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Heiner Müller on the Sell-Out of the GDR (July 30, 1990)

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SPIEGEL: Mr. Müller, are you a communist?

MÜLLER: I never claimed to be a communist because I find it inappropriate to say that.

[ . . . ]

SPIEGEL: And you still could live with communism?

MÜLLER: Yes. I was interested in the tragedy of this socialism. Now it looks like a farce. That is the last phase. But it was a tragedy.

SPIEGEL: Isn’t it an aesthetically questionable standpoint to say you love tragedies even if they are carried out on the backs of other people?

MÜLLER: Aesthetically questionable? What does Der Spiegel live from? It’s not only a problem of art and politics.

[ . . . ]

SPIEGEL: If intellectuals, if writers were so despised by the Communist Party since the time of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, then why did they throw themselves so masochistically at its heirs?

MÜLLER: Of course an artist needs to have a conception of a world that is different from the given or existing one. Otherwise I think it’s impossible to make art. And so there was this final religion of the twentieth century, the communist utopia. It is no coincidence: There are not many great writers or artists who actively promoted Nazism. But incredible numbers of them in all the countries of the world campaigned for this communist utopia.

SPIEGEL: But now that is past, since socialism is over with. [ . . . ]

MÜLLER: [ . . . ] but it isn’t over with. The attempt to refute Marx is over. Marx said this simple sentence: the attempt to build socialism or a socialist structure on the basis of an economy of scarcity will end in the same old shit. That’s what we’re experiencing now.

SPIEGEL: Do you think socialism has a future?

MÜLLER: Yes.

SPIEGEL: And where is it?

MÜLLER: It lies in the simple fact that capitalism does not have a solution for the problems of the world.

[ . . . ]



Source: “Jetzt ist da eine Einheitssoße” [“Now it’s all just Unity Pabulum”] [In East Berlin. The conversation was led by editors Hellmuth Karasek, Matthias Matusske, and Ulrich Schwarz]. Der Spiegel, July 30, 1990, pp. 136-41.

Translation: Allison Brown

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