the text. Single lines of text divide

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frequently into two parts, either mirroring or contrasting with each other, but always concentrating the listener’s ear on internal rhythm and rhyme. The poetic devices Müller employs, moreover, transform the words themselves into speech-song, as in this passage from the middle of the act, which I translate to capture Müller’s poetic process: Und ohne Stimme oder wars die Stimme It was without voice or it was the voice Das Bataillons ein Brüllen oder Flüstern The battalion’s a roar or a whisper Weit weg von meinen Ohren sagte ich Faraway from my ears said I Bevor der Feind mit uns ein Ende macht Before the enemy leads us to our end Werden wir mit dem Feind ein Ende machen We’ll lead the enemy to its end

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Müller 1988, 44–45; lines 114–18

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The internal balance within and between lines further generates dramatic effect, above all between the two main characters enacting Part 2, Captain Belenkow and MomyschUly. Each believes he is serving the Soviet Union, albeit each in his own way. Their conflict during the forest encounter is not with the German enemy, but rather with an internal struggle for leadership and survival, the very realization of the order for the Soviet Union. Belenkow maintains order by saving lives, acting as the physician he was trained to be through university education. Momysch-Uly, as he does throughout Bek’s novel, accounts for his own education through the sensibilities acquired after knowing the freedom of the Kazakh steppes from his youth. For Belenkow leadership lies in his capacity to

heal, not just the soldiers in his care, but also the body politic those soldiers represent. For Momysch-Uly, in contrast, the rules of war can only be maintained through absolute obedience. As dual narrators in Part 2 they represent these contrasting positions through a balance of humanity and bureaucracy: Comrade commander The rules of war are like Soviet orderliness . . . And scars appear on me like wounds old And new wounds stricken from paper With typewriters and government files In our positions and offices in the name Of Soviet orderliness our Soviet orderliness Müller 1988, 46–47; lines 175–76 and 179–83

Forest near Moscow

Müller introduces sound and music into the intimate world of the forest more sparingly. The sounds of battle remain at a distance, foreign to the quiet of the forest, for example, in the relatively few instances when Müller alludes to his leitmotif of German tanks. In the closing minutes of the track, the sound of tanks engaged in battle is internalized, moved to a future “when empty tanks fire upon each other . . . still in battle where the memory of our fallen soldiers’ lives” (Müller 1988, 49). The dead come to life in the unconscious, where they are mobilized again in their service to the state. References to the body, especially to the ears that listen and the tongue that speaks, appear in the text with frequency, affording yet another technique of internalizing the sensorium that forms the common ground of Part 2. Time and history, too, are measured by the body, the survival of the Soviet Union placed in parallel to the living body. Survival of the nation is assured “for as long

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as we can still breathe” (ibid., 45). “The Soviet Union and Soviet orderliness live in your heart and in your mind” (ibid., 49). When they meet in “Forest near Moscow,” Belenkow and Momysch-Uly must resolve the dialectical tension they represent in the novel. Müller leaves his tale of the delicate balance at the point Bek spins it out for the larger narrative of the novel. Belenkow’s demotion to foot soldier symbolizes an equalization of the Soviet forces that will succeed in their defense of Moscow. Rather than following that route out of the forest, Müller and Goebbels choose instead to travel deeper into the delicate balance and remap it onto the common ground of the next track, “the Duel.”

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

The Epic Singer’s Island

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Entering the sonic world of the forest enclosing the Soviet battalion that will defend Moscow, the listener encounters a moment of calm and harmony, as if the second track is deliberately cut off from the violence and struggle of the first track. The sonic world of the forest contains two parts, first of all the narrator, Ernst Stötzner, who provides the voices for all roles in the dramatic struggle between Battalion Commander Momysch-Uly and Medical Captain Belenkow, and then the instrumental underpinnings of Megalomaniax. Though the performers are the same as those in Part 1, thus providing continuity with the other act of Wolokolamsker Chaussee that directly grows from a scene in Alexander Bek’s novel, the music they perform sounds a radically different register, expressing calm and restraint. Musically, the occupants of the “Forest near Moscow” are the epic singer and his accompanying instrument, the late

Forest near Moscow

twentieth-century guslar and gusle. More deliberately than in any other act, Goebbels sets the Müller/Bek text in ways that draw out its underlying epic structures. The narrator interprets the decasyllabic structure of the text unambiguously, enhancing epic structure and form. The listener hears lines as integral wholes from the printed text, even in the many frequent instances when Müller does elide syntax and meaning from one line to the next. The feeling of breaks, both in the grammatical structure of individual phrases and the strong presence of caesurae throughout Part 2, draws the listener into the rhythm of the poetry, which in turn affords Goebbels the opportunity to combine poetic and harmonic rhythms into a regularizing quadruple meter. Poetic and harmonic meter are vaguely march-like, albeit held in restraint until those moments when dramatic tension gives way to the forceful conflict between Momysch-Uly and Belenkow. If the listener did not know that Megalomaniax provided the instrumental backdrop for the sonic world of the forest, they would hardly be recognizable after their performance in Part 1. Unifying the accompaniment for Part 2 is an intentionally reserved sound of an acoustic guitar, in 1989 surely evoking the sound of the singer-songwriter in the German peace movement. We might imagine that the track is a cover of a Wolf Biermann song. The guitar accompaniment is extremely sensitive to the vocal line, capturing the nuances of epic structure as the narrator organizes them through hemistiches and rhythmically distinct phrases. The guitar thus parallels the voice, but also enhances the narrator’s voice by backing it with melodic gestures. It is not always clear, therefore, whether Ernst Stötzner is speaking or singing, for he enters into a common space filled by voice and guitar, while opening it with a modern epic singer-songwriter’s heterophony. This

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sonic space conjoined by voice and guitar symbolizes the forest itself, the moment of regrouping the battalion in the island on Soviet soil. The common space of narrator and guitar, however, does not remain isolated in the course of Part 2. At specifically dramatic moments the narrator is joined by a chorus, amplifying the exchanges between Momysch-Uly and Belenkow, especially the accusations of cowardice and failure to lead that they trade back and forth. Goebbels uses the chorus to punctuate the drama very sparingly, and when we do hear the chorus, it remains in the background as commentary, singing in a style that intentionally suggests the singers have not rehearsed. The choral response symbolizes the Soviet army in the forest itself, needing order and orders so they can be mustered again in defense of Moscow. It is with the chorus, moreover, that the narrator crosses the border between speech and song, briefly giving melodic shape to his commentary to accentuate a moment of dramatic tension, especially when he assumes the role of Momysch-Uly and demotes Belenkow by removing the signs of rank from his uniform. The instrumental underpinning of the sonic world of “Forest near Moscow” remains simple at the beginning of the track, evoking the momentary calm that intervenes between the first and final battles in the defense of Moscow. After seven days of battle the battalion assesses its wounds, acquiring palliative healing from the acoustic guitar. As the track unfolds, however, Megalomaniax’s instrumental sound intensifies and swells, the battalion’s respite punctuated by electric-guitar licks and percussion interpellations, which unsettle the orderliness of the metric patterns underlining the complementary voices of narrator and acoustic guitar. As Momysch-Uly accelerates his attacks on Belenkow, asserting his right under Soviet orderliness

to demote the physician and captain to a simple soldier, the instrumental and vocal lines together crescendo, reaching their climax as Müller’s text concludes with Momysch-Uly’s command that Belenkow remove his officers’ stripes. The listener is dramatically prepared for the track to end after the climax is reached, but Goebbels instead retreats into a transitional coda, reentering the time and space of the forest. With over a minute left on the track, the acoustic guitar picks up its repetitive role as accompaniment to epic, albeit with the voice of the narrator. With twenty-five seconds remaining, the instrumental background undergoes a radical rerouting into the military march from the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, thereby leaping ahead to another battle narrative, which will return two tracks later with Part 4, “Centaurs.” Musically, we re-enter a new utopian space, outside of time, but then exit it as Part 2 fades toward its final conclusion.

The Unexpected Lightness of Metal

Forest near Moscow

Megalomaniax’s performance on the second track is the antithesis of heavy metal sound, even during the relatively early years of metal’s history. The restraint of the accompanying guitar, above which Ernst Stötzner speaks with clarity, emphasizes the narrative and form of epic: the text has priority over the accompaniment. The exercise of musical authority, like that in the drama of the episode, resides in the speaker’s delivery, his ability to draw the listener into the story, accentuating the familiarity of both epic-singer delivery and

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singer-songwriter intelligibility. We are meant to listen closely to the story of Captain Belenkow’s demotion, and the guitar accompaniment, with its peaceful repetitive pattern, must enhance the story. This is not what metal music does, quite the contrary. Most active as a touring and recording band during the 1990s, Megalomaniax (Andreas Wilda, Axel Trapp, Bert Bera, Gunnar Kalb, and Gunnar Pelshenko) had not yet enjoyed a breakthrough moment in the late 1980s when Heiner Goebbels collaborated with them on the first two tracks of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. From the outset of their own recording projects in the early 1990s the band made clear their commitment to a hardcore sound and the underlying themes of social dystopia in the wake of the reunification of Germany. The first album to receive commercial attention, Information Overload (1992, Vertigo 864–293–2), was filled with tracks that unequivocally proclaimed a heavy metal sound (e.g., “Commercial Suicide” [tr. 1], “Hate” [tr. 3], and “No Holy Words” [tr. 6]). This sound was still inchoate on “Russian Gambit,” the first track of the Müller/ Goebbels recording project, but it is nonetheless clear that Goebbels gave Megalomaniax a considerable degree of freedom to experiment with a metal sound to initiate the recording project. By collaborating with Megalomaniax also on the second track, Goebbels further invited them to be the only ensemble of any kind to perform on two tracks. In so doing, he paralleled the decision of Heiner Müller to create successive scenes from material in Bek’s novel. The parallels did not cease with the choice of music and epic text, but rather in an ironic sense they formed a chiasmic moment from paradox. Just as the novelist sought to evoke an island of utopia in the dystopian sea surrounding the Soviet army in its defense of Moscow, so too

did the playwright and composer seek to capture the chasm between chaos and respite with heavy metal and its converse. It was critical to this act of healing the wounded dialectic, therefore, that Megalomaniax themselves travel from the dystopian itinerary of their metal sea to the utopian island from which others would travel along the epic journey ahead.

Forest near Moscow 51

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3 The Duel I’ll show you where God lives. Stalin is dead. Heiner Müller, “The Duel” (1988, 55)

Deutschland über alles In Part 3 of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels reroute the historical journey to bring the listener back to Germany, after its defeat by the Soviet Union in the Second World War and its division into East and West. Following two scenes in Russia, both told from the perspective of the Soviet Army, the larger narrative of the radio play settles into a Germanness, unequivocal in its sound and historical moment. Track 3 gathers a cluster of German symbols, together powerful signifiers of struggle for recovery in postwar Germany. Above all, Heiner Goebbels arrives at the central scene in order to match musical style and moment more closely to German history, past and present, more intensively and directly passionate in the musical work of both narrator and chorus, symbolically performing the two sides of the duel that the characters in Anna Seghers’s short story of the same name enact. In no other scene does Heiner Goebbels match German history with German music so thoroughly. The musical tradition that unifies Part 3 is that of modern German folk song, above all the collective singing of men’s choruses set in motion by a choral movement in the first half of

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the nineteenth century. The movement unfolded along various paths, not least among them those that generated the workers’ choruses that bridged the class divisions of modern, industrialized Germany. In the wake of successive political and financial crises in the twentieth century, workers increasingly dedicated themselves to the cultural and musical activities of social organizations. Workers’ songs (Arbeiterlieder) formed genres and repertories of their own at the confluence of labor activities that stretched across professions, regions, and political groups. Men’s choruses formed around religious groups, student associations, and political affiliations. Choral music was placed in anthologies to send soldiers to war and to mobilize political revolution. It is this ubiquity, the canon of social and socialized German workers’ culture, that Goebbels captures to transform the prose and dramatic texts whose counterpoint signifies the duel at the heart of Track 3 (see P. Bohlman 2010). The workers’ song repertories from which Heiner Goebbels draws have their origins in German folk song, above all in the arrangements and anthologies of folk songs that appeared in ever-greater numbers in the wake of German national unity in 1871. The workers-song tradition itself was the product of synthesis—anthologies, collections, new realizations in four-part harmony—and it hardly surprises that Goebbels forges his own compositional approach to reflect that synthesis in the sequence of individual songs that unfold seamlessly across “The Duel.” Fragments from well-known folk songs appear briefly, sometimes obliquely and sometimes directly referential, only to give way to a newly-composed Goebbels melody. Different styles—unison, imitation, fourpart chorale, humming, whistling—provide a throughcomposed choral counterpoint to contrast with the declamatory style of the scene’s first-person narrator. Musically,

Goebbels intensifies the historical moment as we arrive at the pivotal time and place in Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

Dialectic in Real-Time

The Duel

The duel serving as title and metaphor for Anna Seghers and Heiner Müller in Part 3 provides a narrative opening for Heiner Goebbels to represent the many forms of historical dialectic with music, and to do so in real time. Throughout the track the struggle for history—between individuals, between nations, between ideologies—is realized through dialectic. There is no equivocating about time and place, or about the action that struggle sets in motion. The scene opens ominously in the rhetorical style of a broadside ballad: “’Twas in the month of June when days were darkest / during the Republic’s fifth year” (Müller 1988, 51). The slogans of the communist state are set in contrast repeatedly as litany, already by line 10: “VEB OKTOBER oder FORTSCHRITT” (The People’s Own Corporation October or Progress). The struggle that Müller marks with all-caps is elevated by Goebbels through heightened declamation, the uncanny emphasis of the narrator’s voice. Historical moments appear and retreat throughout the scene as if broken apart by history itself, redeploying the struggle to the rise of fascism, the racialized division of Germany, defeat at the end of the Second World War, the successive arrival of Russian tanks, at once saviors and the harbingers of death. It is the duel at the center of the story that sustains narrative unity even as history disintegrates. The ontological and formal tools of German folk music afford Heiner Goebbels wideranging opportunities to underscore the struggle for history through dialectic. Track 3 has but two sets of performers: the

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Horbach Chamber Chorus, directed by Johannes Eisenberg, and a narrator, once again the distinguished German actor, Ernst Stötzner. In the course of the recorded performance— Track 3 is 15’35” in length—the music symbolically sustains the counterpoint between narrator and chorus, moving through individual songs and the fragments thereof at times underscoring unity, at other times collapsing into disunity. Goebbels mixes traditional folk music with compositions of his own. In most instances, however, it is not readily possible to separate Goebbels’s compositional voice from the massed voice of the German folk. Though both evoke the feeling of folk music, the musical styles of narrator and chorus contrast starkly, sonically mirroring the duel. The narrator employs a declamatory style, transforming speech to oratory. In only rare instances does the narrator shift into song, joining the chorus briefly to emphasize a phrase together with the chorus (e.g., “O, Madrid, you are so wonderful” [Müller 1988, 55, line 117]). Chorus and narrator perform together throughout, with only brief moments when one or the other sounds its side of the duel alone. In contrast the unpitched oratory of the narrator, the chorus combines a distinctive melodic style with the four-part harmonic texture of a German men’s chorus, employing frequent imitation and modulation as they move from section to section. The familiar genres of twentieth-century workers’ choruses—Arbeiterlieder, Marschlieder, Kampflieder (workers’ songs, march songs, songs of struggle)—transpose the dialectic of struggle to musical style. Goebbels asks the Horbach Chamber Chorus to use voice in distinctive ways: humming, whistling, imitating the instrumentation of a workers’ song. In so doing, the choral side of the duel is decidedly more human than the narrator’s side, a harmonious warmth in contrast to cold declamation.

The Duel

Ideologies of dialectic and struggle shaped the canon of folk song from the first years of the GDR, and they remained critical narratives until the final years of its history, unquestionably in 1988 when Goebbels began creating Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Early GDR composers, such as Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), composed what they called “new German folk songs” (neue deutsche Volkslieder), which they used to capture the spirit of a common history before and after the Second World War and the era of National Socialism. Eisler, for example, combined forces with the poet and politician, Johannes R. Becher (1891–1958), to compose a new East German national anthem in the style of a workers’ song, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (Risen from the Ruins), in 1949 (see Bohlman and Bohlman 2012). New aesthetic meaning accrued to folk songs, above all their ability to symbolize collective political and cultural action from German history prior to the Second World War. New collections of folk song reassembled previous German history, especially that which had suffered under the rise of National Socialism. Ashkenazic Jewish folk song, in both German and Yiddish, provided one of the most frequently exploited conduits to a destroyed past. If Jewish folk song could no longer thrive in Germany after the destruction of most Jewish communities during the Shoah, it still could—and did—enjoy the modernity of revival, especially in East Germany, which welcomed its ideological and secular spirit of workers’ struggle. In the postwar GDR staged in the Seghers/Müller/Goebbels “The Duel” folk song not only afforded meaning to recovery and revival, it also swelled into a canon of multiple texts central to the historical longue durée of Germany. The nestor of folk song’s new historiographical canon was Wolfgang Steinitz (1905– 1967), a Jewish linguist, who had joined the German Communist

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Party in 1933 at the moment of Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power. Returning to Berlin from exile in the Soviet Union and Sweden in 1949, Steinitz dedicated himself to gathering a corpus of folk songs that would represent the historical struggle of the German people against the economic and ideological oppression of fascism. Initially a three-volume project, the publication of the corpus appeared in two volumes in 1955 and 1962 under the title, Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Six Centuries of German Folk Songs with Democratic Character; Steinitz 1954 and 1962; see also P. Bohlman 2010). The Steinitz canon had an enormous impact on the folk song revival in the GDR, appearing in several versions, from scholarly to compact and inexpensive publications for performers. The West German reprint by the left-wing publisher, Zweitausendeins (1979), circulated widely in both Germanys during the last decade of their separation, a moment parallel to the creation of the radio play, Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The 600 years of folk songs in the Steinitz anthology included specific names, dates, and historical events. The earliest song dates from 1525, when it appeared as a printed broadside with the title, “Ein neuw Lied vom Bauern Krieg” (A New Song from the Peasants’ War). Song after song narrates the resistance of workers and common people, thus making history through folk song, reaching its conclusion in the final edition of 1979 with the song, “Der kleine Trompeter” (The Little Trumpeter), the story of Fritz Weineck, who was murdered by police while trying to restore order to a disrupted election rally for Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the Communist Party in Weimar Germany, who was a candidate for Chancellor (see Chapter 5). The specificity of the ways Steinitz uses folk song to transform the past into new meaning in the present, mirrors the

historiographical methods employed in Part 3 in a striking number of ways. Heiner Müller punctuates the narrative with exact dates, thus using the rhetorical structure of broadside ballads: “’Twas in the month of June / when days were darkest” (Müller 1988, 51, line 1). The struggle of the worker is localized, while also mapped onto the Second World War and the fight against fascism: “My name plate / had been ripped from my door by my replacement / as if a declaration of war” (ibid., 57, lines 16–18). After the duel magnifies the metaphors for historical dialectic, it reaches its conclusion in the final lines of Part 3 as those engaged in struggle again take up their livelihood as workers: “After shaking hands / each of us wiped his hands on his jacket. / Then we returned to our labors” (Ibid., 57, lines 191–93). In the chronotope census of “The Duel,” Heiner Müller refers to moment and place a total of sixteen different times. Heiner Goebbels musically transforms these occurrences into the transition from one song to another, reconfiguring the narrative so that it evokes the vast historical landscape of folk song. Drawing our attention to the temporal significance of musical transition, Goebbels transforms the dialectic of struggle in history. By the end of Part 3 the listener is assured that Wolokolamsker Chaussee is a work of its historical moment, the 600 years of history that converge in the struggles of the postwar GDR.

Order in the Workers’ Paradise The Duel

“Das Duell” stands among the best-known of the Cold War short stories by Anna Seghers (1900–1983), one of the most influential founders of GDR literature (Seghers 2007). A member of the German Communist Party already in the

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Weimar Republic, Seghers fled Germany in the 1930s, initially taking refuge in France, but escaping in exile to Mexico in 1940, where she remained until 1947. After resettling in East Germany, she dedicated her creative work to chronicling the collapse of fascist Germany and its postwar recovery under socialism. Published in 1966 as the sixth of nine short stories gathered under the title, Die Kraft der Schwachen (The Strength of the Weak), “The Duel” was the last Seghers short story to deal directly with contemporary political conditions in the GDR. The tale itself begins in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when returning soldiers and political prisoners contributed directly and materially to rebuilding Germany after the massive destruction of the war. Many such returnees— “the displaced, refugees, and individual soldiers” (ibid., 242)— struggled to obtain the education and other opportunities the war had denied them, and “The Duel” chronicles the struggle of one of these, Ernst Helwig, as he strives to acquire the mathematical skills to become an engineer. Helwig’s success in the struggle is confirmed in the closing section, thirteen years later, at which time he exemplifies the “strength of the weak” in the GDR workers’ state. It is this historical turn from collapse to recovery that provides the themes of “The Duel” and that surely attracted Seghers’s East German colleague, Heiner Müller, to the “motif” he adapted for the third part of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The narrative arc of the short story also arises from the same historical moment, represented by the struggle between two mathematics instructors, one with academic credentials, who gained his position by capitulating to the demands of National Socialist administrators, the other from the working class, who was unwilling to do so. Their duel played out

metaphorically in the classroom, the challenge to fail or educate as an engineer a working-class war veteran. In the Seghers short story the student-worker overcomes the limitations of his wartime education to pass his examinations on the road to success. In the Müller play, the narrative shifts from the worker-student to the dueling instructors, but detours around potential resolution and stakes out new conflict, signified by the return of armored tanks, which forestall conclusion in Part 3, forcefully symbolizing “our final argument” and the concomitant solution of workers “going back to work” in Müller’s final line (ibid., 57). Even though he transforms the third-person narrative form used by Seghers into the first-person, as he does throughout all scenes in the radio play, Müller chooses to leave the short story fully legible. He complicates the historical record, nonetheless, by riffing on the historical moments, jumping from the postwar GDR of the short story to times of political struggle before and after the contemporary present in which the third scene of the play takes place. The enemy of the duel between two mathematics teachers becomes both the politically compromised elite of the era of National Socialism and the Shoah, but also the Soviet interventions of 1953 and beyond. We were in the lecture hall of Dresden in 1934 While the Nazis marched outside. We were bent Over the formulae. Then the demand for a signature. One held a piece of paper under our noses. JEWS AND COMMUNISTS MUST LEAVE THE LECTURE HALL. Müller 1988, 53

Ibid., 54

The Duel

Do you smell the smoke The NEW GERMANY is burning?

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As the scene moves toward its close, the narrator increasingly calls out for the tanks that will rescue both sides of the struggle, the Soviet army in Bek’s novel and the workers of the GDR. And I thought to myself Where are the tanks They must come and they will come It was they from whom we were born in 1945 A second time. Ibid., 55

Heiner Müller both is and is not true to the text of Anna Seghers’s duel, surely due in part to the thirty years separating the short story from the play. Müller locates the duel’s symbolic struggle in the middle of his play, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, where it is the catalyst between the narratives of the Second World War in parts 1 and 2, and those of the Germanys at the end of the Cold War in the final two parts. Heiner Goebbels, too, seizes upon this catalytic role, indeed, enhancing it with some of the most distinctively creative and idiosyncratic treatment in the entire recording.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Choral Song and Class Struggle

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The formal and structural decisions that Heiner Müller makes in “The Duel” confirm again the indebtedness of Wolokolamsker Chaussee to Classical Greek epic and drama. Though Müller does not consistently employ poetic meters, the first-person narrator speaks generally by using the shorter words and phrases of working-class speech, and this style, in turn, creates a natural feel for the line-break, or caesura, characteristic of epic hemistiches, below in the opening line of the scene:

Es war im Juni / in dem schwarzen Monat ’Twas in the month of June / when days were darkest Ibid., 51

The Duel

With the exception of only a few lines, Goebbels remains entirely true to Müller’s dramatic text. Only fourteen lines are absent, replaced in the total length by repetition of roughly the same number. It is in his reworking of Classical form and genre that Goebbels makes the major transformation. Rather than assert the ways Part 3 affirms indebtedness to epic, Goebbels draws out the contrast between the epic singer’s voice and the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy. Using declamatory delivery, the narrator leads the performance, with an oracular and almost exaggerated clarity. The chorus, in the recording of the Horbach Chamber Chorus, a modern German chorus recorded in rehearsal, responds, doing so melodically in the style of a Männerchor, or men’s chorus. Epic singer and Greek chorus, therefore, largely share the same text, which they perform in a contrasting, albeit still-antiphonal, style, further evoking the rhetoric of a duel. The recorded performance magnifies the contrast even more, emphasizing the ways in which the chorus comments on the text of “The Duel” from a distance, the resonant space of the rehearsal hall a stark backdrop to the close microphone-placement that intensifies the narrator’s epic vocal style in the foreground. The contrapuntal commentary exchanged by narrator and chorus notwithstanding, there is also a noticeable disjuncture between the two, as if they are singing together, but at times not listening to each other. On one hand, Track 3 contains moments when the narrator succeeds in sweeping up the chorus in the intensity of his tale. When confronted by his opponent sitting before him as the representative of a strike committee (lines 36–46), the narrator falls back on his heels in

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shock: “What kind of committee / What kind of strike / Is this a joke” (ibid., 52, lines 45–46). The chorus joins the narrator, intensifying the moment with call-and-response. Musically, the chorus enters the moment to enhance the power of its metaphor of struggle on the side of the narrator. On the other hand, there are frequent moments on the track when we hear the chorus members talking among themselves, aloof and unconcerned about the meaning of the musical moment. When the narrator waxes about falling as a victim to the war of paperwork bureaucracy, the chorus takes a brief break before fully engaging again at the announcement that “Stalin is dead” (ibid., 55, lines 121–31). A similar lack of caring about the seriousness of the narrator accompanies several of the sections in which the chorus hums along in the background, noticeably vamping until they reach a choral segment that is more interesting to them, for example, an imitative passage with successive modulations between major and minor in the lament beginning at line 21 (“There was no desk at that time and no name plate / instead only a world war and ten years in prison”) to the use of melodies in multiple songs in quodlibet when asserting the chorus’s unison identity at lines 29 and 30: “I am a worker, let me be / what I am” (ibid., 51 and 52). Highlighting the distance between narrator and chorus even more drastically, their musical and dramatic dialectic, are the various techniques employed in the ECM studio to produce the historical record.

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“I Was Choked by a Chunk of Time” “The Duel” is the only track on Wolokolamsker Chaussee to be recorded live. The sound itself, capturing the ambience and spontaneity of a rehearsal in real-time enhances the liveness of

The Duel

the recording. Heard alone and out of context, the engineering of “The Duel” might seem amateurish, intentionally so, as if to conjure the evening gathering of a chorus to run through a score that it has not mastered quite yet. The live quality of the track’s sound, therefore, might also signify the authenticity we wish to associate with folk music, or with the workers’ struggle in the early years of rebuilding the GDR. Track 3 on Wolokolamsker Chaussee, however, is not the only time that Heiner Goebbels has chosen to evoke liveness by recording amateurs and non-professionals in such ways that the seams of a rehearsal remain intact. Gathering sounds for the recording projects that fill another ECM compact disc, Eislermaterial (Eisler Material), Goebbels also shows a predilection for the juxtaposition of amateurism and authenticity (see Goebbels 2002). Eislermaterial contains further juxtapositions, too, notably the performance of Hanns Eisler songs by Josef Bierbichler (b. 1948), a distinguished actor with an untrained singing voice, with instrumental arrangements and compositional interventions by one of Germany’s premier new music groups, Ensemble Modern. Both composer and recording studio use a series of decisions to make the atmosphere of rehearsing more striking and efficacious for the historical record. The acoustics of the recording studio emulate those of a large rehearsal space. There is considerable echo, especially surrounding the choral sound. The balance of the recorded sound is uneven, with the narrator’s voice at times dominant to the point of masking the choral singing. Sounds that otherwise would be off-mic and cleaned from the recording are left intact, and they often openly disrupt the quality of the recorded sound. The track begins, for example, with twenty seconds during which the chorus members drag chairs across the floor and noisily set up

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music stands. Immediately thereafter, the conductor or perhaps a rehearsal accompanist sounds pitches at the piano, so that the singers can match them when beginning to sing thirty-eight seconds into the track. There are several moments in the performance, moreover, when the chorus steps outside its traditional role as a German men’s chorus. The most striking instance of redeploying the chorus’s role occurs late in the scene, in which Müller introduces metaphors of rebirth into the nurturing of national life, albeit deceptively for Germany when fascism enveloped the nation in 1934. The chorus shifts register entirely, adopting the style of unison recitation that would characterize prayer or litany in a religious service: Once again we were given a breast The nursemaid is already on her way She is traveling In ’34 and provides milk for everyone.

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Ibid., 56, lines 154–56

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Perhaps the most conspicuous moment that draws the listener into a rehearsal occurs nine minutes into the track when the time and place of historical struggle are set in contrast. Müller here quotes the philosopher Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz (1646– 1716), who espoused this metaphysical and mathematical principle for the continuity of the human soul from life to death with the Latin, natura non facit saltus, nature does not leap ahead: Das braucht Generationen Die Natur It requires generations Nature Macht keine Sprünge. Wir sind nicht die Natur. Does not leap ahead. We’re not nature. Ibid., 54, lines 86–87

The Duel

At this moment in the recording the performance falls apart and halts, unable to leap ahead, and must begin again after the piano has given the correct pitches and provided the melodic skeleton of an imitative section with wide intervallic range and tessitura. Given an opportunity to make adjustments within the rehearsal, the chorus corrects itself and proceeds. Surely one interpretation of this moment is to suggest that the chorus is performing a type of word-painting. Effectively, the chorus is unable to spring forward when Goebbels represents Müller’s allusion to Leibniz with an angular melodic line, which conveys the affect of being unnatural. The recording itself, however, poses the question, where does the duel or the dialectic form lie if the chorus actually rehearses the breakdown of its own rehearsal? History itself is thrown into question throughout the track as liveness and authenticity enter into conflict, enacting the duel. Were we to imagine that folk song and compositions in the style of folk song yielded simple narratives, we would deceive ourselves. Ernst Stötzner and the Horbach Chamber Chorus, in fact, must navigate an extraordinarily dense and complex texture of musical fragments in order to suture the historical moments that are laid bare in the Seghers/Müller/ Goebbels “Duel.” In the real-time of a rehearsal or any other performance, as in nature, they do not allow themselves easily to be sutured together. The historical record reminds us that we have seen these moments before, and we shall encounter them again. Realized through history, the dialectic of struggle affords few options for resolving the fragmentation of the historical record, so that at the end of the duel in Part 3, “we return once again to our labors” (ibid., 57, line 193).

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4 Centaurs What kind of people are they, those who defend Moscow so bravely? This is our answer: “They are Soviet men, who protect their homeland!” Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee, 279 MIRANDA

O brave new world,

That has such people in’t! PROSPERO

‘Tis new to thee. Heiner Müller, “Centaurs,” 59; William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1

Author and Authority Even before we hear Miranda’s proclamation that the shipwrecked travelers in Shakespeare’s The Tempest have landed on the shores of a brave new world, the fourth track of Wolokolamsker Chaussee makes it clear that the listener has entered a narrative and sonic world that differs dramatically from the first three tracks. The historical moorings of the first two acts had been established by the earlier texts from Alexander Bek’s novel, with their specific references to the time and place of the Second World War. In “The Duel” the historical backdrop has shifted to the postwar East Germany in Anna Segher’s short story of the same name. Heiner Goebbels deploys musical signposts in the first three acts to guide us to

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the familiar voices of singer-songwriter and workers’ chorus. We know where we are, and we have begun to find comfort in the historical journey across territory that many have traveled before. All that changes in Part 4. We have departed from the historical narrative of the Wolokolamsker Chaussee of Bek and Seghers, and we have entered the realm of the unconscious that “ ’tis new to thee.” The moorings of Part 4 evoke a sense of uncertainty on many different levels. First of all, the narrative and musical texts that fill the track come from multiple authors, some explicit, others implicit, and several vague or even imaginary. There are multiple suggestions that the narrative’s primary author is Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and that Müller’s text is an adaptation of Kafka’s 1912 novella, Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis; Kafka 1915). Kafka, however, remains unnamed in the both Müller’s published text and the recording of Goebbels’s setting. Instead, both make an oblique reference to Metamorphosis in the subtitle, used in the published version and the recording, attributing “Centaurs” to the “Saxon dialect,” hence oral tradition, of Kafka’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, who, however, does not speak in the novella. At even greater historical and literary distance there is the suggestion that these narratives could lead us to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which, too, are retellings in epic form of Greek and Roman mythology. Authorial voice on Track 4 is further obscured by overlapping uses of oral tradition and the double entendre of narrative symbols. The “Centaurs” of the title were half-human, half-animal creatures in Greek mythology, thus sustaining the larger connection to epic, but the term is also used in the vernacular for stultifying bureaucracy. Authorial voice multiplies in new and different ways across the musical landscape of the fourth track. Most strikingly, the voice of a single author/composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, asserts

itself to dominate the entire act, so consistently so that the compositional voice of Heiner Goebbels withdraws almost entirely. Instead of composing music or even arranging a musical composition created by others, Goebbels’s authorial role is primarily limited to that of sound engineer, who makes decisions about how to use the previously recorded performance of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and the contrasting sound collage assembled from musique concrète. As with the myth of the Centaurs, the written tradition, Shostakovich’s score, is external to the performance, which in turn only borrows and adapts it from oral tradition. Where, then, does the author lie in “Centaurs?” As easy as it is to suggest that authorial voice has moved from one composer to another, from Goebbels to Shostakovich, it seems more plausible to claim a displacement of a different kind. Like the textual narrative in the act, voice in the accompanying music has shifted from author to authority. Shostakovich’s “Invasion Theme,” as we see further below, affirms the historical moment by redirecting the constellation of authorial voices from Ovid’s mythical tales, Kafka’s novella, Müller’s tale of bureaucracy’s banality, and machine-like utterances in both the music and the narrative. Allegorically, author and authority enter into competition, the very swell of recorded sound that will collapse under its own weight at the end of the movement.

The Utopia of Dystopia Centaurs

Nothing is as it seems in “Centaurs.” Every symbol has multiple, contradictory meanings. Müller’s narrative opens possibilities for many interpretations, no one of them fully unraveling the incongruities that tug apart the syntax of the line-by-line

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structure of the text. “When dialectic comes to a standstill,” writes Müller, “the resolution of all contradictions becomes sacred” (Müller 1988, 65). The brave new world of “Centaurs” is at once a utopia and a dystopia, and this can only make sense because contradiction is the true order of the world. The double narrators in Part 4 speak to each other and beyond each other as they contrapuntally make their cases that to fathom social order, it is necessary to recognize and then materially realize the contradictions that undo it. There is, nonetheless, a deep-seated narrative that unifies “Centaurs,” a utopian tale that, however, is dissolved in the sonic detritus of a text stuffed to overflowing with fragments. The main character begins the tale in a space of orderliness shared by both narrators. By the end of the tale, the main character combines the two components of order and disorder, fusing them in the form of a citizen in “the third chapter of world history,” in which the human is no longer separable from the desk at which he works. This creature of the brave new world also fuses the two meanings of Centaurs, first the half-human, half-beasts of Greek mythology with the bureaucracy of life in a utopia managed by orderliness: My desk and myself Who belongs to whom The desk is owned by the people What am I

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Below I am a desk while on top I remain a human

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I’m no longer a human rather a human-machine A furniture-human or a human-furniture The files are my inner organs Müller 1988, 64, lines 158–63

Franz Kafka’s 1912 novella, Metamorphosis, provides Heiner Müller with a parallel narrative universe for Part IV of

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Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Rather than signposts to the Kafka novella, which would clearly direct the reader and listener to literary sources, as he does with the first three acts, Müller chooses instead to employ signage that sends us on detours along new routes in search of the brave new worlds he epigrammatically borrows from Shakespeare and he intimates from Aldous Huxley. We know that the traveler’s narratorcompanion along these routes is Gregor Samsa, but he, too, speaking in Saxon dialect, is giving voice to the journey to new lands for the first time. The fourth track both is and is not a version—a cover—of Kafka’s novella. Like Gregor Samsa, we awaken from a dream into a world still recognizable, even if, in Samsa’s awakening, he has passed from a human to a giant insect. In the course of the novella Samsa never actually leaves his family’s apartment, but rather must retreat farther and farther into the marginal world of his own body. Initially, Samsa’s father, mother, and sister respond to his presence in their home with a mixture of unease and empathy, born of an understanding that the creature in their midst has some connection to their son and brother no longer in their midst. As the story unfolds, the family increasingly confronts the exigencies of its transformed domestic circumstances and the social and financial constraints placed upon them. The father seeks to maintain the orderliness of his workaday life outside the home, but physically slips closer to the pull of slumber; boarders arrive only to find the insect’s presence abhorrent; attempts at maintaining the cleanliness of the insect’s room increasingly prove futile. The final slide into total alienation is signaled by a musical moment, a complete collapse of his sister’s recognition that Gregor can still emotionally respond, if only internally, when she plays the violin. Each scene in the novella accelerates

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toward Gregor’s inevitable death, a combination of murder and extermination. In a brief coda the family finally returns to a world in which they can find quotidian pleasure, and they leave the dystopian apartment for an outing on a modern tram to the utopian world on the outskirts of their nameless city. The text that Heiner Müller crafts for “Centaurs” once again contains fragments that are sutured into the line-by-line structure of epic. For the first time in the Müller/Goebbels project, Part 4 has an eponymous title, but the movement is not about Centaurs, as it would be in epic itself, which, as a genre, is etymologically eponymous. Once again, Müller uses techniques that move around rather than through a story at the core of Part 4. Kafka’s tale of metamorphosis largely serves to open a portal to a world in which the fragments will come to reside. The fragments become literary leitmotifs, individually signifying stories elsewhere in Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The leitmotifs of obedience and the representation of order through uniforms both remind us of their dense use in Alexander Bek’s novel. Müller insists, nonetheless, that in this brave new world, the individual succumbs to order and thus disappears entirely into a personal monument, senseless and insentient (Müller 1988, 65). Part 4 effects a transformation of time and place, resituating the historical moments, if idealized, in an idyllic timelessness that slides toward dystopia at an ever-increasing tempo. It is that transformation that enacts the metamorphosis underlying the textual frame adapted from Kafka.

Timelessness and Orderliness The text of “Centaurs” unfolds as a counterpoint of both literal and literary references interwoven into vivid yet fantastic

Centaurs

images. Whereas narrative in the first three acts of Heiner Müller’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee followed specific references to time and history—Parts 1 and 2 the Autumn 1941 defense of Moscow, Part 3 conflicts in the GDR during the late 1950s— Part 4 enters upon a timeless world, an awakening into a nightmare (line 3), which in turn becomes the temporal context for the ensuing thirteen minutes. Both title and subtitle tease the listener with their mix of specificity and opacity. The title, “Centaurs,” would seem to be a signpost for the mythological, enforced in the printed form of the radio play by an asterisk that directs one to a footnote at the end of the act: “Centaur is Classical Greek for bureaucracy.” This single occasion of a clarifying footnote in the printed radio play would seem at first glance to be strangely superfluous, were it not for the probability that most listeners and readers would assume that the “Centaurs”—used in the plural— referred to the half-human, half-beast creatures of Greek mythology. The subtitle only further disrupts the historical footing after the first three acts: “A Horror Story from the Saxon Dialect of Gregor Samsa.” Each element in the subtitle contains several meanings, which in their contradictions evoke a nonexistent world. “Horror Story” may be the simplest translation of “Greuelmärchen,” but it fails to capture the ways in which “horror” (Greuel) and “Fairy Tale” (Märchen) fit uneasily together. The allusion to the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, directs the listener to the main character of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but only after announcing that “Centaurs” would be narrated in Samsa’s Saxon dialect, generally regarded as one of the most distinctive, if also difficult to understand, dialects from regions of eastern Germany and the GDR. Once again, something does not quite fit here. First of all, Metamorphosis, though written in Prague in 1912, is devoid of

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specific references to place. The characters in the novella, largely Gregor’s family, never speak in an identifiable dialect, but rather express themselves as petite-bourgeoisie in a modern city somewhere in Central Europe. Second, Metamorphosis has only a third-person narrator, thus not Gregor Samsa, who speaks neither as human nor as insect; Kafka, instead, leads his listener to believe that Samsa has lost the ability to speak entirely because he fails to communicate with his family. If the title and subtitle of the printed radio play intentionally redirect us to a time and place that is contradictory in spite of seemingly specific signposts, Heiner Goebbels joins the playwright when transforming the text with music. The primary narrator of “Centaurs” not only reads the title and subtitle of the act, but also announces that the track is “Roman numeral four” of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. What we know even as “Centaurs” begins is that nothing and no one is what she or he is claimed to be: there will be no Centaurs, Gregor Samsa will not speak in any dialect, the narrative of the track will unfold neither in mythology nor in history, but rather somewhere else at some other time, in a nightmare, a timeless world beyond even dystopia: I awakened and everything was in order. Comrade Leader everything is in order No cases of opposition to order

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

And no crime Our people are

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Like the ways they appear in books and in the newspaper. Müller 1988, 59, lines 3–8

After the opening fanfare, in which Miranda heralds the “brave new world” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, two narrators enter the dystopian world they will together inhabit for the remaining twelve minutes of “Centaurs.” The narrators

Centaurs

engage in conversation throughout, not in Gregor Samsa’s Saxon dialect, but rather in two contrasting speech forms. Ernst Stötzner, the actor who performs narrator roles in all five parts, enunciates his text in a calm, matter-of-fact tone, whose restraint soothes the listener into accepting the orderliness of the world into which we have awakened. Maintaining order is humanized, transformed allegorically into the relationship of a married couple: “Thus, so it is It is what everything should be / The wedding between function and functionary / Till death do us part” (ibid., 63, lines 139–41). Another voice punctuates the calm of orderliness, narrated by the distinguished philosopher, film director, and actor, Alexander Kluge (bn. 1932). The second narrator speaks in machine-like bursts, with the inhuman tension of his voice broken by the sort of silence that is produced when recording tape is stretched, or the needle of a record skips from one groove to the next. This is the voice of the worker in socialist society, the account of whose labors enters into call-and-response with the Leader: “We’ve done it Comrade Leader / Ten years of day and night shifts not in vain / Order and security were thus / Were schooled as a productiongoal” (ibid., 59, lines 16–19). Symbolizing the social order of the dystopian world is the uniform, references to which run through “Centaurs” more than in any of the other five parts of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. The uniform opens various levels of intertextuality. Not only does it relate directly to the obsessive symbolism of uniforms in Bek’s novel, but it also serves as a less direct connection to the pride with which Gregor Samsa’s father wears his uniform in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. In “Centaurs” the uniform further serves as a link between order and disorder, utopia and dystopia: “Crossing the street at a red light I indeed / In uniform That is an order. / Cross the street at a red light in uniform” (ibid., 61, lines 68–70).

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Order prevails against chaos across the narratives of “Centaurs,” and in so doing, order also opens the space that Heiner Goebbels fills with music by Dmitri Shostakovich and René Lussier.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Order and Ostinato

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More than on any other track of the Müller/Goebbels recording, “Centaurs” is sonically dominated by a single musical work, the central section of the first movement (allegretto) of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, in C Major, Op. 60, which bears the title, “Leningrad” Symphony. Referred to widely as the “Invasion Theme,” the central section introduces new thematic music that effectively takes the place of what would have been the development section of the sonata form. In “Centaurs” the theme begins after Miranda’s proclamation of a “brave new world” with its backdrop of racing strings recorded at twice the normal speed, which in turn stalls into the sounds of a machine breaking down. All this transpires in roughly forty seconds, handing over the remaining twelve minutes and twenty seconds to Shostakovich. Musically and thematically, Goebbels has created a close fit to the narratives and texts of Bek and Müller, further conjoining them as a tightly woven representation of time and place that connects the Soviet defense of Moscow and Leningrad to the timeless worlds of Kafka and postwar East Germany. Shostakovich (1906–1975) composed the Seventh Symphony in 1941, at the same historical moment in which Bek’s novel was set. The premiere of the symphony took place in March 1942, with a first performance in Leningrad later that year, on August 9, 1942, by which time the symphony had acquired the

Centaurs

name “Leningrad,” meant to honor the defense of the city then under siege by the German army. The historical timeframe of the symphony’s composition lends itself remarkably well to the temporal framework afforded by Müller’s text. Goebbels is able to accommodate the so-called “Invasion Theme” in its entirety, excising only a very few lines (143–57) in the final minutes of Müller’s text for “Centaurs,” as with all movements, presented in decasyllabic epic hemistiches. Shostakovich composed the section at the center of the first movement as a set of twelve variations that unfold successively as an ostinato, with its repetitive harmonic and rhythmic underpinnings filling the twelve minutes of Goebbels’s realization of the “Centaurs” text. The ostinato provides the assuredness of orderliness, orchestrated as a twenty-two-bar military march, with winds above the incessant snare-drum motifs. The orderliness of the returning ostinato theme, however, does not remain undisturbed, for the melodic movement the ostinato supports becomes increasingly agitated with each return, reaching a point of ecstasy that dialectic can no long restrain. Though Shostakovich and Müller conceived of their two works without foreknowledge that they might be combined as a single work, Goebbels finds an astonishing number of ways to connect the two parts, symbolically fusing them as the human/monster, worker/ wooden-desk creatures that inhabit the dystopian worlds of the text’s variants. There are several notable moments, for example, when Goebbels matches Shostakovich to Müller as if the composer were employing word-painting. When the unruly components of collapsing dialectic flood the narrator’s unconscious—“there is a carousel turning in my head” (ibid., 65, line 174)—the woodwinds detour suddenly to a countermelody that might be sung by children at play.

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Its unifying impact on the projection of order in “Centaurs” notwithstanding, the Shostakovich “Invasion Theme” itself contains a wholeness that can be at odds with its constituent parts. The composer borrowed widely for melodic material in the main theme, or themes, used for the ostinato. There is widespread consensus that he joined the well-known melody of Franz Léhar’s “Da geh’ ich zu Maxim” (You’ll Find Me at Maxim’s) from The Merry Widow (1905) with a theme from his own opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Op. 29 (1934) to create the main theme. Evidence that he also used melodic fragments from the “Deutschlandlied” (known generally as “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”) is for me not convincing. The exact identity of his melodic fragments is, however, far less important than Shostakovich’s conception of the “Invasion Theme” as comprising Central European, Germanlanguage material and Eastern European, Russian-language references. Unifying these, in turn, is the persistent snare-drum march that suggestively draws the listener into the historical moment of battle between Germany and the Soviet Union. Goebbels has, in turn, recognized the unifying force of the snare-drum motif throughout Wolokolamsker Chaussee, using it as the musical glue that joins different tracks at their beginnings and endings. As overwhelming as these musically unifying gestures would seem to be, they are also deceptive, indeed, consciously so. “Centaurs” has two narrators, and the Shostakovich theme can only lend support to the one that seeks to unify, Ernst Stötzner’s calming account of orderliness. The monstrous side of the Greek centaurs and Kafka’s human metamorphosis to insect finds voice in the unsettling interjection of sounds that are themselves half music and half machine, together sounding an uncanny and jarring musique concrète. The fact that the

listener never quite knows where and when these mechanical sounds will appear, or for that matter just what role René Lussier (bn. 1957), to whom they are credited, has played in the recording process, undermines the ostinato and throws the brave new world into question. The question of which music is human and which monstrous remains unresolved.

Of Monsters and Men

Centaurs

As we listen to “Centaurs,” we experience a recording in which the sounds of monsters and men are at odds with each other. The Shostakovich Seventh Symphony marches steadily forward, an “invasion” of sounds no less than an invasion of German soldiers at the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War. The machinery producing the metallic sounds is functional only because it ceaselessly falls apart, affording it the function of dysfunctionality. The machinery producing the recording has the potential to sound both utopia and dystopia. At each repetition of the Shostakovich theme, the soothing humanity of familiar tunes becomes more machine-like, the sonic palette of ostinato increasingly collapsing under the weight of accumulating instrumental voices. The machinery of the orchestra itself, unimpeded by the mix of a recording made at a utopian moment faraway and unknown to the listener, fails to contain the semblance of humanity in the many allusions of the music itself. The vocal parts, too, embody the human and the monster. Listening to the calm voice of the human-like narrator, Ernst Stötzner, draws us into his unconscious, the nightmare into which he invites us at the beginning of the track. The disquieting voice of the machine-like narrator, Alexander Kluge, becomes

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more human as we listen to his story, the obedience with which he marches forward through his metamorphosis to the bureaucratic materiality of the world he faithfully serves. The historical record in the track embodies the call-and-response of characters who fail effectively to communicate with each other. The foreignness of the monstrous body, as with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, no longer sounds in a meaningful way. Machines and humans utter a common language constituted of parts that are mutually unintelligible. The worlds cohabited by humans and monsters are the stuff of epics, and Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels seize upon that knowledge to confirm the historical recording of epic in “Centaurs.” Odysseus must reckon with the Cyclops, and monkey armies in the service of Rama rescue his wife, Sita, after she is kidnapped by Ravana, the King of Lanka. In both the Odyssey and the Rāmāyan.a the encounter between humans and monsters marks moments of passage, which in turn necessitate struggle and violence. The sounding of violence is explicit in all the sounded parts of the fourth track of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Here, too, Goebbels decides to sound the symphonic metaphor of invading armies and to capture the sounds of the violent dysfunction of bureaucracy that absorbs everything in its path. As with the monstrous moments in other epics, the recording of “Centaurs” signals a violent change in the narrative journey along Wolokolamsker Chaussee. It is significant that the fourth track is the only one of the entire recording that contains no vocal music. The track is an instrumental bridge between the workers chorus of the third track and the hip-hop group, We Wear the Crown, recorded for the fifth track. “Centaurs” is also the only track that has two different speaking/singing narrators, Stötzner and Kluge, rather than the single narrator

on the other four tracks, in each case Stötzner. The instrumental music on the track, moreover, was created entirely separately, even though Goebbels was able to fit the twelve iterations of the ostinato theme perfectly to Müller’s text. In a musical sense, we might argue that the brave new world of the fourth track is devoid of human vocality, thus the voices we hear are those of the monsters dwelling in human nightmares. What we hear in the end is the sound of the void, the void of our own inner monster, with which “Centaurs” crosses the shores from utopia to dystopia in the final lines: “What crunches / in our inner woodenness Hey It is the worm that dwells within Help” (ibid., 65, lines 197–98).

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5 The Foundling The Stretto of Death Fugue His only wish was to be executed and damned to hell. Heinrich von Kleist, “The Foundling” (1984 [1811], 248) And me I am the death that comes from Asia. Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 68)

Death, disease, destruction. Together they constitute the stretto of a death fugue whose desperate voices spill across the final track of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. All that has gone before converges in “The Foundling,” the fragments and leitmotifs sampled and sutured as the beats underlying the hip-hop track that Heiner Goebbels gives to the dual narrators, the band We Wear the Crown and Ernst Stötzner. We have heard all these fragments before, as riffs from the earlier tracks, as themes from the literary worlds through which Heiner Müller has journeyed, as the sounds and symbols of the counterpoint between utopia and dystopia. There is more sound layered on the track than the listener can fathom. We’ve reached a time and place, a chiasmic moment, that is bursting at the seams. The superabundance of sound in the stretto cannot possibly hold up under its own sonic weight. To survive this moment, it will be necessary to cast off some fragments of the past, first to sample them from the collective memory, and then to forget them again and again.

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The fifth track frames the Müller/Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee in many of the same ways as the first track. Both take a single story for their point of narrative departure, and both of those stories are rendered specific because of the executions that at once provide ambiguity and teleological inevitability. Both turn to contemporary popular music groups that perform genres that are stylistically in relatively early stages in the late 1980s, German heavy metal for Track 1 and German hip-hop for Track 5, in both cases seemingly incongruous, or at least arbitrary, mismatches. Both tracks lead the listener into sonic worlds of chaos and dystopia, in which narrative and musical logic lie beyond the reach of first encounter. The dual narrators in both tracks clearly fulfill the roles of epic singer and Greek chorus, but in all cases they give voice to a cacophonous cast of many characters, whose individual roles are often intentionally indistinguishable from each other. The playwright and the composer use the confusion of sonic chaos as a counterpoint to the epic, Track 5 forming the ending presaged by the beginning of Track 1. Arriving at “The Foundling,” we know we’ve been en route all along, passing along the historical route of Volokolamsk Highway that passes from Moscow to Berlin. Track 5, “The Foundling” (Der Findling), is based on a short story of the same name by Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). Written in the final year of his life—his double suicide with Henriette Vogel (1780–1811) long served as one of the most symbolic moments in the emergence of Romanticism in German letters—“The Foundling” is a story of betrayal and revenge at the time of plague in Italy. Heiner Müller clearly states his indebtedness to the Kleist story from the outset, noting that his variant, or literary cover, follows the Kleist original (“nach Kleist”), thereby distinguishing the fifth act of the radio play from

the other four, which simply draw upon literary motifs (e.g., “nach einem Motiv von Alexander Bek” [according to a motif by Alexander Bek] for Track 1). There can be no question, then, that we are to read and listen to the Müller/Goebbels “Foundling” as a modern allegory for Kleist’s short story. The Kleist story, moreover, is notable because of its conscious use of fragments, tales within tales, a single narrative comprising incidents that do not always fit logically together. This is the stuff of hip-hop. Kleist’s literary chaos, in which he strings together the deaths of his characters in ways that defy the redemption we might expect from acts of betrayal and revenge, appears transformed in the musical chaos of the fifth track. The path of multiple tales from Kleist to Müller to Goebbels amasses a growing number of voices, affording a stretto from extensive sampling and covering. One death, for example, is layered upon another in musical palimpsest—Antonio Piachi at the time of plague in Italy, Ernst Thälmann in the concentration camp at Buchenwald, the specter of death from Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” street protesters in Germany in 1968, GDR citizens shot at the Berlin Wall, and GDR state socialism in the final throes of the Cold War. The stretto of the death fugue in Track 5 swells until it is no longer bearable. And then Wolokolamsker Chaussee falls silent.

The Diseased Dialectic I pressed my face into her breasts Her grave in the cemetery was already paid for It never had been my homeland Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 71–72)

The Foundling

In which cancer had already found its home

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As the radio play and recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee reach the fifth track, it is clear that the motifs that previously had represented the wounded dialectic of the Cold War Germanys now signify a dialectic that is diseased and dying. The allegory of the foundling giving the track its name is critical for the agency with which Müller and Goebbels seek to endow the performers, for it transforms the imagery of literary motifs into the physical materiality of the recorded death fugue. The allegory of the foundling, too, is critical because of the agency and materiality that accrues to it in the retelling of Kleist’s short story as hip-hop. A foundling is a child without parents, either orphaned or abandoned, often due to the circumstances of war and disease. Foundlings appear as a literary trope during times of death and destruction, which in turn are accompanied by widespread hunger and pandemic. Kleist’s use of the foundling as metaphor was not uncommon in eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature—Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and many novels by Charles Dickens spring immediately to mind—yet his use of the trope was particularly striking because of his inversion of the foundling’s role in the narrative, from eponymous hero to force of destruction and death. Rather than restore the lineage of families torn apart through adoption, Kleist’s foundling betrays through the betrayal of his adoptive family to hasten the inevitability of the ultimate ending. Kleist sets “The Foundling” during a period of pandemic in Italy, probably the Black Death of the fourteenth century. The Roman banker, Antonio Piachi, is traveling on business with his son, Paolo, the child of his deceased first wife. When they approach the city of Ragusa, the gates are closed because of the spread of plague throughout the city, so they must turn back. First, however, they see an infant at the side of the road, Nicolo,

The Foundling

who has lost his parents to the plague, and he, too, suffers from the disease. Piachi surrenders to pity and takes the foundling with him. Soon thereafter, however, Paolo becomes infected and dies, even as Nicolo recovers, leading Piachi and his wife, Elvire, to adopt him as a surrogate son. As Nicolo grows within the family, he increasingly acquires financial responsibilities, receiving the banking business from his father. As a young man, nonetheless, Nicolo unleashes a string of betrayals, financial and familial, all with the intrigue and assistance of the Catholic Church. At the climax of the betrayals, Piachi murders the foundling and must himself be executed. He refuses absolution from the Church, proclaiming instead that he will reckon with the betrayal of the foundling when both are in Hell. The use of palimpsest and substitution to retell the copious stories gathered for the Müller/Goebbels project is familiar to the listener already before reaching the fifth track, but Kleist’s substitution of the final years of the GDR for the plague years of medieval Italy accomplishes the retelling more directly than at any other moment in the radio play. The similarity that makes this possible lies in the act of signifying rather than in the object that is signified. We witness the betrayal by the foundling in many different guises: the Soviet Union, state socialism, bureaucratized workforces, concentration camps in the Shoah and prisons for those resisting communism, centaurs of past and present, the GDR itself. These are all the same and they are all different. Just as death provides the mise en scène for Kleist’s story, framing it from beginning to end, death relentlessly sounds the entrance and exit of the voices who clamor for beginnings and endings in the stretto of Track 5. Death opens the chiasmic moment in both the short story and the recording track, but in so doing it affirms its own finality, the silence that follows the moment of death itself.

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Narrative Simultaneity and the Collapse of Time Thälmann and Thälmann above all else, Germany’s immortal son. Thälmann has never fallen— The voice and fist of the nation.

Wolokolamsker Chaussee

“Thälmannlied” / “The Thälmann Song” (refrain)

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Signs of certainty about time and place abound as we begin the fifth track. Just returned from a five-year sentence in the infamous political prison at Bautzen, the protagonist sits at a desk across from his antagonist, who preaches about the workers’ paradise in a sermon delivered from the very tongues of Marx and Engels. As the opening minutes unfold, however, what initially seemed certain begins to deteriorate, and both protagonist and antagonist begin to lose control of their thoughts, their actions, and, above all, their ability to tell the tales of their pasts: “what he said was as if he had never said it” (Müller 1988, 67). We’ve heard all this before, in one form or another, throughout the Müller/Goebbels recording, and from the sonic worlds they sampled. There is much, also, that is familiar about the text. The line-by-line structure remains consistent, with caesurae parsing the poetry into well-balanced hemistiches. The journey along Volokolamsk Highway may well be reaching its final destination in the fifth track. Only moments into the track, however, we begin to question what seemed an inevitable closure of the narrative arc. The first signal that a different narrative structure is at work here seems at first subtle, but it soon begins to disrupt the narrative orderliness we have grown to expect from the epic underpinnings of text

The Foundling

and performance. Rather than dual narrators, apportioned to vocal and instrumental roles, performing consistently in the first person, Müller now chooses to assign the second narrator a third-person identity, that of “he” (er). The fifth act begins by asserting this identity of alienation—“He sat across from me during the interrogation” (ibid., line 1)—and it closes with an analogous act of third-person alienation—“Then the telephone sounded as he / picked up the receiver and dialed the number” (ibid., 75, lines 253–54). The suspension of the dual-narrator structure on the fifth track, or its redeployment to first-, second-, and third-person roles, is critically important for Müller and Goebbels, as it was for Kleist. Instead of maintaining the chronological temporality of a longer narrative arc—the allegory of moving from Moscow to Berlin across the tracks of Wolokolamsker Chaussee—time now collapses, splintering into many fragments, each with its individual narrative arcs. Kleist often utilizes this literary technique of tearing his stories into parts in order to reassemble them in a temporal moment of their own, what Bianca Theisen describes as narrative simultaneity (Theisen 2006). Playwright, composer, and hip-hop band employ a similar process of dumping fragments together in a space not made for them, and then fitting them together so that they occupy a new space, made possible only by simultaneity. Listening to the track, we hear some of the fragments as familiar. Others, however, materialize out of nowhere, only to disappear, leaving, however, their sonic imprint on the narrative palimpsest. The epigraph to the present section exemplifies the use of narrative simultaneity. The reference to the “Thälmannlied” (“The Thälmann Song”), one of the signature songs of struggle for the GDR Communist Party, appears fleetingly as the first hemistich in line 156, immediately following the first appearance

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of the VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN (Forget/Forgotten/Forgetting) refrain, never to reappear in the track (Müller 1988, 72). More important than sounding a fleeting reference is what the listener does not hear at this moment, but rather the textual and musical meaning that we experience at unsounded layers of the palimpsest. The refrain of the “Thälmann Song” that appears in the epigraph above would have been widely known in the GDR for which Heiner Müller was recognized as a leading playwright in the 1980s. The song refers to another historical moment, in 1944, when Ernst Thälmann (1886–1944), the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933, was murdered in the Buchenwald concentration camp. In the space opened by the song, time both collapses—“Thälmann has never fallen”—and becomes timeless—Thälmann is “Germany’s immortal son.”The hemistich reference to the song, following the “forget/forgotten/forgetting” enjoinder, thus dramatically opens a moment of narrative simultaneity, with multiple histories sounding at once. The question remains, how not to forget them.

VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN The phonograph was for Budapest Wolokolamsker Chaussee

For my friend who was shot at the Wall

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Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 71)

From the prologue to the first track, the sounds of machines have interrupted the sonic journey of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. In “Russian Gambit,” the explosion of artillery shells precedes the entry of the dual narrators; in “Centaurs,” the inevitable

The Foundling

march of Shostakovich appears to stumble as metallic industrial production breaks down; machines are the signs of chaos and of comfort, the melding of human and non-human as the alienation of a non-music grows increasingly familiar with each track. Reaching the final track, we enter a sonic world in which the distinctions between humans and machines have effectively disappeared. We have reached the Berlin Wall, the narrative caesura of the epic at which the machinery of war and the orderliness of bureaucracy form the stretto that removes even the distinctions between life and death. Hip-hop is ideally suited to sound the time and space at the end of GDR history, and the hip-hop collective called We Wear the Crown performs the task of ending history with stunning brilliance. In the late 1980s, hip-hop in Germany was still in its infancy. Musicians and popular music producers alike still sought to honor its roots in an African American urban art form, whose presence in late-Cold War Germany was nourished by the extensive presence of American military forces. Global hip-hop practices, too, were still linguistically underdeveloped, with most musicians seeking ways to merge lyrics that synthesized vernacular, even dialect orality, and the literary canon of revivalist singer-songwriters. It was at the crossroads of an emerging and global African American genre that We Wear the Crown entered, briefly and spectacularly marking the chiasmic moment that brought Wolokolamsker Chaussee to its close. The biography of We Wear the Crown is itself fleeting and elusive, and its discography is brief and enigmatic, reduced in most sources to a single track on an ECM recording. The two musicians who appear in the discographies of We Wear the Crown, Durron Butler and Moses Pelham, were themselves at the earliest moments of their careers as hip-hop musicians. Butler (bn. 1967) arrived in

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Germany with the United States Army shortly before his appearance with We Wear the Crown. It was in Germany that he made the transition from heavy metal to hip-hop, the genre in which he would later establish his career as a beatboxer for the Fat Boys. By the late 1980s, Pelham (bn. 1971) had established a reputation as a pioneer in an emerging German hip-hop scene, but it was in the 1990s, when he founded the Rödelheim Hartreim Projekt, that his professional breakthrough took place. Listening to the single track that defines their biography and discography, we must also recognize Ernst Stötzner as a member of the band, for he both joins We Wear the Crown and engages with them in the narrative simultaneity of the stretto. Musically, as well as allegorically, We Wear the Crown was itself a foundling. Adopted from different, if still inchoate, popular music traditions, they join on the fifth track to forge a hip-hop style that would define a historical moment at the Wall separating the two Germanys. For “The Foundling” the band discards entirely the styles of instrumental accompaniment that Heiner Goebbels had mustered for the earlier tracks. The narrators move between the poetic intricacies of the hip-hop vocal lines and the mechanical reproduction of beats and sampling on the turntables. We witness the beginning and ending of We Wear the Crown, their performance with hip-hop of the end of history.

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The Record of Historical Suicide The ammunition that ripped me to shreds Also belongs to the folk and I am the folk VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN UND VERGESSEN Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 74–75)

To visit the common grave of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, we must travel from central Berlin to its western outskirts, first with various forms of public transit, and then by foot from the train station for the Berlin district of Wannsee. Initially, there are no signs to direct us to the final resting place of one of Germany’s greatest literary figures, also the place in which he and his lover took their own lives. Once the edge of a forest is reached, however, a few simple signposts direct us to the modest stone in a forest clearing not far removed from a small lake, the Kleiner Wannsee. The stone itself bears witness to a life of tragedy, and with it the time and place when life and death become one through the simultaneity of their common immortality: He lived, sang, and suffered In a sad and arduous moment. Here he sought death And found eternity. Inscription on the tombstone of Heinrich von Kleist

The Foundling

The modest monument to Kleist’s life and death may seem at first glance as if it is remote, removed from history itself, but in fact its location in the forest separating Berlin and Potsdam is uncannily close to the former border wall between West and East Germany. Today, we would pass through this border zone without difficulty, though very few would actually choose the forest path past Kleist’s grave. The passage across borders here, nonetheless, symbolically replicates many journeys across history in which suicide leads to the simultaneity of life narratives. Is it only a coincidence that Kleist’s suicide would take place at the border between two Germanys 150 years later, and that

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the final track of the Müller/Goebbels recording ends with historical suicide as the monumental wall separating the Germanys symbolically falls? Whether or not these moments between life and death are even remotely related, their connections are uncanny because they contribute to the stretto of motifs and fragments, sounds and samples that accumulate in the narrative simultaneity that overwhelms the final stages in the journey of Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Since its beginnings, the recording has engaged with sonic worlds in the process of dying. It would seem that the playwright and composer, hip-hop band and German Romantic writer, are seeking the closure of history, which ultimately they, too, cannot find. The “Vergessen” refrain swells to bring us to the end, but the simultaneity of its meanings—Vergessen can be a command to forget, it can become a noun applied to what is forgotten, or it can draw us into the very act of forgetting— cannot contain time and history. We remain in the narrative time and space of epic, with whose endings we shall travel across the caesurae of history to new beginnings.

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Epilogue: The End of Epic as Its Beginning Each time, the Germans thought: This is the last resistance, the last battle. . . . Volokolamsk Highway remained the focus of their main advance. Aleksander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 217)

Sounding the Wall, Past and Present As I turn to the final pages of this book in late 2020, the entire world finds itself in the grip of a pandemic that daily visits disease and death upon thousands. Far too little is known about the beginnings of the global spread of the coronavirus causing COVID-19, and as yet, it is impossible to know when the disease will reach its end. To the extent that we have learned anything about the disease, it is that pandemic, whatever it is called, be it epidemic or plague, forces us to reckon with time according to its own design. The time of pandemic is one in which beginnings and endings converge as the narrative simultaneity of a chiasmic moment. When deciding on the text that would provide a model for the final track of his radio play and at the same time frame the entire epic journey across a Europe riven by the Second World War and

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the Cold War, Heiner Müller, too, turned to a story that was set in the time of pandemic, Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Foundling.” Writing in the early nineteenth century in the year of his suicide, Kleist had turned to plague at another time and place, most likely the so-called Black Death of the fourteenth century, which in the four years from 1347 to 1351 ravaged Europe as the deadliest pandemic in history, with a death toll estimated at between 75 and 200 million. In Kleist’s “Foundling,” death frames the story, the protagonist’s son Paolo’s death from the plague at the beginning, and his own execution for murdering the foundling, Nicolo, at the end. Müller does not name plague as such in the final act of his radio play, but rather he modulates from it, using the common tone of death, to chronicle the ideological disease that portended the end of the chasm that had divided Europe in the late twentieth century, also leaving in its wake the bodies of tens of millions, including those who had lived in the bloodlands through which Volokolamsk Highway stretched, geographically and allegorically (for a compelling history of the time and place charted as bloodlands, see Snyder 2010). So many lives, so much death, so many stories of plague and disease, now connecting 1989 to 2020, together marking the end of history. For many in Europe the moment in which the recordings of Wolokolamsker Chaussee appeared, the end of the history whose divisions they had shared was a time of celebration. The Germanys were united, nations in Eastern Europe freed themselves from state socialism, government bureaucracy and oppression collapsed. The dual protagonists whose tales formed the narrative in the epic at the heart of the present book reached the end of those tales. Europeans who had survived to live beyond the end of the Cold War would famously turn to music to fête the resilience with which they would build a new world in Europe. The Berlin Wall on whose

Epilogue

two sides Leonard Bernstein would conduct the Beethoven/ Schiller “Ode to Joy” from the Ninth Symphony in December 1989 was the same Berlin Wall at which the recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee would finally arrive, also in 1989. In the Müller/Goebbels recording, however, there are no traces of the joy Bernstein projected on Berliners. Instead, the collapse of history at the Berlin Wall is marked by the sonic sadness of hiphop, preparing for the silence that lay ahead (see Brodsky 2017). In the waning months of 2020, I also set out in search of the unified Europe that was so joyfully celebrated in 1989, but I do so in vain. Thirty years since the Cold War, there can be little doubt that we find ourselves once again in a divided Europe, increasingly called the New Cold War. The tensions that pull European nations apart have both internal and external origins, and the history of the present turns itself once again to its dual narrators. Russia has replaced the Soviet Union in its attempts, some of them military, as in Ukraine, to split East from West. The European Union, once the political avatar for a New Europe, urgently struggles to forestall dissolution into the Old Europe. Forceful action to claim nationalistic fragments as one’s own shoves the United Kingdom over the precipice of Brexit and across Europe empowers rightwing populists to drive immigrants, refugees, and people of color and difference from the continent. Walls, too, rise again as sonic sites of remembrance and forgetting. In 2019, Berlin celebrated the thirty years since the Fall of the Wall once again, almost banally, with the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony at the Wall. Simultaneously, border walls across Eastern Europe are erected to silence the voices of those seeking refuge in Europe. Such walls function increasingly like those that spread across the historical moments charting Wolokolamsker Chausee (see, e.g., P. Bohlman 2020). The end of

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Cold War history sounded at the Wall on the final track is once again familiar in the New Cold War. If I close this book with a series of reflections about hearing and listening to Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s ECM recording of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, I do not do so as a plea for relevance. While gathering details about the literary and musical materials used for the recording, I fully recognize that some have timely and specific historical meanings, while others may best fulfill aesthetic goals for the performance on the recording. The transformation into an epic of a Russian novel and three shorter works from the modern history of German letters and the enhancement of epic form and genre with musical techniques produced a remarkable work of theater and music, but the creativity we experience is significant more for expressive force than the spinning out of a larger historical narrative. The recording is itself not a history of the Cold War, but rather it leads us to historical moments in which the Cold War—and the historical longue durée of Europe, past and present—are legible. There are many aspects of the larger radio play that we find in other collaborations by Müller and Goebbels, but they do not cohere through methods and techniques that produce a style history or through potential influences other writers and composers, even they themselves, might seek to emulate or develop.

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Historical Recording / Recording History Its surfeit of fragments from diverse musical and narrative sources notwithstanding, the ECM recording upon which I

Epilogue

reflect in this book remains a singular work of art. The ontological question that such singularity then poses is very straightforward, even as it belies simple answers: just what is the work of art that we understand Wolokolamsker Chaussee to be? Surely, it is easiest to respond to that question by determining what the recording is not. Simply stated, it is not a composed piece of music that accompanies a radio play in five acts. By and large, Heiner Goebbels did not compose the music that we hear on the recording. His attribution as the composer of the music for the entire work may stretch across song, sound, and symphony, acknowledged on the cover of the album and in the liner notes for individual tracks, but analytically it is impossible to identify few aspects of the music that he actually wrote. There is no score for the recording itself. For those tracks on which the music was originally created for another time and place, that is, as a work of music with meaning and purpose entirely different from the recording, the score was created by another composer, for example, Dmitri Shostakovich writing his Seventh Symphony in 1941. The question of composer and composition becomes even more vexing because of the difficulties with which we distinguish between and among melody, music, sound, and noise, all of which, in various mixes, permeate the individual tracks. Melody, for example, does not always, or even usually, follow what we would normally call lyrics, the texts of epic song adapted by Heiner Müller. In only two tracks, “The Duel” and “The Foundling” do the combined voices representing the Greek chorus sing the lyrics, as German workers’ song and hiphop. The first narrator, performed by Ernst Stötzner throughout the entire recording, generally employs a technique of speechsong, but with different intonation and style on each track. The performances on the recordings, moreover, are not the results

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of the usual processes of preparation that listeners—and record producers, as well—would expect and require for a concert or a recording session. The performers on each track are largely working together for the first and last time. Goebbels is not working here with one of the musical groups with whom he will more regularly record, for instance, Ensemble Modern. The combinations of musicians, like the different styles and genres, would seem to be arbitrary, if, however, they did not work so effectively together for the narrative moment of a single track. The hip-hop group, We Wear the Crown, may well have formed only to play for the fifth track of the recording, the only entry in their discography. The Horbach Chamber Chorus provides commentary as the Greek chorus on the third track, employing the deliberate informality and haphazardness of a rehearsal, in which they stop and start in order to get certain passages correct. Clearly, Goebbels’s evocation of performance that calls attention to its own lack of polish intentionally conveys the spontaneity of the moment of recording, thus drawing our ear beyond any kind of sound we might imagine to express authenticity. The most conventional of all composed parts of the entire radio play, the “Invasion Theme” in the middle the first movement of the Shostakovich Seventh Symphony, might seem to retain some kind of compositional authenticity, but its swelling ostinato, too, is ripped from the original context to conjure the orderly machinery of state bureaucracy. We err if we listen to Wolokolamsker Chaussee in search of the usual conventional meanings of a work of art. Were we to search in this way, we would necessarily exercise a kind of listening that searches for the orderliness imposed on the music and its constituent parts. We would be moving backward from our immediate listening experience hoping to discover a

Epilogue

sound, score, and symbol system that afforded an authenticity that was not ours, but rather one owned by the professional caste of composers, performers, and record producers. Walter Benjamin famously argued in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Benjamin 1969), that authenticity was diluted and adulterated when subjected to the reproductive capacity of modern machines. Müller and Goebbels have turned toward ECM, however, to create a recording that asks the listener to move in an entirely different direction. Abandoning the search for an authentic work of art whose distance from the listener’s experience is increasingly one of alienation, Müller and Goebbels gather the signs and sounds of experiences both close and distant, comforting and confounding, that together expand a more familiar, at times even intimate, sonic world into which the listener feels invited, to enter through the portals formed by caesura and chiasmic moment. The listening that enlivened my own journeys with Wolokolamsker Chaussee, despite the accumulation of chiasmic moments—or because of them—has always been intimate. Just as I listened to a bootleg cassette on the highways of Freiburg in 1990 at the beginning of the journey sounded in the pages of this book, I find myself at the final stations sitting at my CD-player and computer in my Berlin apartment just off Frankfurter Allee, European Highway 1, thirty years later connecting Moscow to Berlin, this time, my Berlin, the confluence of a lifetime of epic journeys. Standing at the chiasmic moments that fill the recording, listening in Berlin across the caesurae that expand the reach of epic, I now comprehend the sonic world of Wolokolamsker Chausee as a time and space I can inhabit with others. As our distance from the Cold War whose narratives stretched from

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the defense of Moscow in Alexander Bek’s novel extends beyond the social and political divisiveness of the two Germanys to arrive at a point of collapse at the Berlin Wall, we witness its narratives increasingly as our own in the vast soundscape of Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s recording project. Europe’s wounded dialectic has not vanished, and it remains still in need of healing. The journey along Wolokolamsker Chaussee remains richly resonant, the epic that sounds its history as the beginning, once again, forestalls its ending.

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Bibliography Beissinger, Margaret, Jane Tylus, and Susanne Wofford, eds. 1999. Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World. Berkeley : University of California Press. Bek, Alexander. 1962. Die Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Trans. Rahel Strassberg. Berlin: Militärverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. Bek, Alexander. n.d. Wolokolamsk Highway. Moscow : Foreign Languages Publishing House. Benjamin, Walter. 1969 [1935]. “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In idem, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, 217–51. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zorn. New York: Schocken. Bohlman, Andrea F. 2020. Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland. New York: Oxford University Press. Bohlman, Andrea F., und Philip V. Bohlman. 2012. Hanns Eisler – in der Musik ist es anders. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. Bohlman, Philip V. 2010. “600 Jahre DDR–Musikgeschichte – am Beispiel deutscher Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters.” In Nina Noeske and Matthias Tischer, eds., Musikwissenschaft und Kalter Krieg – Das Beispiel DDR, 79–95. Cologne: Böhlau. Bohlman, Philip V. 2012. “Historiographic Heterophony: Epic and the Narration of the Timeless Present.” In idem and Nada Petković, eds., Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, 81–98. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

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Bohlman, Philip V. 2020. “ ‘She Played the Harp and Sang a New Song’: The Sea, the Wall, and the Aesthetic Topography of Mediterranean Migration.” Puls 5: 7–25. Bohlman, Philip V., and Brian Currid. 2001. “Suturing History, Healing Europe: German National Temporality in Wolokolamsk Highway.” The Musical Quarterly 85 (4): 681–717. Bohlman, Philip V., and Nada Petković, eds. 2012. Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow. Brodsky, Seth. 2017. From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious. Berkeley : University of California Press. Kafka, Franz. 1915. Die Verwandlung. Stuttgart: Wolff. Jakobson, Roman. 1966. Roman Jakobson: Selected Writings. The Hague: Mouton. von Kleist, Heinrich. 1984 [1811]. “Der Findling.” In idem, Sämtliche Erzählungen, 229–49. Stuttgart: Reclam. Kordes, Barbara. 2009. Musikalische Lesarten: Heiner Goebbels und Heiner Müller. Göttingen: V&R Unipress. (Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur und Medien 5) Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography

Müller, Heiner. 1988. Die Schlacht, Wolokolamsker Chaussee: Zwei Stücke. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren. Orig. publ. 1977 and 1988; Berlin: Henschelverlag Kunst und Gesellschaft.

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Nechepurenko, Ivan. 2018. “ Volokolamsk Journal: ‘When a City of 40,000 People Gets Poisoned, They Don’t Care’.” The New York Times, April 6: A7. Sehgers, Anna. 2007 (1965). “Das Duell.” In idem, Erzählungen, 1958–1966, 242–73. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag.

Snyder, Timothy. 2010. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. London: Vintage. Souksengphet-Dachlauer, Anna. 2010. Text als Klangmaterial: Heiner Müller’s Texte in Heiner Goebbels’ Hörstücken. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Steinitz, Wolfgang. 1954 and 1962. Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten. 2 vols. (East) Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. West German reprint: Berlin: Zweitausendeins, 1979. Theisen, Bianca. 2006. “Simultaneity: A Narrative Figure in Kleist.” Modern Language Notes 121: 514–21. Weber, Anne. 2020. Annette, ein Heldinnenepos. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz. Wolf, Christa. 1963. Der geteilte Himmel: Erzählung. Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag.

Discography Goebbels, Heiner. 1993a. SHADOW / Landscape with Argonauts. ECM 1480 513 372–2. Goebbels, Heiner, and Ensemble Modern. 1993b. La Jalousie / Red Run / Herakles 2 / Befreiung. ECM New Series 1483 437 997–2. Goebbels, Heiner. 2000. Surrogate Cities. ECM 1688.

Goebbels, Heiner. 2007. Landschaft mit entfernten Verwandten. ECM New Series 1811 476 5838.

Bibliography

Goebbels, Heiner, Ensemble Modern, and Josef Bierbichler. 2002. Eislermaterial. CD and booklet. ECM New Series 1779 461 648–2.

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Goebbels, Heiner. 2012. Hörstücke, nach Texten von Heiner Müller. 3 CDs. ECM 1452–54. CD 3 = Wolokolamsker Chaussee I–V. Megalomaniax. 1992. Information Overload. Vertigo 864–293–2.

Bibliography

Müller, Heiner. 1996. Wolokolamsker Chaussee. Read by Heiner Müller. Munich: DerHörVerlag.

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Index Adorno, Theodor W. xvii Aegean Sea 40 Antiquity xxii, 9 Arbeiterlieder, see workers’ songs audio cassette xv–xvii, xx, 1, 7, 103 authenticity xvi, 65, 67, 103 authority 31, 42, 69, 71 Bautzen 18, 90 Bayerischer Rundfunk xvi Becher, Johannes R. 57 Beethoven, Ludwig van 99 Bek, Alexander xii–xiv, xvi, xviii–xx, 2–8, 11–22, 24–9, 32, 36–7, 40–1, 43–4, 46–7, 50, 62, 69–70, 77–8, 87, 97, 104 Belenkow, Captain 17, 40–1, 44, 46–50 Benjamin, Walter 103 Bera, Bert 50 Berlin x, xx, 2, 8–9, 13, 20, 28, 30, 33–4, 36, 58, 86, 91, 95, 103 Berlin Philharmonic 99 Berlin Wall xiv, xviii–xix, 12, 19, 25, 87, 92–3, 97–100, 104 Berliner Ensemble xvii Bernstein, Leonard 99 Bierbichler, Josef xviii, 65

Biermann, Wolf xv, 47 Black Death 25, 88, 98 Bohlman, Andrea xi, xvi, xxiv Bohlman, Benjamin xi Bohlman, Christine xi Bohlman, Danielle xi Bohlman, Riley xi Boscobel xx Brecht, Bertolt xvii, xxii Brexit 99 broadside ballad 55, 58–9 Brodsky, Seth xxiii Buchenwald 87, 92 Budapest 92 Bundestraße 1 (B1) xx–xxi, 103 bureaucracy 64, 70–1, 75, 82, 93, 98, 102 Burgenland xi Butler, Durron 93 caesura 9–10, 33, 36–7, 47, 62, 90, 93, 96, 103 canon 54, 57–8, 93 Catholic Church 89 CD xvii, 1, 7, 27, 65, 103 Celan, Paul 87 “Centaurs” xxiv, 8, 15, 18, 21–2, 24–5, 38, 49, 69–83, 92 chiasma 23–4, 36–37 chiasmic moment 6, 26, 29, 31, 35, 38, 41, 50, 85, 89, 93, 97, 103

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chorus 14, 33–5, 38, 48, 53–4, 56, 63–7, 70, 86, 101–2 chronotope 26, 33–4, 37, 59 Cid 13 class struggle 62 Cold War xviii, xxi, xxiii–xxiv, 3, 25, 37, 40, 59, 62, 87–8, 93, 98–100, 103 communism 2, 57–9, 61, 91–2 Communist Party, see communism composer 26, 30–1, 34, 51, 70, 80, 86, 91, 96, 100–1, 103 concentration camp 87, 92 COVID-19 97 Currid, Brian x, 24

Index

death 11–13, 55, 85, 87–9, 93, 95–8 death fugue 85, 87–8 decasyllabic structure 9, 47, 79 dialectic xx, 55–7, 59, 64, 67, 72, 79, 87 Dickens, Charles 88 Dresden 61 “Duel, the” xviii, 7–8, 14–15, 17, 24–5, 37, 46, 53–67, 69, 101 Dylan, Bob, xiv, xxi dystopia 28–9, 31, 37–8, 41, 43, 50–1, 71–2, 74, 76–7, 79, 81, 83, 85–6

110

East and West xi, xvii, xxiv, 6–7, 23, 53, 99 East Berlin xvi East Germany xii, xiv, 3, 18, 25, 57, 60, 69, 78, 95

see also German Democratic Republic (GDR) Eastern Front xx see also Russian Front ECM x–xv, xvii, xxii–xxiv, 1, 24, 37, 64–5, 93, 100, 103 Eicher, Manfred xxii eighteenth century 99 Eisenberg, Johannes 56 Eisler, Hanns xxii, xxiii, 57, 65 Engels, Friedrich 18, 90 Enlightenment xxi Ensemble Modern xviii, xxiii, 65, 102 epic xvi, xxiii, 1, 4, 6–7, 9–12, 14, 31–9, 43, 47, 49–51, 62–3, 70, 74, 79, 82, 86, 90, 93, 96–8, 100–1, 103–4 epic singer 5–6, 10, 12–16, 46–7, 49, 63, 86 Europe xi, 1, 6, 23, 97–8, 100, 104 Eastern, xi, xxi, 98 Western, xxi European Highway 1, see Bundestraße 1 (B1) European Union 99 fascism 21, 55, 58–9, 66 Fielding, Henry 88 folk music, see folk song folk revival 25 folk song 53–8, 65 Yiddish, xv “Forest near Moscow” 5, 7, 22, 25–6, 39–51

Harth, Alfred xxii heavy metal 19, 28–9, 31, 34–7, 39, 49–51, 86, 94 Helwig, Ernst 60

“Invasion Theme” 25, 27, 71, 78–80, 102 island 39–40, 46, 48, 51 Italy 8, 86, 88

Index

genre xvi, 8–9, 11, 13, 15–16, 18–19, 26, 32–33, 54, 63, 74, 86, 93–94, 100, 102 German army 19, 24, 35–36, 79 German Democratic Republic (GDR) xvii, 3, 7, 24–25, 43, 57–62, 65, 75, 89, 91–93 see also East Germany Germany xiv, xvi, xxi, xxiii, 2, 6, 8, 24, 40, 50, 53–55, 57–58, 60–61, 65–66, 75, 80, 90, 92–95 Germanys xviii–xix, 6–7, 12, 25, 58, 62, 88, 94–96, 98, 104 Goebbels, Heiner xii–xiii, xvi–xix, xxi–xxv, 1–2, 5–6, 9–10, 12–16, 18–24, 26–30, 32, 35, 37, 39, 41–43, 46–48, 50, 53–57, 59, 62–63, 65, 67, 69–71, 74, 76, 78–79, 82–83, 85–91, 94, 96, 99–104

Hemistich, see stichic structure Hessischer Rundfunk xvi Highway 61 xiv, xx–xxi “Highway 61 Blues” xiv, xxi “Highway 61 Blues Revisited” xiv, xxi hip-hop xxiv, 25, 82, 85–8, 91, 93–4, 96, 99, 102 historical record 61, 64, 67, 82, 100 history end of 94 European x, xxiii–xxiv, 1, 6, 18, 26, 100 German 12, 24, 43, 53, 57, 92–3 narrative xvi, xviii, xx–xxi, xxv, 5, 7, 19, 21–2, 24, 31, 55, 58–9, 67, 76, 95–6, 98, 100, 104 of the present 99 recording 23 Soviet 2 Hitler, Adolf 58 Holt, Fabian xi Horbach Chamber Chorus 25, 56, 63, 67, 102 horse 19–21, 37 Hörstück x, xvii, xxii humanity 45, 81 Hungary xi Huxley, Aldous 73

“Foundling, the” xxiv, 8, 17, 24–5, 38, 85–96, 101 fourteenth century 88, 98 fragment xxiv, 8–9, 16, 22, 24, 26, 31, 33, 36, 54, 56, 72, 74, 80, 85, 91, 96, 100 France 60 Freiburg im Breisgau xiv–xv, 103 Frey, Elisabeth x

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Jakobson, Roman 10 Jos Frits Bookstore xv Kafka, Franz xiii, 8, 21, 24–5, 38, 70–8, 80, 82 Kalb, Gunnar 50 Kazakh steppes, see Kazakhstan Kazakhstan 2, 4, 17, 20, 22, 44 Kleist, Heinrich von xiii, 8, 24–5, 85–9, 91, 95, 98 Kluge, Alexander 77, 81–2 Kordes, Barbara xxii, 32

Index

lament 29 Léhar, Franz 80 Leibniz, Wilhelm Gottfried 66–7 Leningrad 12, 78, 81 Leningrad Symphony xiv, 19, 27, 49, 71, 78–9, 81, 101–2 line-by-line structure, see stichic structure LP xv, 1, 7 Lussier, René 78, 81 Lyssanka 4, 20, 37

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McDowell, Mississippi Fred xiv, xxi Madrid 56 Marx, Karl 18, 90 materiality xxii, 6–7, 82, 88 Megalomaniax xxiii, 25, 28–30, 33–7, 46–51 Metal, see heavy metal Metamorphosis 8, 21, 24–5, 70, 72, 75–7 Mexico 60

modernity 19, 35, 37 Momysch-Uly, Baurdschan 2–6, 11, 13–18, 20, 22, 25, 30, 32, 35, 37, 40–2, 44–9 More, Thomas 40 Moscow xiv, xix–xxi, 1–2, 4–5, 8–9, 11–13, 19–20, 24, 28–30, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 42–3, 46, 48, 50, 75, 78, 86, 91, 103–4 Moses 13 Müller, Heiner xii–xiii, xvi–xix, xxi–xxv, 1–2, 5–16, 20–4, 26–30, 32–4, 36–7, 39–47, 49–50, 53, 55, 57, 59–63, 67, 69–76, 78–9, 82–3, 85–92, 94, 96, 98–101, 103–4 Munich xv musique concrète 71, 80 myth xxi mythology xxii, 70, 72, 75–6 narrative 28, 30, 36, 39, 43, 46, 55, 57, 59, 61–2, 67, 69–72, 75–6, 78, 82, 86, 88, 90–1, 94–7, 100, 103–4 narrator 2, 5–7, 14–16, 18–19, 23, 25, 28–32, 34–8, 45–9, 53–4, 56, 62–5, 72–3, 76–7, 79, 81–2, 85, 91, 94 National Socialism 57, 60–1 New Cold War xx, 99–100 New York City xxi nineteenth century 54, 88, 98

novel x, xvi, xviii–xx, 1, 3–4, 6, 12–17, 20–4, 26, 28–30, 32–6, 40–4, 46, 50 Odysseus 40 ontology xvii, 55, 101 oral tradition 5, 15–16, 70–1 order 30, 35, 44–6, 48, 59, 72–4, 76–80, 90, 93, 102 orderliness, see order ostinato 25, 78–81, 102 Ovid 38, 70 pandemic 88, 97–8 Panfilow, Iwan Wassiljewitsch 3, 5, 11–12, 15–19, 22, 42 Pelham, Moses 93–4 Pelshenko, Gunnar 50 Piachi, Antonio 87–9, 98 Pietsch, Rudolf xi pilgrim x–xi pilgrimage x–xi plague 86, 97–8 Poe, Edgar Allan xxii Poland xvi Potsdam 95 Prague 75

Sajew, Semjon 42 Samsa, Gregor 8, 21, 25, 70, 73–7, 82 Schiller, Friedrich 99 Second World War xix–xx, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 19, 24, 40, 53, 55, 57, 59–60, 62, 69, 81, 97–8 Seghers, Anna xiii, xviii, 7–8, 24–5, 53, 55, 57, 59–62, 67, 69–70 Shakespeare, William 69, 73, 76 Shoah 57, 61, 89 Shostakovich, Dmitri xxiv, 19, 25, 27, 49, 70–1, 78–81, 93, 101–2 Shostakovich, Symphony no. 7, op. 60, in C Major, see Leningrad Symphony silence 27–8, 77, 99 singer-songwriter xv, 25, 47, 50, 70, 93 sixteenth century 40

Index

radio xv, xxiii, 1 radio play x, 6, 10, 16–17, 21–4, 26, 29–30, 32, 37, 39, 53, 58, 61, 75–6, 88–9, 97–8, 101 real-time xix–xx, xxiv–xxv, 2, 55, 67 recording x–xi, xv, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 2, 6–7, 24, 26–9, 32, 34–5,

37–8, 65, 67, 77–8, 80, 88–9, 96, 98–104 Red Army, see Soviet Army reunification xiv, xxiv–xxv, 1, 50, 54 revival 57 Romanticism 86, 96 Route 66 xx Russia 22, 53, 99 “Russian Gambit” xxiii, 7, 9, 24, 27–38, 50, 92 Russian Front 2 see also Eastern Front

113

socialism 2, 31, 60, 77, 87, 89, 98 sovereignty 40 Soviet army 4–5, 12, 17, 19, 28, 30, 36, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 53, 62, 80 Soviet Bloc xxi Soviet Union xxiii, 2, 5–7, 11–12, 40, 44–6, 53, 58, 89, 99 speech-song 44, 101 Stalin, Joseph 53, 64 Steinitz, Wolfgang 57–8 stichic structure 9, 11, 16, 32–4, 47, 62, 74, 79, 90–1 Stötzner, Ernst 25, 28–9, 35, 37, 46–7, 49, 56, 67, 77, 80–3, 85, 94, 101 Strassberg, Rahel xix Südwest Rundfunk xvi Sweden 58

Index

tank 19–20, 37, 45, 55, 61–2 Thälmann, Ernst 58, 87, 90–2 “Thälmann Song” 91–2 Theisen, Bianca 91 Torah 13 Trapp, Axel 50 twentieth century x, xviii, 7, 26, 47, 54, 98 twenty-first century x

114

Ukraine 99 Unification, see reunification uniform 21–2, 26, 48, 74, 77 United States xx University of Chicago x utopia x, 29, 37–41, 43, 49–51, 71–2, 74, 77, 81, 83, 85

Vogel, Henriette 86, 95 Volokolamsk xix–xx, 4, 17, 19, 43 Volokolamsk Highway xiv, 8, 11, 20, 30, 37, 40, 86, 90, 97–8 Wannsee 95 We Wear the Crown xxiv, 12, 25, 82, 85, 93–94, 102 Weimar Republic 60 West Germany xiv–xv, xvii Wilda, Andreas 50 Wolf, Christa xviii Wolokolamsker Chaussee book by Philip V. Bohlman x ECM recording x–xii, xiv–xvii, xx–xxi, xxiii, xxv, 1, 5–6, 11–12, 14, 16, 21, 24, 26–9, 39, 41, 43, 46, 50, 53, 55, 59, 64–5, 69, 76–7, 80, 82, 85–8, 92–3, 96, 98–104 novel by Alexander Bek xiv, xviii, 1–5, 7, 11–12, 14, 21, 23–5, 70 radio play by Heiner Müller xiii, xix, 1, 7, 9, 12, 14, 57–8, 60, 62, 73, 75, 88 Wolokolamsk Highway, see Volokolamsk Highway workers chorus, see workers’ songs workers’ songs 54, 56–7, 82, 101 workers’ struggle 65 wounded dialectic 1, 6, 19–20, 23, 29, 31, 51, 88, 104 written tradition 5, 15, 71 Yiddish 57

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