“Now it’s all just Unity Pabulum”
Dramatist Heiner Müller on Intellectuals and the Decline of the GDR
SPIEGEL: “What’s going on here is not unification but subjugation.” That’s a Heiner Müller sound bite from mid-July on German unity. Subjugation requires coercion. Are GDR citizens really being pressured into unification? MÜLLER: Not at all. They wanted this unity and probably still do. It’s just that they imagined it differently. What’s happening now is economic subjugation.
SPIEGEL: How did GDR citizen Heiner Müller envision unification?
MÜLLER: It makes no sense to whine about some dream that was never fulfilled.
SPIEGEL: But you can describe it.
MÜLLER: That’s not so easy. I have always been regarded as a person who is directly interested in politics. But that’s nonsense. I am interested in writing and some other things, and politics is material, just like everything else.
[ . . . ]
SPIEGEL: Mr. Müller, you have always considered yourself a GDR writer, although you were only able to develop your talents in the West. What is the complex relationship between you and this state that is coming to an end?