M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller “A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard” Apart from the seasonal indications in the titles of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest is the only play by Shakespeare that refers to a natural phenomenon in its title. 1 And yet, as we know, the storm that so terrifies the mariners and the ship’s other occupants in the first scene of the play is, by the very first line of the second scene, said to be the possible result of “art” (1.2.1), a supposition that is soon confirmed. Conspicuously, the singular noun “art”, applied to Prospero’s magical abilities, appears ten times throughout the play and the tempest is said to be “performed” by Ariel (1.2.194). This paradigmatic instance of a natural phenomenon, the sea storm, turns out to be the result of human action, so that, in the world of romance, nature and history appear to strangely merge. 2 Indeed, the play is full of such interpenetrations. The violence of the elements is often described in terms of human warfare: the waves are “contentious” (2.1.119); Fernando is said to have “flung aside” the “enmity” of the waters (2.1.117); and Prospero says he has “called forth the mutinous winds” (5.1.42) and “Set roaring war” “’twixt the green sea and the azured vault” (5.1.43-44). Alonso is, therefore, perfectly justified in remarking, by the end of the play, that “These are not natural events” (5.1.227) and that “there is in this business more than nature / Was ever conduct of” (5.1.243-244). There is 1 This paper exists in the margins of my recently completed PhD dissertation, Texts Waiting for History: William Shakespeare rewritten by Heiner Müller. I provide the German original of all quotations from Müller and also from occasional longer quotations by other authors. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 In his discussion of the introduction of the word “hurricane” in European discourse, Peter Hulme points to colonists’ difficulties in allegorising and thus taming in narrative the awesome destructive power of this novel phenomenon (cf. Hulme 94-101). As Hulme then proceeds to discuss Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he returns to the dialectics between nature and art in the play in order to argue that “The storm in the play is very clearly ‘tempest’ rather than ‘hurricane’ in the sense that it is interpretable through the master code of Providence. […] The storm that opens the play is only momentarily a natural catastrophe of the kind that [John] Taylor has eventually to designate via an alien discourse: the storm is part of a design and therefore not the disaster it initially appears” (Hulme 101-102). M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 116 even a sustained play on the several uses of the word “natural”: for Trinculo, Caliban is “a natural” (3.2.31), meaning he is a fool; for Prospero, he is rather “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.188- 189); for Prospero again, it is afterwards Antonio, his usurping brother, who, on the contrary, is said to have “Expelled remorse and nature” (5.1.76), thus being “Unnatural” (5.1.79). On the other hand, critics attuned to ecocritical preoccupations have pointed out that the play includes several references to human transformation of nature. Gabriel Egan discusses the surprisingly many instances in which characters or stage directions mention the gathering of wood, which he sees as proof that “Prospero’s main activity since his arrival on the island has been its deforestation” (Egan 155). 3 Like Egan, though much earlier, Jonathan Bate noted that “The land described in the masque [in act four] is husbanded, not in a state of nature. It is under Ceres, patroness of agriculture” (Bate 257). Bate further reads The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s last revision of [Ovid’s] Metamorphoses”, in that it is a “demonstration of the pervasiveness of change” (ibid. 245). Interestingly, in this junction between nature and history, the factor that is privileged is mutability, rather than fixity. In the history of the sciences an expression exists that, taken somewhat literally, describes this paradoxical situation. The expression, of course, is natural history. Having initially run a long and distinguished career throughout which it designated most of the research that now falls under the heading of natural sciences, it is currently most often reserved for describing a certain type of museum. The strangeness of the expression has not been lost on its practitioners, nor on later historians. 4 In Das Ende der Naturgeschichte [The End of Natural History], Wolf Lepenies studies the change in the cultural assessment of the sciences during the 18 th and the 19 th centuries and points to how practitioners of the natural sciences and encyclopaedists would criticise the expression for its inaccurateness. In the concept of natural history during the 18 th century, no historical development was implied and its unhistorical character was instead stressed, as a way to distinguish it from ‘proper’ human history (cf. Lepenies 30; 37). However, this insistence rather betrays 3 Peter Hulme has also convincingly argued that Caliban’s work for Prospero, represented by the gathering of wood and food, shows how Prospero, despite his much-vaunted magical powers, either cannot or will not satisfy the necessary minimum for survival: he “is dependent upon Caliban’s labour for his food supply and general material requirements” (Hulme 131). By recalling the context of colonial ventures, Hulme then connects Prospero’s magic with the natives’ historical perception of firearms as magical, and points to how, despite their ‘magic’, the Europeans proved incapable of feeding themselves and often depended upon natives for their survival (cf. ibid. 128). 4 A book from 1997, by Rhoda Rappaport, dealing with the history of geology between 1665 and 1750, is fittingly called When Geologists were Historians. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 117 an anxiety as to the repercussions of the expression. The implication that nature itself might have a history, an implication suggested by fossils and by the beginnings of evolutionary theories, became unavoidable by the time of Charles Darwin. Darwin himself, borrowing a metaphor from Charles Lyell, said that he looked “at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept” (Darwin 229). Some years after Darwin published The Origin of Species, it would be Karl Marx’s turn, in the preface to the first edition of Das Kapital, to adopt a standpoint according to which “the development of the economic formation of society was viewed as a process of natural history” (Marx 92). By the 19 th century, however, according to Lepenies, natural history tropes were becoming a literary device, especially in the novel, rather than a respected scientific method (cf. Lepenies 122-130). By the following century, the concept of natural history, already distanced from its most common meaning, became a fascinating, though modestly developed, theme in the early work of both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. In his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama] (1928), Benjamin appropriated the concept of natural history not from Marx but from the German baroque poets and playwrights. By studying baroque analogies between history and the cycle of nature, Benjamin focused on the epochal fascination with ruins and on the way these were seen to unlock a specific ontology of history: Auf dem Antlitz der Natur steht ‘Geschichte’ in der Zeichenschrift der Vergängnis. Die allegorische Physiognomie der Natur-Geschichte, die auf der Bühne durch das Trauerspiel gestellt wird, ist wirklich gegenwärtig als Ruine. Mit ihr hat sinnlich die Geschichte in den Schauplatz sich verzogen. Und zwar prägt, so gestaltet, die Geschichte nicht als Prozeß eines ewigen Lebens, vielmehr als Vorgang unaufhaltsamen Verfalls sich aus (Benjamin 1991, 353). [The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. (Benjamin 2009, 177-178)] In the Baroque interest in ruins, Benjamin saw how historical and natural transience came to merge, but also that, in a dialectical manner, during this period ruins were being produced as artifacts in pictorial representations. Eternal transience is thus said to have become an ontological concept for the Baroque poets: “Natur schwebt ihnen vor als ewige Vergängnis, in der allein der saturnische Blick jener Generationen die Geschichte erkannte” (Benjamin 1991, 355) [“In nature [the baroque poets] saw eternal transience, and here alone did the saturnine vision of this generation recognise history” (Benjamin 2009, 179)]. This ontological concept had already been illustrated, earlier in M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 118 the book, by the image of a waterfall to which the religious man of the baroque and his world were felt to be driven (cf. ibid. 66). In his theses on the concept of history, from 1940, Benjamin was to use a similar image as he described the storm that carried the angel of history helplessly along with it, a storm that Benjamin, in yet another natural-historical metaphor, identified with historical progress. 5 Adorno, on the other hand, developed Benjamin’s theme first in a 1932 paper, “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte” [“The Idea of Natural History”], and also later, during the 1960s. Rather than positing an ontology of history, which he found and criticised in Heidegger’s concept of “historicity”, said to naturalise history, Adorno proposed a dialectical movement: Wenn die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von Natur und Geschichte ernsthaft gestellt werden soll, bietet sie nur dann Aussicht auf Beantwortung, wenn es gelingt, das geschichtliche Sein in seiner äußersten geschichtlichen Bestimmtheit, da, wo es am geschichtlichsten ist, selber als ein naturhaftes Sein zu begreifen, oder wenn es gelänge, die Natur da, wo sie als Natur scheinbar am tiefsten in sich verharrt, zu begreifen als ein geschichtliches Sein. [...] Die Rückverwandlung der konkreten Geschichte in dialektische Natur ist die Aufgabe der ontologischen Umorientierung der Geschichtsphilosophie: die Idee der Naturgeschichte (Adorno 2003a, 354-55). [If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it only offers any chance of solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature. [...] The retransformation of concrete history into dialectical nature is the task of the ontological reorientation of the philosophy of history: the idea of natural-history. (Adorno 2006a, 260)] The point of this dialectic was to appropriate the concept of nature not as an unchanging, fixed state, but rather as state of transience: “Natur selber stellt 5 Benjamin’s image of the storm of progress, and other references in these theses, should be connected with the immediate context of a Europe invaded by the Nazi armies. The advance of these armies was, at the beginning, felt to be unstoppable and the German expression “Blitzkrieg”, describing as it did a strategy of constant motion, was also meant to convey this impression. Interestingly, even before the war, the apparently irresistible rise to power of Nazism in Germany had been described by Carl Jung in similar terms. In the essay “Wotan” (1936), Jung described the feeling of forward momentum of Nazism and the subjective powerlessness of spectators in insistent natural-historical terms. In its attempt to describe the awakening of Wotan, the ancient god of storm, the essay includes almost in every page references to dormant volcanoes resuming their activity, cyclones, hurricanes, storms, tempests, “a great gushing river”, “a rock crashing down the side of a hill”, “a torrent caught in gullies, creeks and marshes”, a dammed course of water which breaks through and overleaps its obstacle (Jung 12; 19; 20; 21; 23; 24; 27). In a later essay, “Der Kampf mit dem Schatten” [“The fight with the shadow”], Jung added a reference to “the irresistible force of an avalanche” (ibid. 4). Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 119 als vergängliche Natur, als Geschichte sich dar” (Adorno 2003a, 358) [“nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history” (Adorno 2006a, 262)]. In a seminar from 1965, Adorno developed this perspective, by pointing to Hegel’s view that historical progress first appeared as an infernal mechanism or slaughterhouse, and by then adding that, at the point when history appeared most uninhibited, it took on the qualities of blind nature, instead of turning away from them. This argument then allowed Adorno to state that all history up to that moment had been natural history, that is, a history of violence (cf. Adorno 2006b, 117)]. 6 Adorno finally used this notion to criticise Hegel for supporting a view of history outside and beyond the subject. According to Adorno, in Negative Dialektik [Negative Dialectics]: “[Hegels] Weltgeist ist die Ideologie der Naturgeschichte” [“Hegel’s world spirit is the ideology of natural history”] (Adorno 2003b, 350). Frozen tempest This connection between an ever-changing nature and human history, which, at its most violent, is seen to be closer to the catastrophic manifestations of nature, was also an object of interest for Heiner Müller, an East German playwright and famous adapter of Shakespeare, especially from the 1960s to the 1990s. 7 Müller adapted three plays by Shakespeare: Macbeth, which became Macbeth, nach Shakespeare [Macbeth, after Shakespeare] (1972); Hamlet, which was used as the basis for Die Hamletmaschine [Hamletmachine] (1977); and Titus Andronicus, which was rewritten into Anatomie Titus Fall of Rome ein Shakespearekommentar [Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome a Shakespeare Commentary] (1985). Müller also translated As You Like It and Hamlet, and wrote a number of poems based on Shakespearean motifs. Archival research at the Heiner Müller Archiv in the Akademie der Künste in Berlin also shows that he may have attempted to write adaptations of King Lear and the Tempest. The second of these fragmentary projects is of particular interest in connection with the 6 One can hear in this distinction an echo of Marx’s distinction between pre-history, meaning pre-revolutionary history, and history proper, i.e. the history of emancipation. 7 This interest is directly connected with Müller’s reception of Benjamin. Müller first read Benjamin perhaps as early as 1946 (cf. Müller 2008b, 108) and Benjamin’s work caused a lasting impression which produced echoes in Müller’s texts up to and including the 1990s. Müller often referred to Benjamin in interviews and there are even audio recordings of Müller publicly reading texts by Benjamin. Closer to my point, it is known that Müller re-imagined Benjamin’s angel of history and storm of progress more than once. At least three texts exist which are declared rewritings of Benjamin’s 9 th thesis: “Der glücklose Engel” [“The hapless angel”]; “Ich bin der Engel der Verzweiflung” [“I am the angel of despair”]; and “Glückloser Engel 2” [“Hapless angel 2”] (cf. Müller 1998, 53; 212; 236). M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 120 topic of this paper. This project, called Frozen Tempest by the author, 8 appears to have been initiated rather late in Müller’s life, possibly around the late 1980s and early 1990s and probably in connection with Müller’s 1988 address to the East German Shakespeare Society, in which he refers to and quotes from The Tempest (cf. Müller 2005a, 337). It seems to have been eventually dropped in favour of finishing Germania 3, Müller’s last, posthumously published play (cf. HMA 5374). The hypothesis that these fragments may simply be preparatory material for the 1988 address and not the beginnings of a planned adaptation might be entertained, but the existence of two typescripts with attempts at translating the first page of The Tempest and the consistent naming of the project throughout suggest otherwise. 9 Finally, the date for the beginning of the project or at least for its inception may be pushed as far back as 1984, when Müller wrote “Bildbeschreibung” [“Description of a picture”], a prose text which refers explicitly to The Tempest as one of its pretexts and which concludes with the following lines: “ICH der gefrorene Sturm” (Müller 1999, 119) [“I the frozen tempest”]. This early a reference to the title of the project suggests that the idea may have already been gaining shape in Müller’s mind. One of these fragments was initially published as the last of the poems in the edition of Müller’s complete works and has, therefore, been dated by Frank Hörnigk, the editor, as having been written during the 1990s: 8 The title “Frozen Tempest” appears almost always originally in English in Müller’s manuscripts. In these, Müller often switched from German to English and back for convenience. In my translations of Müller’s fragments from this project, the words originally in English disappear among the translated terms and no longer stand out as foreign terms. I therefore recommend that the reader browse the original quotations for an appreciation of the linguistic mix. When quoting from the fragments, I either refer to the few published versions or identify them as HMA + number of document, according to the numbering of the Heiner Müller Archiv (HMA) at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In the HMA, the following files contain fragments partly or wholly related to this project: HMA 5369, 5370, 5371, 5372, 5374, 5375, 5377, 5378, 5379, 5381 (which mistakenly includes 5380), 5382 and 9180. HMA 5379 and 9180 are attempts at translating the first page of The Tempest. HMA 5377, from 1993, was found in Müller’s copy of Frank Kermode’s 1954 edition of The Tempest for The Arden Shakespeare Second Series. This fragment has been published by Wolfgang Storch as “Arbeit an Der Sturm nach Shakespeare” [“Work on The Tempest, after Shakespeare”] (Storch 78). 9 Müller’s references to The Tempest outside of these fragments are surprisingly scarce. He uses Miranda’s “O brave new world” and a few adjacent lines as epigraphs to two plays, Waldstück [Forest Play] (cf. Müller 2001a, 87) and Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV: Kentauren [Volokolamsk Highway IV: Centaurs] (cf. Müller 2002, 229), and there is an important reference in the prose text “Bildbeschreibung” [“Description of a picture”], which I discuss in the main text. References in interviews are almost nonexistent. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 121 Geh Ariel bring den Sturm zum Schweigen und wirf die Betäubten an den Strand Ich brauch sie lebend, damit ich sie töten kann Mir Vater warum (Müller 1998, 328) [Go Ariel bring the storm / to silence and / throw them stunned to the beach / I need them / alive, so I can kill them / / For me father / why] The terse economy of the text marks it immediately as Müller’s. The few lines that compose it confound the reader’s expectations one after the other: the tempest is brought - to silence; the stunned occupiers of the ship are needed alive - so they can be killed. Prospero’s vengeful logic is then met by a cryptic fragment of what could have been a separate stanza. The text was later identified, not as a poem, but as a dramatic fragment, and a new, illuminating transcription was proposed by Wolfgang Storch: PROSPERO Geh, Ariel, bring den Sturm zum Schweigen und Wirf die Betäubten an den Strand. Ich brauch sie Lebend, damit ich sie töten kann. MIRANDA Vater Warum (Storch back cover) [PROSPERO / Go, Ariel, bring the storm to silence and / Throw them stunned to the beach. I need them / Alive, so I can kill them. / MIRANDA Father / Why 10 ] This newly transcribed fragment and a series of other fragments, both of translations and of departures from the material attest to a dramatic project, rather than to a series of poems. In this project, Müller briefly came back to the figure of Hamlet, whom he had already dealt with in Die Hamletmaschine [Hamletmachine], but this time in connection with the issues from The Tempest. In the 1977 play, Hamlet had already appeared on a despoiled shore, his back turned to the ruins of Europe, in a tableau that vaguely recalls The Tempest: “Ich stand an der Küste und redete mit der Brandung BLABLA, im Rücken die Ruinen von Europa” (Müller 2001a, 545) [I stood at the shore and talked with the surf BLABLA, the ruins of Europe in back of me (Müller 1984, 53)]. However, in this play, Hamlet does not escape the double binds of his com- 10 The initial mistake most probably arose from the sequence of letters “Mir”, which in German corresponds to the dative, singular form of the first-person personal pronoun, that is, “for me” or “to me”. However, a full stop was eventually detected immediately after the word, so that it could then be read as an abbreviation of Miranda. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 122 promised situation as an intellectual and eventually crawls back into the ghost’s armour that seals his fate. In the sparse fragments that compose the Frozen Tempest project, Müller seems to have been interested in rewriting The Tempest by focusing on the theme of Prospero’s revenge, which, as is common in Shakespeare’s so-called romances, never materialises and is instead replaced by reconciliation. The Tempest has been newly put in the context of contemporary revenge plays in the recently added section to the revised Arden edition of the play. In it, Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan refer to John Marston’s The Malcontent and to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster as examples of Jacobean plays about usurped rulers whose restoration is effected in a tragicomic mode, no revenge taking place (cf. Vaughan and Vaughan 142-147). As the editors of this edition show, Prospero also seems set from the beginning on some diabolical revenge; in a remarkable management of suspense and of the spectators’ expectations, his real intention, forgiveness, only begins to be revealed as late as 5.1. Müller’s approach to The Tempest from the point of view of revenge may have been connected with the fact that Müller had already rewritten Shakespeare’s only two revenge tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. 11 Prospero’s reversal of expectations may, therefore, have appealed to Müller as a creative undoing of Hamlet’s seemingly unavoidable forward movement towards catastrophic revenge. Most of Müller’s fragments concentrate on Prospero, who is represented as a colonial master and as an undead Hamlet: Grünbein Shakesp. Rede Hamlet tempest the sea and the mirror [...] Shakesp. Lektüre Hamlet surviving Sturm d. Liebe die so schwer zu lernen ist tempest rehabilitation frozen tempest: exrevolutionary now (colonial) capitalist [...] Die Insel wo Prospero der untote Hamlet seine Neger quält [...] (HMA 5370). [Grünbein Shakesp.[eare] speech / Hamlet tempest / the sea and the mirror […] Shakesp.[eare] reading Hamlet / surviving / storm / t.[he] love that is so hard to learn / tempest rehabilitation / frozen tempest: exrevolutionary / now (colonial) 11 Müller also rewrote Macbeth, which has elements in common with revenge tragedies, and seems to have envisaged rewriting Julius Caesar, another of Shakespeare’s plays with connections to the genre. However, because of a series of unforeseeable events, Müller eventually chose to rewrite Titus Andronicus instead of Julius Caesar (cf. Müller 2005b, 254). Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 123 capitalist […] The island where Prospero / the undead Hamlet / tortures his Negros] Besides the nod towards W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, itself a rewriting and a commentary of The Tempest, the three references to Hamlet prove particularly conspicuous. 12 From these rather cryptic notes, one may decipher a representation of Prospero as Shakespeare’s revision of or return to Hamlet, who, having survived, had gone from revolutionary to colonial capitalist. The reference to a love that is so hard to learn may be made to connect to the following fragment: “froz. tempest vor Germ? / Prosp. in exile / (Anfang similar to Philoktet) / revenge or grace / alternative / Auschwitz” (HMA 5374) [“froz.[en] tempest before Germ[ania 3]? / Prosp.[ero] in exile / (Beginning similar to Philoktet) / revenge or grace / alternative / Auschwitz”]. 13 In it, the exiled Prospero seems to ponder whether to exercise revenge or grace. By referring to Auschwitz, Müller was probably repeating a frequent idea of his, according to which only grace, or mercy (“Gnade”), could be presented as an answer or way out of the selective, eventually genocidal logic which, for him, had culminated in the extermination camps. 14 This perspective seems to be confirmed by Müller’s turn to The Tempest near the end of his 1988 speech to the East German Shakespeare Society, “Shakespeare eine Differenz” [“Shakespeare a Difference”]. In this fascinating text, Müller gathers a number of references around the theme of how to read Shakespeare after a century of historical catastrophes. He quotes 12 As usual, Müller was well aware of his predecessors in the practice of rewriting specific plays by Shakespeare. He knew the work of Aimé Césaire and even translated the play Une Saison au Congo. He may, therefore, have been acquainted with Césaire’s Une Tempête. Although Césaire goes unmentioned in these fragments, his anti-colonialist preoccupations are shared by Müller. Auden’s poem, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, on the other hand, is explicitly referred to in this fragment and may have either spurred or strengthened what seems to have been Müller’s identification between Prospero and Hamlet. Indeed, according to Arthur Kirsch, in a preparatory list at the beginning of the draft of The Sea and the Mirror, Auden “associated Prospero with Hamlet, a character whom he found unsympathetic” (Kirsch xxi). 13 In this fragment, Müller refers to two of his plays: Germania 3, which would be his last play; and Philoktet, a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which also begins with a man abandoned and stranded on an island. 14 “Da gibt es als Antwort auf das Prinzip Auschwitz nur die Gnade: die Liebe einer Prostituierten. Das hat ein Element von Kitsch und Christentum, aber es gibt bisher auf Auschwitz keine andere Antwort als die Gnade” (Müller 2008a, 677) [“The only answer to the Auschwitz principle is grace/ mercy: the love of a prostitute. This has an element of kitsch and of Christianity, but until today there is no other answer to Auschwitz other than grace/ mercy”]. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 124 Miranda’s first line in Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror - “MY DEAR ONE IS MINE AS MIRRORS ARE LONELY” (Müller 2005a, 335) - and adds to it Hölderlin’s fragment about Shakespeare - “WILDHARREND / IN DER FURCHTBAREN RÜSTUNG / JAHRTAUSENDE” (ibidem) [“FIERCELY ENDURING / IN THE FEARFUL ARMOUR / MILLENIUMS” (Müller 2001b, 120)] 15 - in order to create a narrative about an all-mirroring- Shakespeare trapped in the wilderness of a catastrophic history. After quoting Horatio’s speech about the death of Julius Caesar, Müller then offers the following comment: “Geschichte im Naturzusammenhang” (Müller 2005a, 336) [“History in the context of nature” (Müller 2001b, 120]. He adds to this the theme of a “war of landscapes”, which work at the disappearance of human beings, after having been ravaged by humans. The catastrophes of history, therefore, gain a more than metaphorical projection into nature - although the cosmic response to Caesar’s death may be a trope, climate change is only too real. Referring to this recurring historical sameness, that is, the perpetuation of violence that so often becomes reflected in Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories, Müller says that one must work at differentiating oneself from this cycle: Unsre Aufgabe, oder der Rest wird Statistik sein und eine Sache der Computer, ist die Arbeit an der Differenz. Hamlet, der Versager, hat sie nicht geleistet, dies sein Verbrechen. Prospero ist der untote Hamlet: immerhin zerbricht er seinen Stab, Replik auf Calibans, des neuen Shakespearelesers, aktuellen Vorwurf an alle bisherige Kultur: YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE AND MY PROFIT ON’T IS I KNOW HOW TO CURSE (Müller 2005a, 337) Our task - or the rest will be statistics and a matter of computers - is the work at this difference. Hamlet, the failure, didn’t accomplish it, this is his crime. Prospero is the undead Hamlet: after all, he smashes his staff, a reply to Caliban’s, the new Shakespeare reader’s topical rebuke to all hitherto existing culture: YOU TAUGHT ME LANGUAGE AND MY PROFIT ON’T IS I KNOW HOW TO CURSE (Müller 2001b, 121) Here, Müller revises Hamlet again via the figure of Prospero. By breaking his staff, which represents his magical power to do violence, Prospero puts an end to the spiral of violence. In a rare reference to The Tempest in an interview from 1987, Müller insisted precisely on Prospero’s forgiveness of his enemies and on the renunciation of the power to both do violence and enforce harmony (cf. Müller 2008a, 14). 15 I here use, and on occasion silently alter, Carl Weber’s translation of the address in Müller 2001b 119-121. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 125 Combining this notion with the fragments, it is almost impossible not to read the act of freezing the tempest as an allusion to Walter Benjamin’s thesis from “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” [“On the Concept of History”] according to which the angel of history is helplessly and violently carried forward by the storm of progress (cf. Benjamin 1999, 249). In his earlier rewritings of Shakespeare, Müller had focused on the tragedies and had developed a Benjaminian view of the progress of history as a sequence of catastrophes. Müller’s reference to Auschwitz in connection with the Frozen Tempest project seems to develop this mode of thinking, by possibly alluding to Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea that enlightenment and progress are inextricably connected with horror (cf. Adorno and Horkheimer 223), or, as they put it at the beginning of the Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment]: “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (ibid. 3). 16 Benjamin’s other representations of the unstoppable onslaught of history in the form of a natural catastrophe (a waterfall, a storm) seem, then, to have been picked up by Müller in the Frozen Tempest project. By turning to one of Shakespeare’s romance plays, The Tempest, Müller seems to have become interested in the issue of forgiveness and of renunciation of power over others. Imagining Prospero as a capitalist exploiting the island’s natives, Müller sketched the rudiments of an abdication of colonial power which, had the adaptation been finished, might have revised the vengeful exchanges and bitter endings of the previous rewritings. Prospero’s solution, to renounce magic and oppression, may have been envisaged as the means of stopping this storm of progress and bringing it to silence, effectively freezing it. Of course, an analysis of these brief fragments is speculative at best, but, bearing in mind their late date and the consistent references to The Tempest in “Shakespeare eine Differenz” [“Shakespeare a Difference”], it becomes possible to argue that this idea constitutes a fairly discernible theme common to Müller’s uses of The Tempest. This interpretation might be reinforced by pointing to the theme of father / daughter relations, which not only appears in other fragments related to this project, but that also begins to show in some of Müller’s later poems. In 1992, his daughter Anna had been born and, fighting with a cancer that ultimately killed him, Müller wrote a number of autobiographical poems which, among other things, dealt with this new infant presence in his life and with his own perceived change in relation to the world around him. Many of these poems have a different, more elegiac tone and are less punctuated by Müller’s cruel aphorisms, rather pondering 16 Müller himself made the connection clearly enough in an interview: “Das Grundthema der Linie Dostojewski-Kafka-Faulkner ist die Selektion: Auschwitz als das letzte Stadium der Aufklärung” (Müller 2008a, 684) [“The underlying theme of the line going from Dostoyevsky to Kafka and Faulkner is selection: Auschwitz as the last stadium of the Enlightenment”]. M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 126 on the cruelty of a world that is being seen for the first time through a child’s eyes. This theme of a “brave new world” also appears in one of the fragments (cf. Storch 78) and may thus be connected with a possible turn that might have been effected in the Frozen Tempest project, a turn not entirely unlike that which was practiced by Shakespeare himself in the plays now known as romances. If this project had been completed, the theme of Hamlet’s revenge, now Prospero’s, might have been transfigured in a romance-like way, even though such a change might appear unlikely to us given Müller’s main body of work, obsessed as it is by the perpetuation of violence. And yet, who would have imagined the author of such bleak plays as Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida to have also written The Tempest? “Storm still” 17 At a recent congress held in Porto, Chris Morash proposed looking at the current financial, economic and social crisis as a storm in slow motion, that is, as the apparently unstoppable movement of a massive and abstract force. 18 Morash, of course, was making use of Benjamin’s image of the storm of progress. Coming back to Müller, we may begin to see that Morash’s suggestion could very well provide a possible reason for Müller’s surprising insistence, during the abovementioned period, on “natural history”, understood in the Benjaminian and Adornian sense of human history seen as everchanging, catastrophic nature, in which the focus is placed on mutability rather than on stability. If the proposed dating for most of the Frozen Tempest fragments as having been written sometime between the late 1980s and the early 1990s holds, it becomes almost irresistible to imagine that they probably bear some relation to the fall of the Berlin Wall and to the introduction of capitalism in what 17 King Lear, Folio version, 3.1, opening stage direction. Incidentally, this stage direction has become the title of a recent novel, or dramatic script, by Peter Handke, Immer noch Sturm (2010). Given Handke’s antipodal position to Müller in German letters, it is worth noting that Handke’s novel/ play also makes use of the storm trope as a way to describe the history of Slovenian struggles against foreign rule from the 1930s to the post-war period. These struggles are particularised by their effects on the narrator’s family, which is invoked in a long ghostly scene that constitutes the novel/ play. Handke overtly rewrites Lear’s entry holding the dead Cordelia in his arms (cf. Handke 132) and, near the end, Gregor, the narrator’s uncle, declares: “Es herrscht weiterhin Sturm. Andauernder Sturm. Immer noch Sturm” [“A storm continues to rule. A lasting storm. Storm still”] (ibid. 161). 18 The congress “Dashed All To Pieces” was held at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto, Portugal, in the first days of December 2011. It was dedicated to representations of natural catastrophes and meant to celebrate the 400 years of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Freezing the tempest: natural history in Shakespeare and Heiner Müller 127 would soon cease to be the GDR. It is usually pointed out that, throughout this period, Müller did not produce a single play, rather devoting himself to poems, interviews, directing and generally being a public figure. His creative answer to the end of the GDR and the fall of the Wall had been a mammoth production of Hamlet and Die Hamletmaschine, called Hamlet/ Maschine, which premièred on March 24, 1990, at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin, six days after the elections that gave the majority to the conservative CDU/ DA/ DSU coalition. The production had been prepared during the months preceding and postdating the fall of the Wall and several of the actors involved in it spoke publicly at demonstrations during this period. Closer to the object of this essay was the scenery by Erich Wonder and what it suggested. Besides the use of trompe l’œil effects, including a famous view from within Ophelia’s grave, for the first three hours of the play the stage was partially separated from the audience by a transparent curtain that suggested an ice cube, while the back of the stage was inundated with water, as if the ice were melting. This was a way of suggesting not only the melting of the Cold War but also the climatic catastrophes that, according to Wonder and Müller, would define the coming century (cf. Suschke 140-141). The enormous length of the production, which, with three intervals, lasted up to eight hours, was also meant to alter the spectators’ perception of time and to produce an experience which, by encompassing large spans of time, went beyond the political here and now (cf. Moninger 239-240). Indeed, this viewpoint somewhat shunned the everyday events happening outside and aimed at suggesting a form of time which even went beyond that eagle’s eye perspective on history, in which, as Hegel would say, nation states were the protagonists. As Katharina Keim has rightly pointed out, at stake was no longer human history, but natural history (cf. Keim 243). On the other hand, as Maik Hamburger has noted, the theme of the passage of time was also politically motivated: “Time has run away from Hamlet, as it has from a whole social era. Life punishes those who come too late, said Gorbachev. We all come too late, said this Hamlet/ Maschine” (Hortmann 429). In an interview from 1994, Müller gave yet another excuse for no longer writing any plays: in the new reunified Germany, there was nothing to write about, no past, no future, only an everlasting present and, Müller seemed to suggest, no interesting political figures with dramatic potential. He then added the following: “Das einzige, was an Geschichtlichem derzeit passiert, ist der Kapitalfluß. Und der ist unsichtbar” (Müller 2008b, 580) [“The only thing that is happening historically for now is the flow of capital. And this is invisible”]. According to Müller, capital flow could not be dramatised; it could not be represented by characters on a stage, because it was an unseen, abstract force. And yet, I would argue that Müller did try to grasp this new history as capital flow in play form - precisely in the figuration of a natural M IGUEL R AMALHETE G OMES 128 catastrophe in the Frozen Tempest fragments. What might have been critically unclear in 1994 may now, in March 2012, be much clearer, also due to our own historical experience. The catastrophic effects of a capitalist crisis appear to us, in an almost phenomenological manner, as arbitrary, sudden, unexpected and inevitable. Its formidable driving force and lack of interest in its victims likens it to a natural phenomenon, such as a waterfall, to use Benjamin’s image, or to a natural disaster, such as a storm at sea or an earthquake. I would argue that, if Müller did connect the Frozen Tempest fragments with this notion of history as capital flow, he may have been trying to adapt his ongoing historical-philosophical reflections to a changing reality, while, once again, coming back to Shakespeare in order to transform those insights into dramatic material. If this reading has any plausibility to it, it might provide a new testimony of Müller’s mutability in these matters and of the seemingly endless uses to which Shakespeare continued to be put, even beyond his original use value in the GDR. 129 Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Philosophische Frühschriften - Gesammelte Schriften, Band 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003a. . Negative Dialektik. 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