“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 333

GALIN TIHANOV

“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”:

Hamlet from Berlin (East)
Hitherto unknown archival material allows a closer look at Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture and
tragedy, and a fuller examination of Heiner Müller’s interest in, and debt to, him. The significance of
Schmitt’s theory of drama for Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine is analyzed against the comparative
background of Russian literary Hamletism. Müller’s self-conscious intertextualism was a response to,
and an extension of, Schmitt’s critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama, which is treated here as
but an element of his wider post-romantic cultural and social theory.

The title of this article contains a threefold reference. To start with, it plays on
the titles of a number of narrative works that were published in Russia over some
twenty years between the late 1840s and the late 1860s, notably Turgenev’s
“Hamlet of the Shchigrov District” (1849) from Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
and Leskov’s “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1865), whose title was
consciously modeled on Turgenev’s.1 There were no doubt many more Shake-
spearean characters in the nineteenth-century Russian thick journals, but these
would suffice to evoke the general picture of translating the heroic passions of
monarchic history onto the diminished scale of the everyday, so specific of the
Russian appropriation of Hamlet at the time.
The second reference, equally easy to detect, is to Heiner Müller’s play Ham-
letmachine, to which a significant part of this essay is dedicated. The third refer-
ence, perhaps no less transparent, is to Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet book, which, as
would become clear before long, was a major inspiration for Heiner Müller and
should serve as a key to at least partially understanding the complex and multiple
meanings of Müller’s drama.
These three allusions mark the three parts of the present article. I start by
briefly surveying the scene of Russian literary Hamletism, only to the extent
where important (dis)continuities with Müller’s drama could be established.

1 See Iu. Levin, “Shestidesiatye gody”, in Shekspir i russkaia kul’tura, ed. M. Alekseev, Moscow and
Leningrad: Nauka, 1965, 469. Levin later argued that while Turgenev’s title was unmistakably
ironical, Leskov’s was meant as an entirely serious reference to his heroine’s cruelty (Iu. Levin,
Shekspir i russkaia literature XIX veka, Leningrad: Nauka, 1988, 155). Leskov was also one of the
few contemporaries to write approvingly of Turgenev’s 1860 speech “Hamlet and Don Quixote”
(cf. I. Stoliarova, “‘Gamlet i Don Kikhot’: ob otklike N. S. Leskova na rech’ Turgeneva”, Turge-
nevskii sbornik, Leningrad: Nauka, 1967, Vol. 3, 120–23).
arcadia Band 39 (2004) Heft 2
334 Galin Tihanov

Then I attempt a succinct interpretation of some central motifs of the almost

impenetrable, and certainly unnarratable, text of the Hamletmachine, and finally
I place Müller’s drama in the hermeneutic purview of Carl Schmitt’s post-
romantic cultural theory and social thought. I scrutinize Schmitt’s key proposi-
tions in the context of his failed project of overturning and leaving behind
Romantic ideology. His arguments are examined at some length, often with ref-
erence to other prominent German attempts to theorize drama and tragedy in
their sociological and aesthetic significance. In the concluding remarks, I ana-
lyse Heiner Müller’s self-conscious intertextualism as a response to, and an
extension of, Schmitt’s critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama. My
ultimate goal is to add to existing knowledge in a three-fold manner: by extend-
ing our notion of Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture and tragedy 2, not least
through drawing on previously unknown archival evidence; by adumbrating a
fuller picture of Heiner Müller’s interest in, and debt to, Schmitt 3; and by posing
the question of the ways in which drama makes sense of myth and negotiates
between historical reality and artistic invention, between necessity and contin-
gency.
Russian Hamletism deserves attention as what I would call, following Hans
Blumenberg’s suggestion, a secondary cultural myth. Empirically, it has been
thoroughly studied both in the West and in Russia.4 But not comparatively.
Heiner Müller’s range of reference and his own familiarity with Russian and
Soviet literature lie beyond any doubt. Suffice it to point to his autobiography,
War without Battle (“Krieg ohne Schlacht”), which contains a long list of Russian

2 Carl Schmitt as a theorist of tragedy remains an inchoate field of inquiry. For two substantial
exceptions, see Christoph Menke, “Tragödie und Spiel”, Akzente, 1996, Vol. 43, No. 3, 210–25
and Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision”, Representations, 2003, No. 83,
67–96.
3 There have been so far almost no sustained attempts to spell out the significance of Carl Schmitt
for Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine. Among the few exceptions, see Alexander Weigel’s brief
but insightful essay, “Hamlet oder der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel” (1991), in M. Linzer and
P. Ullrich, Regie: Heiner Müller, Berlin: Zentrum für Theaterdokumentation und -information,
1993, 74–7. Michael Ostheimer has drawn on Menke (cf. note 2 above) in his own statement
on Schmitt, Heiner Müller and tragedy in “Mythologische Genauigkeit”. Heiner Müllers Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie der Tragödie, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, esp. 12–14 and
161–6 (for an earlier version, see M. Ostheimer, “‘Götter werden dich nicht mehr besuchen’.
Zum Europa-Mythos in Heiner Müllers Langgedicht ‘Ajax zum Beispiel’”, in Ian Wallace et
al. (eds.), Heiner Müller: Probleme und Perspektiven. Bath-Symposium 1998, Amsterdam and Atlanta:
Rodopi, 2000, 383– 402).
4 In Russia, the best research in the field has been published by Iurii Levin; in addition to his work
referred to above, see also his “Russkii gamletizm”, in Ot romantizma k realizmu. Iz istorii mezhdu-
narodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury, ed. M. Alekseev, Leningrad: Nauka, 1978, 189–236. The more
important works in English are quoted in notes 6 and 10 below; in German, see A. Rothkoegel,
Russischer Faust und Hamlet. Zur Subjektivismuskritik und Intertextualität bei I. S. Turgenev, Munich:
Otto Sagner, 1998.
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 335

prose writers, whose work Müller drew into his own intellectual orbit.5 Russian
prose of the nineteenth century, in particular that of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turge-
nev, Gogol and Chekhov, was available in the GDR in numerous state-sponsored
editions of high print-runs; in an ideologically monitored climate, it was meant
to offer a package of unassailable humanistic values and high aesthetic standards
to complement the works of the German classics exemplified by Goethe and
Schiller, who were the objects, at least until the 1980s, of a veritable cult nurtured
and protected by the state.
There are two crucial points where a meaningful continuity between Heiner
Müller’s and nineteenth-century Russian Hamlet interpretations, notably Turge-
nev’s, is bound to emerge. The first is the time-honoured issue of the balance be-
tween intellect and emotion, and the resulting (in)ability to act. In his famous
speech on Hamlet and Don Quixote of 1860, Turgenev had given a Romantic
spin to this question. In his Berlin years, Turgenev was acquainted, after all, with
Bettina von Arnim, and through Stankevich he appropriated a Romantically-col-
oured Hegel. Schelling’s philosophy, too, was of vital importance, asserting as it
did the identity of the unconscious mind of nature and the conscious life of the
intellect, thus setting a high standard for a harmony between the two.6 It was the
rift between the two that worried Turgenev and plagued his Hamlet in the well-
known speech of 1860. Hamlet, much to the displeasure of some of Turgenev’s
critics, was now turned into a simplistic but powerful emblem of a person in dis-
cord, whose inner life fails to support the outward activities of the self.
The second important issue in Turgenev’s Hamlet interpretation is that of
existential originality, or rather its absence. In “Hamlet of the Shchigrov Dis-
trict” (“Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda”), a story from Turgenev’s Sketches from a
Hunter’s Album (“Zapiski okhotnika”), the main character goes unnamed for
most of the time, only twice being referred to as “Vasilii Vasilich,” a rather cus-
tomary Russian name, which, moreover, he seems to deny to be his own real
name. When prompted at the end of the story by the narrator (who is also his
confidant) to finally introduce himself, Turgenev’s character protests his ano-
nymity: “No, for God’s sake, don’t ask me or anyone else for my name. Let me
remain for you an unknown person, a Vasilii Vasilich who has been crippled by
fate.” This crisis of naming is caused by the character’s self-perception as an “un-
original person”; as such, he says, he doesn’t deserve any particular name. “But if
you earnestly want to give me some kind of title, then call me … call me Hamlet

5 For an overview confined almost exclusively to Müller’s appropriation of Russian and Soviet
drama, see V. Koljazin, “Russische Literatur”, in H.-T. Lehmann and P. Primavesi (eds.), Heiner
Müller Handbuch, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003, 156–60.
6 Cf. Eva Kagan-Kans, Hamlet and Don Quixote: Turgenev’s Ambivalent Vision, The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1975, 13.
336 Galin Tihanov

of the Shchigrov District. There are many such Hamlets in every district, but
perhaps you haven’t come across any others […].”7
An echo of Turgenev’s Hamletism reverberates strongly in Heiner Müller’s
drama, but his own twist is recognizably post-romantic, flowing over into a post-
modernist resistance to self-identity. The reason-emotion tension is sublated in a
mechanistic existence that obviates the very question of essence and originality.
The organic unity of flesh and intellect is now declared beyond reach, and the
only emerging perspective is that of the machine: “My thoughts are wounds
in my head. My brain is a scar. I want to be a machine. Arms to grab legs to walk
no pain no thinking.”8 Early on in the same part (“Pest in Buda Battle of Green-
land”), the Hamlet-performer has formulated the mechanistic terms of his dis-
course that annul the very debate of originality so central to Turgenev: “I am the
typewriter … I am the data bank … My drama did not take place. The script was
lost” (91–2). Hamlet’s life, in other words, had been written for him, and all he
could do is enact this life as a performer, at a considerable distance from the con-
dition of identity with himself. He has to reconcile himself to the role of a type-
writer that reproduces mechanistically a chaotic version of the lost original. The
allusion here, unexplained up to now by Heiner Müller’s commentators, seems
to be to the recorder scene in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet there refuses to be
“played upon” like an instrument, while Heiner Müller’s Hamlet does not mind
being a mere typewriter to be typed upon. The incongruous story of his life
knows no state of identity, nor indeed does he desire such a state. Ironically, to be
“at one with my undivided self ” seems to him suitable only when “killing time.”
(“I go home and kill time, at one with my undivided self ”; 92).
Crucial in explicating the mechanistic metaphor in Heiner Müller’s play is
the context of surrealist, avant-garde and pop art, to which he refers in his
autobiography (e.g. Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol). Indicatively, Lautréa-
mont’s surrealistic definition of the beautiful as “the casual meeting between a
sewing machine and an umbrella” is seen by some critics as inspirational for
Müller’s preference for the disparate and the inconsequential.9 But there is also
a Russian avant-garde, and in many ways a surrealist, prose text that could fur-
nish insight here. Held in high regard in the GDR because of its non-orthodox
poetics that departed from prescribed realist conventions, Iurii Olesha’s 1927
novel Envy (“Zavist’”) offers an original interpretation of the machine-motif

7 Both quotations are from I. Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, trans. R. Freeborn, London:
Penguin, 1988, 209.
8 H. Müller, The Hamletmachine, in H. Müller, Theatremachine, trans. and ed. Marc von Henning,
London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995, 93; all further quotations are from this edition, with
page numbers in parentheses in the main text.
9 See H. Fuhrmann, Warten auf “Geschichte”: Der Dramatiker Heiner Müller, Würzburg: Königshausen
und Neumann, 1997, 100.
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 337

and, in so doing, also evokes Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The second half of Envy
features Ivan Babichev’s “conspiracy of feelings” and his fantastic weapon, the
mythical machine Ophelia: “And I’ve given it the name of a girl who went out of
her mind with love and despair. I’ve called it Ophelia, the most human, the most
touching name.”10 With Ophelia, Ivan plans to avenge his era and to produce
one last celebration of those human feelings which are “scheduled for liqui-
dation”: pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love. The ideal young Communist
Makarov, too, has declared his desire to become a machine, but Ivan’s Ophelia
is actually meant to undermine Makarov’s life without emotions. However, in
a final nightmare (Kavalerov’s), Ophelia turns on Ivan and impales him. In
a move all too familiar ever since the Romantics, the machine has gone out of
control; it devours its own creator, and with him the dream of a world where
human emotions thrive beyond peril and challenge. In Olesha, remarkably, the
themes of the parity between reason and emotion, on the one hand, and of un-
originality and mechanicity, on the other, have come together in a way Müller
could have found suggestive. In his drama it is precisely Ophelia who material-
izes Hamlet’s dream of a machine-like existence. In Part 2 (“Europe of the
Woman”) she appears with her heart turned into a clock. Although she later sig-
nals her desire to break away from mechanistic existence (“I dig the clock that
was my heart from out of my breast”), in the final part she chooses to give up
organicity, for she recognizes in it another male-dictated stereotype. Müller’s
Ophelia thus embodies the dilemma of modern feminism: how to negotiate a
modus vivendi that steers clear from the dangers of both mechanicity and or-
ganicity, which are both unmasked as ideologically usurped male-dominated
modes of existence. That Heiner Müller’s Hamlet wants to be like Ophelia, that
he wants to be a woman, as he claims in Part 3 (“Scherzo”), could also be read as
a hidden reference to Olesha, in whose major play “A list of benefits” (“Spisok
blagodeianii,” 1931) it is a woman, the actress Goncharova, who plays Hamlet
for an audience of workers (in The Hamletmachine, the three great ideologues
and practitioners of revolution – Marx, Lenin and Mao – all appear on stage as
women).
Yet in Heiner Müller’s drama the whole gender issue is treated with more sub-
tlety than in Olesha’s novel. The feminine principle is seen as the proactive one,
but it is controversially projected onto the plane of symbolic matricide. Hamlet
sets forth in Part 1 (“Family album”) his vision of a “world without mothers,”
where “women should be stitched up” – this “would have spared me myself,”
as he ironically puts it (87). In the concluding Part 5, whose title (“Maddening

10 Iu. Olesha, Envy and Other Works, trans. A. MacAndrew, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967,
90 (translation modified). My brief analysis of Olesha’s work relies on Eleanor Rowe, Hamlet: A
Window on Russia, New York: New York UP, 1976, 137–9.
338 Galin Tihanov

Endurance”) is an explicit reference to Hölderlin11, Ophelia holds, in a wheel-

chair, a final soliloquy that proclaims this new world without birth and concep-
tion, in which the destruction of motherhood amounts to the vicarious murder
of Gertrude, thus extending the original task Hamlet faces in Shakespeare’s play.
Not by accident does the monologue open with the claim “Here speaks Electra.”
Müller seeks to integrate his own drama into a larger inter-textual continuum,
where ancient Greek tragedy receives pride of place. Electra is bound to activate
the memory of matricide that flows from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
Herself a virgin, and therefore childless, in Euripides Electra goes to the length
of pretending to have a child in order to lure Clytemnestra into her home, where
death awaits her. In Heiner Müller’s drama Ophelia is determined to efface the
traces of sexuality and motherhood in order to sponsor a vision of the world
where the enslaving “happiness of surrender” – female but also all-human sur-
render – is scorned and left behind:
In the name of the victims. I discharge all the sperm I ever received. I transform the milk
from my breasts into deadly poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. Between my
thighs I strangle the world that I gave birth to. I bury it in my crotch. Down with the hap-
piness of surrender. Long live hatred, contempt, uprising, death. When she walks through
your bedrooms with butchers’ knives you will know the truth.
Ophelia’s final sentence (“When she walks …”) has been variously related to two
female terrorists: Susan Atkins, one of the murderers of Sharon Tate, and
Squeaky Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Ford. Elsewhere in his
autobiography, Müller notes that Ophelia has to do with Ulrike Meinhoff and
the problem of terrorism in Europe. The question of terrorism and political ac-
tivism is a central one in Müller’s play. Hamlet is portrayed as a person tired of
both action and the failure to act over centuries of European history. He is the
failed reformer of socialism, with thinly veiled references to the Hungarian
uprising of 1956, but he is also – to some extent autobiographically – the East
German intellectual, whose resistance to the regime is cast in the compromising
forms of complicity: “In the loneliness of airports I breathe freely / I am Privi-
leged / My repulsion is a privilege / Protected by wall. Barbed-wire prison”
(92–3). In addition, this modern Hamlet is also a citizen of a globalized world,
where people bear “the scars from the consumer battle” and hail “Coca Cola” as
a supranational commodity. For this new Hamlet, locality is not any more of
overriding importance. He no longer belongs in, or to, he only comes from, ac-
cidentally and inconsequentially.

11 Cf. Hölderlin’s “Wildharrend” in the line “Wildharrend in der furchtbaren Rüstung, Jahrtau-
sende” (Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1951, vol.
2, 316); this reference has been pointed out by Patrick Primavesi, among others (P. Primavesi,
“Friedrich Hölderlin”, in H.-T. Lehmann and P. Primavesi (eds.), Heiner Müller Handbuch, 131–34,
here 133). For a summary of other textual and historical allusions, see Jean Jourdheuil’s article
“Die Hamletmaschine” (ibid., 221–27).
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 339

The extent to which The Hamletmachine has to be read as a political play that
examines the questions of what exactly constitutes the engine of change, and
whether history has not been reduced to a reproductive machine incapable of
sustaining the hopes for a radical transformation of society, can only be under-
stood when Müller’s play is interpreted against the background of another im-
portant German appropriation of Shakespeare, Carl Schmitt’s 1956 book Hamlet
or Hecuba. The Burst of Time into the Play (“Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der
Zeit in das Spiel”).12
Schmitt’s book followed in time his major work of 1950, The Law of the Earth;
before his death in 1985 he published two more books: Theory of the Partisan
(1963), also known by Müller, and Political Theology II (1970). These latter works
both built on earlier texts: Theory of the Partisan drew on the political philosophy
and the theory of space articulated as early as 1942 in Land and Sea and later on in
The Nomos of the Earth, while Political Theology II quoted the title of Schmitt’s
eponymous book of 1922. Hamlet or Hecuba, however, appeared out of the blue,
or so it seemed to many.
As a matter of fact, the book had already been in the making for a number of
years, even though in a post-publication talk Schmitt was anxious to have his
readers believe that it was “hardly planned” and certainly “not aimed for”.13
Back in 1952, Schmitt’s daughter Anima had translated Lilian Winstanley’s by
then almost forgotten historical account Hamlet and the Scottish Succession 14, which
at the time of its English publication (1921) triggered a lively discussion among
scholars; Schmitt himself wrote the preface to the German translation15, and he
also furnished a “Note for the German Reader”16, where he summarized some
of the main positions in the polemic surrounding Winstanley’s book.17 Winstan-

12 Further on I quote from Schmitt’s book by indicating the relevant pages in parentheses in the
main body of the text. The most important part of the book (Chapter 3: “Die Quelle der Tragik”)
is available in David Pan’s excellent English translation (C. Schmitt, “The Source of the Tragic,”
Telos, 1987, no. 72, 133– 46). Pan also provides a useful synopsis of Chapters 1 and 2 and a trans-
lation of Schmitt’s “Exkurs 2 ‘Über den barbarischen Charakter des Shakespeareschen Dramas;
zu Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, Berlin 1928’”
(pp. 62–7 in Schmitt’s German text; 146–51 in Pan’s translation). Wherever possible,
I quote from David Pan’s translation; in all other cases I give my own translations without signal-
ling this specifically.
13 C. Schmitt, “Was habe ich getan?” in C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, ed. A. Mohler,
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995, 221–4, here 224 (“nicht gezielt und kaum geplant”). This was
the text of a talk Schmitt gave on 12 June 1956 at a discussion evening in Düsseldorf organized
by his publisher; the text was republished, with notes, by Piet Tommissen in Schmittiana, Vol. 5,
1996, 15–19.
14 L. Winstanley, Hamlet Sohn der Maria Stuart, trans. A. Schmitt, Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1952.
15 C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” ibid., 7–25.
16 C. Schmitt, “Hinweis für den deutschen Leser,” ibid., 164–70.
17 Schmitt’s acquaintance with Lilian Winstanley’s studies of Shakespeare apparently dated back to
1950 when he referred to her 1924 book “Othello” as the Tragedy of Italy (C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der
340 Galin Tihanov

ley’s book was very important to Schmitt, for he found in it support for his core
argument. Winstanley (1875–1960), the grand-daughter of Lord Winstanley, a
pioneer of adult education in Victorian Manchester, was at the time a Lecturer in
English Literature at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.18 The author
of fiction, poetry, and several scholarly studies of Shakespeare, Spenser and Shel-
ley, Winstanley maintained that Shakespeare’s major plays could all be inter-
preted with reference to real historical events and figures. Thus she argued that
Hamlet actually mirrored the anxieties of Jacob I, that Lear was an allegory for
France, while Othello stood for Spain and Desdemona for the Republic of Ve-
nice. Without undertaking to weigh the historical evidence, Schmitt believed that
Winstanley’s approach served his own agenda very well indeed19: her research
would assist him in theorising tragedy as a genre that relies on non-negotiable
historical authenticity, a literary form that accommodates the salutary intrusion
of real historical time, and – on the crest of singularity and genuineness – is best
equipped to rise to myth. Neither Schmitt nor Winstanley seems to have been
aware of the fact that as early as 1829 the German Romantic Achim von Arnim
had already drawn a suggestive parallel between Hamlet and Jacob I, arguing that
in Shakespeare’s play the former probably stood for the latter.20
The importance invested by Schmitt in writing Hamlet or Hecuba can be ga-
thered from a letter to Ernst Jünger of 6 March 1956. Schmitt tells Jünger that
the title of the book led to extensive discussions with the editors at Eugen
Diederichs; perhaps Schmitt was unhappy about the title (the alternative one
apparently being Tabu und Rache 21), for he anxiously asked Jünger: “What do you
say to a title like this one? It turned out that no one knows any more who Hecuba

Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950), 4th edn, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,
1997, 116–17 n. 2). In Schmitt’s Nachlass in Düsseldorf, there is also a copy (without an inscrip-
tion by the author) of Winstanley’s 1914 book on Tolstoy (RW 265, No. 363) and an autographed
copy of her book Macbeth, King Lear and Contemporary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1922 (“Professor Dr Carl Schmitt with the author’s compliments, 22/10/1951”, RW 265
No. 366).
18 There are five letters (one of them preserved as an undated fragment) and a postcard by Win-
stanley in Schmitt’s Nachlass. These were written over some five years, between 1951 and 1956; as
is evident from Winstanley’s first letter of 4 October 1951 (RW 265 No. 18213), Schmitt initiated
the correspondence in September 1951 by offering to send his Nomos der Erde.
19 The admiration was mutual: in her last letter to Schmitt (28 June 1956), Winstanley told him that
she read Hamlet or Hecuba three times on receiving it as a gift in early April 1956 (RW 265, No.
18216).
20 Cf. Achim von Arnim, “Hamlet und Jakob. Eine Anmerkung zum Shakespeare,” in Arnim,
Schriften in 6 Bänden, ed. R. Burwick et al., Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992,
Vol. 6, 883–9 (I am grateful to Reinhart Koselleck for directing my attention to Arnim’s essay).
21 The two options are discussed, obviously on Schmitt’s request, in Sava Kličković’s letter to him
of 26 March 1956, where Kličković, a friend of long standing, voices preference for Hamlet oder
Hekuba: “Der andere Titel hat nicht die Kraft der unmittelbaren Wirkung, die der Gegenüber-
stellung lebendiger Gestalten eigen ist” (RW 265, No. 7735).
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 341

was?”22 Jünger, however, withheld judgement, and three weeks later, on

26 March 1956, Schmitt wrote again: “In my last card to you I asked you for ad-
vice on the title Hamlet or Hecuba. The Burst of Time into the Play. Nothing can be
changed any longer.”23 Schmitt’s concern lest the title of the book prevented it
from reaching out to a wider audience was to be taken very seriously, something
Jünger had apparently failed to do.24
His failure to engage in discussion over Schmitt’s title may well have resulted
from sheer negligence. But I wish to suggest that Jünger must have recognized in
Schmitt’s title a strong echo from his own earlier texts, particularly from The
Worker, an echo he chose to pass over in silence. A significant parallel that goes
beyond the mere lexical similarity between Schmitt’s title and some of the key
phrases in Jünger’s book has so far remained unnoticed in scholarship. Schmitt’s
“Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel” tacitly invokes and modifies Jünger’s “Der
Einbruch elementarer Mächte in den bürgerlichen Raum,” the title he gave to sec-
tions 13–15 of The Worker.25 (It has to be conceded that in his earlier Political Theol-
ogy (1922) Schmitt himself had already glorified the power of life to break through
the crust of mechanical existence in the hour of exception.) In Jünger’s discourse,
the space of the bourgeois, who has long become a hostage to the ordinary, the
economically-rational and the banal, is disrupted by the “break-in” of the elemen-
tary in the guise of danger and pain. This process is couched in terms that incor-
porate, just as with Schmitt, an uneasy synthesis of temporality and myth: “The
dangerous that [used to] appear under the signs of the past and the spatially re-
mote now rules the present. It seems to have burst into the present from primeval
times and from the expanse of space […].”26 What is more, both Jünger and
Schmitt charged “Einbruch” with the semantics of a Romantic rupture of the
everyday framework of life in favour of authenticity, gained at the expense of
trauma and an enforced re-ordering of reality. “Einbruch” can be seen as another
metaphor of the dialectic of discontinuity and transition between ontologically
different levels and conditions of life, which is so emblematically captured in
Schiller’s Romantic idea of “suddenness” and “shock” (“Erschütterung”) in the

22 Ernst Jünger/Carl Schmitt, Briefe 1930–1983, ed. H. Kiesel, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1999, 295.
Schmitt had already expressed the same concern, couched in precisely the same words, in a letter
to Armin Mohler of 13 February 1956 (cf. C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, ed.
A. Mohler, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1995, 214).
23 Ernst Jünger/Carl Schmitt, Briefe 1930–1983, 299.
24 Schmitt’s self-promotion efforts are documented (RW 265, No. 20346) in a list of 44 review
copies to be sent out by the publisher and another list of 31 free copies to be presented by
Schmitt to influential intellectuals and friends (including, among others, Hans Freyer, Lucien
Goldmann, Erich Przywara, Hans Zehrer, Mircea Eliade, Rolf Schroers, Adolf Frisé).
25 E. Jünger, Der Arbeiter. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1932, 46–56.
26 “Das Gefährliche, das unter den Zeichen der Vergangenheit und der Ferne erschien, beherrscht
jetzt die Gegenwart. Es scheint aus uralten Zeiten und aus der Weite der Räume in sie einge-
brochen zu sein […]” (Der Arbeiter, 55; my translation).
342 Galin Tihanov

work of the sublime.27 According to Schiller, the sublime furnishes an abrupt

and forceful exit from the world of material sensations where “the beautiful
would always have kept us with pleasure”; through “upheaval,” it liberates us
from the limitations of sensation and transplants us into a sphere beyond the
grasp of reason.28
Schmitt’s book is a rigorously argued philosophy of drama and history,
which he self-consciously positioned among nineteenth- and twentieth-century
German debates on drama. While working on Hamlet or Hecuba, from 1951 on-
wards, but also in the years following its publication, Schmitt read and made ex-
cerpts from several representative texts of German drama theory and criticism:
Jean Paul’s “Ueber die dramatische Poesie,” Gervinus’s Shakespeare, Grillparzer’s
“Notizen über Shakespeare,” Friedrich Gundolf ’s Shakespeare und der deutsche
Geist, Max Kommerell’s Lessing und Aristoteles, Werner Krauss’s Corneille als poli-
tischer Dichter, as well as texts on tragedy and drama by Hegel, Lukács, and Ben-
jamin.29 Modern genre theory in Germany has been consistently marked by
attempts to study the three major genres of literature (epic, drama, and poetry)
with a view to establishing some verifiable correspondences between the forms
of artistic creativity, on the one hand, and the forms of history and society, on
the other. In this respect, Schmitt was following a well-trodden path. Suffice it
to point to Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel and “The Metaphysics of Tra-
gedy” (the latter mentioned in passing by Schmitt), to Franz Rosenzweig’s sec-
tions on tragedy in The Star of Redemption, or to Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, which
became a major reference point for Schmitt.
Whence this special interest in drama? Twentieth-century debates on drama
in Germany evolved under the sign of sociology and philosophy of history.
Thinking of drama was a way of analysing the trends of social evolution and the
fortunes of class. Three examples would do: Lukács, in his monumental History
of the Development of Modern Drama, associated drama with the decline of a (ruling)
class, the moment when its worldview no longer goes unquestioned and tragic
defeat is near. Drama, he concluded, “reaches its peak always in tragedy; a per-
fect drama can only be tragedy.”30 Fritz Sternberg, the German sociologist and
political thinker, who wrote, among other books, an influential study of imperi-

27 On the semantics of “shock” and “suddenness” in Ernst Jünger and the avant-garde, see Karl
Heinz Bohrer, Plötzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des ästhetischen Scheins, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp,
1981.
28 Cf. F. Schiller, “Über das Erhabene,” in Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Bd. 21: Philosophische
Schriften. 2. Teil, Weimar: Böhlau, 1963, 45–6.
29 Cf. Schmitt’s notes in his Nachlass: RW 265, Nos. 20295 (Grillparzer), 20313 (Gervinus and Gun-
dolf), 21087 (Hegel, Benjamin, Kommerell, and Krauss), 21088 (Jean Paul), 20345 (Lukács).
30 G. Lukács, Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Dramas [1911], ed. F. Benseler, Darmstadt, Neuwied:
Luchterhand, 1981, 25.
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 343

alism31 and from whom Brecht learned a lot during the early months of his con-
version to Marxism, submitted that drama itself was in decline. Far from being a
mere historical contingency, Sternberg interpreted this as a historical necessity, a
consequence of the gradual ousting of the individual by “collective forces” in the
period following World War I.32 In a similar vein, but with political implications
that would be used by the Nazis for their own purposes, Gustav Steinbömer
argued in his 1932 book State and Drama (“Staat und Drama”) that the evolution
of drama reflects historically evolving relations between the private and the pub-
lic, in which the individual is eventually subordinated to the public institutions,
norms, and values.
Schmitt does retain this largely sociological interest, but not as his primary
focus of attention. Drama is important for him in so far as the performance
exemplifies the coming into existence of a community made up of the actors and
the audience. Schmitt takes a hermeneutical approach here, which sets him apart
from other contemporary approaches to drama, notably Karl Jasper’s interpre-
tation of tragedy in the framework of his philosophy of truth.33 Modern drama,
Schmitt argues, is usually first published as a work of literature, and only then
performed. This means that the audience, while watching the play, can enjoy the
support of preliminary knowledge of the text. Shakespeare’s drama, however,
worked differently (and to a better effect), in that the audience did not normally
acquaint itself in advance with a printed text. (Schmitt here shares a long-estab-
lished tenet of German drama theory, according to which drama has to be
(en)acted – not read – and has therefore to rest on common knowledge. A strong
exponent of this view was Hegel in his Aesthetics and, after him, Arnold Gehlen
in his 1934 essay “Die Struktur der Tragödie”.34) Thus for a community to
emerge in the Renaissance theatre, a common historical experience had to be
shared by both the actors and the viewers (37), i.e., a history lived through by, or
already known to, everyone present had to make its way into the play before the
meaning of the play could be shared and understood by the spectators’ commu-
nity. Playwrights can orientate their writing in two different fashions: towards a

31 F. Sternberg, Der Imperialismus, Berlin: Malik Verlag, 1926. Brecht was familiar with this study
(cf. Sternberg’s memoirs of Brecht published in the year of Sternberg’s death: F. Sternberg, Der
Dichter und die Ratio: Erinnerungen an Bertolt Brecht, Göttingen: Sachse & Pohl, 1963, 65). On Stern-
berg, see S. Papcke, Deutsche Soziologie im Exil. Gegenwartsdiagnose und Epochenkritik, 1933–1945,
Frankfurt a. M.: Campus Verlag, 1993, 38–58.
32 See F. Sternberg’s open letter to Brecht “Der Niedergang des Dramas,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, no.
219 (12 May 1927), republished as an appendix to Sternberg’s Brecht memoirs, 58–64, here 63.
33 See K. Jaspers, Von der Wahreit, Munich: Piper and Co., 1947, 915–960. The differences between
Jaspers and Schmitt seem to me more significant than the similarities suggested by V. Kahn
(cf. note 2).
34 See A. Gehlen, “Die Struktur der Tragödie,” in Philosophische Schriften II (1933–1938). Gesamt-
ausgabe. Band 2, Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1980, 199–215, esp. 209–211.
344 Galin Tihanov

contemporary community of spectators sharing the same historical experience

(“für die Mitwelt”), or towards a future audience that comes to know history
only in the form of more or less abstract knowledge (“für die Nachwelt”).35
Shakespeare’s drama was one for the Mitwelt, and that was its advantage over later
work for the stage (e.g. Schiller’s dramas, written as they were – according to
Schmitt – for posterity, the Nachwelt, rather than for a fellowship of spectators
with immediate grasp of their common past and present).
Schmitt thus starts by distinguishing the literary sources of drama (e.g. Shake-
speare’s use of Plutarch in Julius Caesar) from the actual historical resources that
enable actors and viewers to invoke shared experience and knowledge. He avers
that this distinction was not always made with due consistency. Thus a miscon-
ception arose that the playwright, being at liberty to deal in whatever fashion he
pleases with the literary material he draws on, is actually a free and sovereign ar-
tistic creator. Going back to his vehement rejection of Romantic ideology in
Political Romanticism (1919), forty years later Schmitt again warns against Roman-
tic subjectivism and occasionalism. The origins of the disproportionate belief in
the poet’s creative freedom are seen by Schmitt in the Storm and Stress move-
ment of the eighteenth century, and in the dominant role ascribed to poetry in
the ideology of modernity. Yet a poem is rather different from drama, and so is
the relation of the poem to the poet’s experience (Erlebnis) when compared to
the relation of drama to its mythical or historical resources. Stefan George,
whom Schmitt here calls “one of our greatest and most form-conscious poets”
is all but quoted verbatim as saying that poetry reshapes experience to an extent
where it becomes meaningless for the poet; knowledge of this experience thus
becomes for everyone else “confusing rather than redemptive” (35: “eher
verwirrend als erlösend”). This may well be true of poetry, especially modern
poetry, but it is utterly false as a way of explaining drama, Schmitt insists. The
audience and the need for common knowledge to be mobilized in the perform-
ance set a limit to the playwright’s creativity. Shakespeare’s frivolous manipu-
lation of his literary sources, Schmitt submits, is only the reverse side of his being
chained to his audience’s knowledge of history and current events.
Within drama, however, not all genres are equally open to and receptive of
history, nor are they equally dependent on it. Theatre is after all about “play”
(“Spiel”), which means that all dramatic genres establish their own theatrical
time and space, their own framework of conditional (fictional) reality that makes
sure that the text can also be read by subsequent generations that no longer share
the experience and the knowledge of the original audience. Play, therefore, is an
inalienable element of drama, a conditio sine qua non of its existence.
Here enters Schmitt’s crucial distinction. Tragedy, unlike all other forms of
drama, while preserving the mode of playability also has an irreducible core of

35 The distinction is made in C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” in L. Winstanley, Hamlet Sohn der Maria Stuart, 12.
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 345

authenticity supplied by history. That time and temporality were forces shaping
the nature of the tragic was not Schmitt’s discovery. The young Benjamin, in a
text written in 1916 which served as preparatory material towards the Trauerspiel
book (the text remained unpublished in his lifetime), sought to clarify the con-
ditions under which “historical time passes over into tragic time,” reaching the
conclusion that tragedy may be distinguished from mourning play precisely
“through the different ways they relate to historical time.”36 Furthermore, Max
Scheler, whose opposition to the inductive approach in aesthetics was an inspi-
ration for Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book37, had argued in his 1914–15 essay On the
phenomenon of the tragic that – because it is the product of a dynamic relationship
between values that changes in a particular (inevitably catastrophic) direction –
the tragic “always appears within the sphere of a motion of values” (“erscheint in
der Sphäre der Wertbewegung”), and therefore time, in which this motion takes
place, belongs to the non-negotiable conditions for the unfolding of the tragic:
“In a world without space tragedies would [still] be possible, but not in a timeless
world.”38 Schmitt radicalizes this thesis by turning time from a passive condition
into an active force enabling tragedy to emerge. Historical time bursts into the
time of the play, which in the wake of this intrusion assumes a dual ontological
status that combines the playability of any drama with the “unplayability”
(Unverspielbarkeit) reserved exclusively for tragedy. It is very difficult to render
adequately the entire range of potential meanings accommodated by the Ger-
man “Unverspielbarkeit.” As a verb, “verspielen” means “to lose, to waste, to
squander away,” often by gambling, but through the prefix “ver-” it could also
convey the meaning of converting something into something else by using a dif-
ferent medium of expression, as is the case in “verfilmen.” Finally, the prefix
“ver-” also suggests the possibility of distortion, as in, say, “verbauen.” “Unver-
spielbarkeit” (42), then, is much more than “unplayability”; it suggests that the
nucleus of historical authenticity characteristic of tragedy cannot be turned en-

36 W. Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, ed. M. Bullock and M. Jennings, Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996, Vol. 1, 55–6. The volume contains two more texts
of 1916 that served as drafts towards the Trauerspiel book and also remained unpublished in Ben-
jamin’s lifetime.
37 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. J. Osborne, London: New Left Books,
1977, 38–9. Benjamin seems to have been more indebted to Scheler than he would let on; his
interpretation of melancholy appears to be consonant with Scheler’s observations about the
“specific sadness of the tragic” (“[D]ie spezifische Traurigkeit des Tragischen”), characterized by
both “depth” and “boundlessness” (“Unabsehbarkeit”) and “flowing over beyond the event into,
as it were, an indefinite width without horizon” (“Die Trauer fließt so über das Ereignis hinaus in
eine gleichsam horizontlose unbestimmte Weite”; cf. M. Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tra-
gischen,” Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 3, Bern and Munich: Francke Verlag, 1972, 149–69, here 157–8,
my translation).
38 M. Scheler, “Zum Phänomen des Tragischen,” 154 (“In einer raumlosen Welt wären Tragödien
möglich; in einer zeitlosen nicht”; my translation).
346 Galin Tihanov

tirely into a play, cannot get lost or distorted in the play. Thus tragedy rests on an
unassailable authenticity underwritten by either myth or a shared and immediate
experience of history (often at its most dramatically-exceptional), both of which
fall beyond the scope of the playwright’s power of invention. History, in other
words, cannot be framed by invention. History itself is the framing agency with
regard to tragedy, and the presence – or rather the burst – of historical time in it
removes the contingencies of invention. Thus invention (“Erfindung”) and
tragic action (“Geschehen”), in Wackernagel’s words, repeated here by Schmitt
(51), become incompatible.39 Tragedy, Schmitt concludes, stops where play be-
gins (42), for these are two markedly different regimes of authenticity. It is pos-
sible to have a play within the play, but there cannot be a tragedy within tragedy.
Tragedy, just as for Benjamin, but in a more resolute and perhaps straightfor-
ward way, is different from other dramatic genres, including the Trauerspiel. The
tragic situation cannot be invented or made up, that of the Trauerspiel can. And so
can that of historical drama, which relies not on an immediately co-experienced
knowledge of history and reality, but rather on the distant Bildungswissen of his-
tory, i.e., knowledge of history acquired through education. Unsurprisingly, the
target of discontent here, as in Benjamin’s treatise40, is Schiller, whose theory of
the play-drive (“Spieltrieb”), expounded in the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of
Man, was misread by Schmitt as resembling the Romantic “lack of earnestness”
which tries to dissolve the seriousness and authenticity of tragic life in the alleg-
edly “higher order” of artistic play.41 Schiller’s historical dramas, then, for
Schmitt as much as for Benjamin, fail to rise to tragedy and cultural myth: “Schil-
ler’s drama is Trauerspiel; it has not risen to the level of myth.”42 As one can see,

39 Schmitt borrowed the reference to Wackernagel from Benjamin (cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama, 106), but he tried to question in a lengthy note (72–3 n. 21) the suitability of
Wackernagel’s words as an endorsement of Benjamin’s theory.
40 Cf. W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 122, where Schiller’s historical drama is
described as “closer to the form of the Trauerspiel” rather than to that of tragedy (Benjamin’s
example is Die Braut von Messina).
41 Schmitt’s suspicion of the principle of play and his appeal for seriousness commensurate with
the conflict between friend and enemy, on which politics rests, led to criticism in the 1930s by
Johan Huizinga, not least in his book Homo Ludens, which argued that culture originates in, and
subsists on, play (for more on Huizinga’s critique of Schmitt, see H. Quaritsch, “Eine sonderbare
Beziehung: Carl Schmitt und Erich Kaufmann,” in Bürgersinn und staatliche Macht in Antike und
Gegenwart. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schuller zum 65. Geburtstag, Konstanz: UVK Universitätsverlag,
2000, 71–87, esp. 80–81).
42 “Schillers Drama ist Trauerspiel und hat den Mythos nicht erreicht” (49). I cannot resist relating
at this point an amusing story that speaks volumes about the challenged reputation of Schiller’s
historical dramas at the time. In 1961, some five years after Schmitt wrote Hamlet or Hecuba,
Heiner Müller was about to be excluded from the GDR Writers’ Union for his “ideologically
unacceptable” drama “The Resettler” (Die Umsiedlerin). After the meeting he was approached by
Hanns Eisler who advised him that if he wanted to be safe in the GDR he should follow Schil-
ler’s example: “[A]n Austrian tyrant gets murdered in Switzerland. This is the kind of play you
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 347

Schmitt’s stance with respect to Schiller’s aesthetics was rather complicated:

Schmitt partook of the Romantic fascination with “upheaval,” “suddenness,”
and “burst,” and he also endorsed the idea of ontologically different layers of
reality, so prominent in Schiller’s treatise on the sublime, but he was eventually
dissatisfied with the importance accorded to play in Schiller’s account of what
makes one human.
What matters here most is the realization of the fact that even when Schmitt
opposed Schiller’s praise of play and playfulness, he was doing so in a way that
was thrusting him back into the bedrock of Romantic ideology. Schmitt’s yearn-
ing for authenticity constituted a return to the Romantic discourse of originality
and genuineness. Ever since his 1919 work Political Romanticism, Schmitt had
been anxious to leave behind what he believed to be the compromising softness
of Romantic philosophy, its submission to occasionalism and subjectivism. He
believed that his Hamlet book was a return to a history-based discussion of art
where dialectical materialism had established an unhealthy monopoly.43 The
Hamlet book was seen by him as breaking the customary practice of understand-
ing art as an autonomous aesthetic realm. He hoped that Winstanley’s and his
own reading of Hamlet, based as it was on the recognition of the force of history
to burst into, and confine, the realm of play, would be a resounding refutation of
the Romantic interpretative method, whose unchecked psychologism meant
that, in T. S. Eliot’s sardonic words, for Goethe Hamlet became a Werther, and
for Coleridge – Coleridge himself.44 And yet Schmitt’s Hamlet book speaks
forcefully the language (Adorno would have preferred “jargon”) of authenticity,
singularity, and “unplayability,” all in a post-romantic key that recognizes the
existence of ontologically different layers and modes of life, whose rift can no
longer be healed except in the rare bursts and epiphanic appearances of authen-
ticity. Admittedly, Schmitt takes the power of imagination away from the artist
(in a move critical of Romantic aesthetics), but in the same breath (in a typically
post-romantic move) he restores the notion and the norm of irrepeatability and
uniqueness with regard to the historical situation, as well as the myth-generating
power of the solitary hero at the moment of decision. It is tragedy, just as for
Lukács and Rosenzweig, that is called upon to be the guardian and exponent of

should be writing in Germany” (the reference, of course, is to Wilhelm Tell; the story can be found
in Heiner Müller’s autobiography: H. Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen, Cologne:
Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1992, 178). It has to be noted, though, that in his 1952 “Vorwort,”
where Schmitt regards Schiller’s dramas as being written “for posterity” (“für die Nachwelt”), he
nevertheless concedes that even they (at the hands of gifted critics such as Max Kommerell)
could acquire the status of myth-generating art (Schmitt, “Vorwort,” 19); cf. also Müller’s own
description of Wilhelm Tell as “the drama of liberation” in 1989 (H. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation,
Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 97).
43 Cf. Schmitt, “Was habe ich getan?,” 223.
44 Schmitt quotes Eliot’s words in the 1952 “Foreword”, 23.
348 Galin Tihanov

authenticity in Schmitt’s reworking of the Romantic ideal. But unlike Lukács and
Rosenzweig, Schmitt is more concerned to assert authenticity with regard to his-
tory and the past than to life as such; it is the saving grace of myth that should
take care of the latter. Thus Hamlet or Hecuba seems to be indicative of Schmitt’s
entire career as a thinker: it reproduces his syndrome of trying to flee the Ro-
mantic agenda and finding himself over and over again replicating and having to
modify it in a time when the answers of the Romantics would not do.45 The state
of exception46, the revolt against the indecision of the “chattering classes” (in
The Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig had drawn a characteristically anti-cli-
mactic comparison between silence, proper speech, and mere “debate” in attic
tragedy 47), the glorification of the sea over the land mass, the veneration of the
historically singular and authentic, the hopes attached to the lonely figure of the
partisan and his irregular combat – all these motifs participate in a fascinating
drama of ideas, where the repressed Romantic ideology makes its inexorable re-
turn. Thus in his 1952 foreword to the German translation of Winstanley’s book,
Schmitt insists that drama is better placed than the novel to capture, and remain
closer to, the singularity of historical events. Moreover, there (and four years
later in his own book) he interprets Hamlet as the drama of a king who destroys
the “sacred substance” of his kingdom through too much thinking (“zerdenkt”)
and talking (“zerredet”).48 It then becomes logical that Schmitt should have
wanted to assert the heroic effort of decision and action, which he found to be
the centerpiece of Shakespeare’s drama, by extending the meaning of Hamlet to
embody the tragic vacillation and indecisiveness on the eve, or in the face, of
groundbreaking historical events. His own somewhat cryptic interpretation of
Hamlet in a letter to Armin Mohler of 15 July 1956 suggests that Shakespeare’s
hero symbolized to him Germany on the threshold of the 1848 revolution
(“1848: Deutschland ist Hamlet”)49 and Europe (or at least European intelligent-

45 I have written on other aspects of Schmitt’s “post-romantic syndrome” in “Carl Schmitt and
Theodor Däubler: The Geopolitical Afterlife of the Post-Romantic Epic,” in Romantična pesnitev
/ The Romantic Poem, ed. M. Juvan, Ljubljana: Ljubljana University, 2002, 609–24; see also my ar-
ticle “Regimes of Modernity at the Dawn of Globalisation: Carl Schmitt and Alexandre Kojève,”
in D. Kadir and D. Löbbermann (eds.), Other Modernisms in an Age of Globalisation, Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2002, 75–93.
46 On the state of exception as a Romantic relic in Schmitt’s political philosophy I concur with a
number of other scholars (Hofmann, Lübbe, Bredekamp).
47 F. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. W. Hallo, Notre Dame and London: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1985, 77.
48 C. Schmitt, “Vorwort,” 17.
49 C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220. Schmitt borrowed the phrase “Deutschland ist
Hamlet” from the opening line of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s 1844 poem “Hamlet,” a piece of unre-
markable poetic quality that conveys the staple view of Hamlet as an over-hesitant intellectual:
“Das macht, er hat zuviel gehockt; / er lag und las zuviel im Bett. / Er wurde, weil das Blut ihm
stockt, / zu kurz von Atem und zu fett. […] Drum fehlt ihm die Entschlossenheit; / kommt
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 349

sia) in the traumatic years of World War I (“1918: Europa ist Hamlet”).50 What is
more, writing in 1958, Schmitt projects the Hamlet symbol onto the immediate
future of the entire Western world, probably meaning to suggest that the plague
of indecision in dealing with the past and facing one’s own future has progressed
to affect not just Germany and Europe but the whole array of Western democ-
racies.51 Thus the inescapability of decision and action, on the one hand, and the
ideal of authenticity, on the other, converge for Schmitt in the “unplayability”
that makes the essence of tragedy (and of political life).
Schmitt sees in the “unplayability” of the tragic a feature that also determines
the options available to the stage director. The uniqueness and singularity of a
shared historical situation as the formative moment of tragedy, which it then
elevates to myth – as Hamlet supposedly does – means that there is no point in
trying to dress the actors in period costumes and stage a museum-like perform-
ance. No amount of effort could arrest and convey the singularity of the past
moment. No matter what we do, we can never attain the same significance of the
historical situation that glued together through shared experience actors and
audience. So there is nothing wrong with playing Hamlet in a tailcoat. But this
should be no more than a necessary prevention of naive and misconceived “his-
toricism” (“Historismus”). If pushed too far, this approach could lead to what
Schmitt disparagingly terms “Offenbachiade,” i.e., something that resembles the
ease and fleeting merriness of operetta. It is quite possible that the invocation of
Offenbach was not free from a renewed criticism of Karl Kraus, an admirer of
Offenbach (as attested in Benjamin’s essay “Karl Kraus reads Offenbach”) and

Zeit, kommt Rat – er stellt sich toll, / hält Monologe lang und breit, / und bringt in Verse seinen
Groll.” Freiligrath ends by appealing to the heroism of decision (“Nur ein Entschluß”), but con-
cedes identification with Hamlet (“Bin ja selbst ein Stück von dir”); cf. F. Freiligrath, Werke in
einem Band, ed. W. Ilberg, Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1967, 73–5. On the wider context,
see the chapter “Hamlet et l’Allemagne” in I. Omesco, Hamlet ou la tentation du possible, Paris:
P.U.F., 1987, 138–57. A reference to Freiligrath’s poem, in a different context, also appears in
Hamlet oder Hekuba, 54. Schmitt’s identification of Hamlet and Germany was a confirmation
sui generis of the lasting German cultural myth of Shakespeare as a poet whose work’s true home
is Germany rather than England, a myth expounded by Gerhart Hauptmann and Friedrich Gun-
dolf, among others; on this see Werner Habicht’s richly informative article “Shakespeare and
Theatre Politics in the Third Reich,” in Hannah Scolnicov and Peter Holland (eds.), The Play out of
Context: Transferring Plays from Culture to Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989,
110–120.
50 C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220. The reference is to Paul Valéry and is unpacked
by Piet Tommissen in his republication of “Was habe ich getan?,” Schmittiana, Vol. 5, 1996, 15 n.
12.
51 “1958: Die Westliche Welt ist Hamlet” (C. Schmitt, Briefwechsel mit einem seiner Schüler, 220). In a
late archival note of March 1975, Schmitt saw 1968 as a more suitable date for the symbolic iden-
tity of the Western world with Hamlet; he also added, somewhat puzzlingly given his Catholic
background, the following sentence: “1900: Wir (Protestanten) sind alle Hamlets” (RW 265, No.
19862).
350 Galin Tihanov

the target of a parody Schmitt contributed anonymously to Franz Blei’s 1920 Bes-
tiarium of German literature.52
Important as it might be in its own terms, this episode in German intellectual
history would not have busied us here, certainly not at such length, were it not for
its crucial impact on Heiner Müller. Operetta and musical, with their determi-
nation to suspend the monopoly of seriousness and originality, bring us to post-
modernism and back to Müller’s Die Hamlet-Maschine, conceived as early as the
1950s but not completed before 1977, the debris – indicatively – of a 200-page
translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Müller prepared in 1976–77, only to
get embroiled in accusations of plagiarism soon afterwards.53 Müller, along with
Alfred Andersch and Rolf Schroers, was one of the most prominent admirers of
Schmitt on the literary Left (Benjamin, of course, being the most prominent of
all, even though his fascination with Schmitt in The Origin of German Tragic Drama
came at the close of his, in George Steiner’s words, “romantic-metaphysical”
period, just before his affiliation with Marxism54). Müller knew Hamlet or He-
cuba 55 and used it, along with texts by Norbert Elias, Paul Virilio56, and John
Donne, Augustine’s Confessions, Stephen Hawking’s A Short History of Time, Frei-

52 Cf. Tommissen, In Sachen Carl Schmitt, Vienna: Karolinger, 1997, 29–30.

53 On the textual history of Hamletmachine, see J. Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Müller, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998, 108 and 210–11; and the editorial notes in H. Müller, Werke, ed.
F. Hörnigk, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2001, vol. 4, 592–4.
54 For Benjamin’s complex appropriation of Schmitt, see Horst Bredekamp’s excellent article
“From Walter Benjamin to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry, 1999, Vol. 25,
No. 2, 247–266, and the articles listed in Bredekamp’s extensive footnotes, esp. Samuel Weber,
“Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” Diacritics, 1992, Vol. 22,
5–18; see also the book-length study by Susanne Heil, Gefährliche Beziehungen: Walter Benjamin
und Carl Schmitt, Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996, esp. 127–36, and Nikolaus Müller-Schöll, Das Theater
des “konstruktiven Defaitismus”, Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld, 2002, passim. With specific reference
to Hamlet or Hecuba, cf. D. Pan, “Political Aesthetics: Carl Schmitt on Hamlet,” Telos, 1987,
no. 72, 153–9; G. Meuter, Der Katechon. Zu Carl Schmitts fundamentalistischer Kritik der Zeit, Berlin:
Duncker und Humblot, 1994, 472–6, and Chr. Schmidt, “Zeit und Spiel. Geistergespräch
zwischen Walter Benjamin und Carl Schmitt über Ästhetik und Politik,” in Jüdisches Denken in einer
Welt ohne Gott. Festschrift für Stéphane Mosès, ed. J. Mattern et al., Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000,
78–89.
55 Cf. his brief text of 1988 “Shakespeare eine Differenz,” where the name of Carl Schmitt appears
next to Müller’s statement (itself a reference to Schmitt) “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel kon-
stituiert den Mythos” (Heiner Müller Material. Texte und Kommentare, ed. F. Hörnigk, Leipzig: Phi-
lipp Reclam Jr., 1989, 106). Müller quotes the subtitle of Schmitt’s book again in his 1992 text
“Beschreibung einer Lektüre” (cf. G. Schulz, “Kein altes Blatt. Müllers Graben,” in Heiner
Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, ed. Theo Buck and Jean-Marie Valentin, Frankfurt a. M.: Peter
Lang, 1995, 12). See also H. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 22.
56 Interestingly, an old and ailing Schmitt had read the German translation of one of Virilio’s basic
texts (Geschwindigkeit und Politik, Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1977), given to him as a present by Günter
Maschke on 9 February 1982; Schmitt’s copy (ending on p. 118) contains copious marginal notes,
many of them voicing his approval (cf. RW 265, No. 390).
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 351

ligrath’s “Hamlet,” Kavafis’s poem “King Claudius,” Gottfried Benn’s “Gewisse

Lebensabende,” and Müller’s own essay “Shakespeare eine Differenz,” as a text
assisting the actors (“Schauspielermaterial”) in comprehending the idea of time
in the play when the Deutsches Theater staged The Hamletmachine in 1990 in Ber-
lin.57 In addition to Hamlet or Hecuba, Müller was also versed in Schmitt’s later
Theory of the Partisan 58, which he considered a “key text”59, and was familiar with
Schmitt’s central notion of the state of exception, claiming to have explored in
Volokolamsk Highway (Wolokolamsker Chaussee) such a situation “in Carl Schmitt’s
sense”.60 When directing his own drama Mauser (1970), which was never per-
formed in the GDR and was only staged in Berlin in 1991, Müller included in the
programme notes a lengthy passage on brotherhood, enmity and fratricide from
Schmitt’s Ex captivitate salus (1950)61; he was also acquainted with Schmitt’s con-
cept of the Katechon and with the main ideas of the latter’s texts on leadership,
the Volk and the Nazi movement written in the 1930s.62 In his autobiography
War without Battle, the title for which he borrowed from Ludwig Renn’s 1957
eponymous novel63, Heiner Müller elevated Schmitt – along with Ernst Jünger 64

57 See folder D 677a in the Heiner Müller-Nachlass in the Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste,
Berlin, which documents the production history. It is also worth noting that Jean Jourdheuil, the
first-ever director to stage Müller’s Hamletmachine, later became the co-translator, with Jean-Louis
Besson, of Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba into French (1992).
58 Horst Domdey has suggested that Müller’s essay “New York oder das eiserne Gesicht der Frei-
heit” contains traces of Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan (H. Domdey, “Die Tragödie des Terrors.
Heiner Müller – letzter Poet der Klassenschlacht,” Theater Heute, Jahresheft 1991, 104), and Jean-
Pierre Morel has made a case for Sasportas, one of the protagonists of Müller’s 1979 drama The
Task (Der Auftrag), using words alluding to a passage in the same book (cf. J.-P. Morel, “Out of
joint: Die Revolutionen in Der Auftrag,” in Heiner Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, 71–2). A frag-
ment of the text referred to by Morel also appears, in a rather similar version, in Müller’s Anatomie
Titus Fall of Rome. Ein Shakespeare-Kommentar.
59 H. Müller, Krieg ohne Schlacht, 272 (“war ein Schlüsseltext für mich”); cf. also 314.
60 “[I]m Sinne von Carl Schmitt” (Krieg ohne Schlacht, 347); see also Müller’s contribution to the 1990
discussion “L’état d’urgence chez Carl Schmitt et La décision chez Bertolt Brecht,” in Brecht après la
chute, ed. W. Storch, Paris: L’Arche, 1993, 33– 44.
61 See R. Herzinger, Masken der Lebensrevolution. Vitalistische Zivilisations- und Humanismuskritik in
Texten Heiner Müllers, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992, 236 n. 45. On the Schmittian destruction of
the idea of brotherhood in another play by Müller, The Battle (“Die Schlacht”), see Hans-Thies
Lehmann, “Zwischen Monolog und Chor. Zur Dramaturgie Heiner Müllers,” in Ian Wallace et
al. (eds.), Heiner Müller: Probleme und Perspektiven. Bath-Symposium 1998, Amsterdam and Atlanta:
Rodopi, 2000, 11–26, here 20.
62 Cf. Müller, Zur Lage der Nation, Berlin: Rotbuch, 1990, 25 and 84.
63 See G. Gemünden, “The Author as Battlefield: Heiner Müller’s Autobiography War Without
Battle,” in Heiner Müller. ConTEXTS and History, ed. G. Fischer, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1995,
126 n. 7.
64 For a recent comparison of Jünger and Müller and a critical evaluation of the literature on them,
see Th. Weitin, Notwendige Gewalt: Die Moderne Ernst Jüngers und Heiner Müllers, Freiburg: Rombach
Verlag, 2003.
352 Galin Tihanov

and Brecht – to the status of a cult figure; in 1987 he even undertook

research in the Schmitt archive during a stay in Düsseldorf 65 and spoke, a few
years later, of a “Carl-Schmitt Renaissance”.66 What is more, in an interview
granted in 1983 Heiner Müller repeated Schmitt’s statement about the impossi-
bility of inventing tragic constellations in drama.67 But instead of asserting
Schmitt’s defense of authenticity, Müller construes the impossibility of invention
as an appeal for a postmodern extension of intertextuality.68
Thus it should come as no surprise that the very language of the play demon-
strates Müller’s disinterest in authenticity. The texture of Hamletmachine, even
more than that of Müller’s previous dramas, notably Herakles 5 (1964) and Phil-
oktet (1958/64), is deliberately intertextual, with quotations from T. S. Eliot, Pas-
ternak, Hölderlin, and Cummings, thinly disguised references to, or paraphrases
of Benjamin, Dostoevsky, Marx, Warhol, Artaud, and some of Müller’s own

65 Cf. Jan-Christoph Hauschild, Heiner Müller oder das Prinzip Zweifel. Eine Biographie, Berlin: Aufbau-
Verlag, 2001, 510; Manfred Lauermann has witnessed Müller’s enquiries about Schmitt with the
Schmitt expert Günter Maschke (M. Lauermann, “Politische Theologie des Klassenkampfs. Die
Lektüre von Brechts Die Massnahme durch Carl Schmitt – ein soziologischer Versuch,” in Mass-
nehmen. Bertolt Brecht/Hanns Eislers Lehrstück “Die Massnahme”. Kontroverse. Perspektive. Praxis, ed.
I. Gellert et al., Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 1998, 58 n. 25); Müller mentions his acquaintance with
Maschke and comments on him in “Die Küste der Barbaren,” Frankfurter Rundschau, 25 Septem-
ber 1992 (reprinted in Gesammelte Irrtümer, Frankfurt a. M.: Verlag der Autoren, 1994, Vol. 3,
168–71). On Müller and the political Right after the Wende, see R. Herzinger, “Geisterbeschwö-
rungen im deutschen Augenblick. Heiner Müllers Antiwestlertum und die Neue Rechte,” Sprache
und Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 1993, no. 2, 73–85; cf. Müller’s reactions to Herzinger in
Gesammelte Irrtümer, Vol. 3, 193, 201.
66 “Jetzt sind eher die infernalischen Aspekte bei Benjamin wichtig. Gespräch mit Heiner Müller,”
in M. Opitz and E. Wizisla (eds.), Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her. Texte zu Walter Benjamin,
Leipzig: Reclam, 1992, 348–62, here 362. Cf. also the numerous brief mentions of Carl Schmitt
in Heiner Müller’s estate in the Archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin (nos. 3812, 4802,
4817, 4936, 4942, 5061, 5195).
67 H. Müller, Gesammelte Irrtümer, Frankfurt: Verlag der Autoren, 1986, Vol. 1, 138.
68 Müller’s stance with respect to postmodernism deserves attention beyond the scope of this ar-
ticle. At times, he was demonstrably distrustful of the very concept of postmodernism; when
asked what constitutes postmodernism in literature, he replied half-curtly, half-jokingly: “The
only Postmodernist I know of was August Stramm, a modernist who worked in a post office”
(“19 Answers by Heiner Müller,” in Hamletmachine and other texts for the stage, ed. C. Weber, New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984, 137); see, however, his address at the
1978 MLA Convention in New York, “Reflections on Post-Modernism,” New German Critique,
1979, no. 16, 55–7. On Müller and postmodernism, also with relation to Hamletmachine, see e.g.
A. Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse: The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Müller,
New York: Peter Lang, 1985; N. Zurbrugg, “Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility:
Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson”, Modern Drama, 1988, Vol. 31, no. 3,
439–53; S. Wilke, “The Role of Art in a Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The The-
atre of Heiner Müller,” Paragraph, 1991, Vol. 3, 276–89; S. Taubeneck, “Deconstructing the
GDR: Heiner Müller and Postmodern Cultural Politics,” Pacific Coast Philology, 1992, Vol. 26, nos.
1–2, 184– 92.
 “Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”: Hamlet from Berlin (East) 353

plays (Cement, The Resettler, The Construction). Just like the text, history no longer
operates by producing singular and unique events, but rather by feeding into the
play fragments of past and present (often deliberately discrepant)69 events, which
no longer determine the fate of the characters. Indeed, the very notion of dra-
matic personae is radically destabilized. While Schmitt sees in Hamlet the last
mythical figure of our time, Müller denies the status of myth and heroism not
just to Hamlet, but also to all protagonists of German and Central-European
history alluded to in the play.70 Hamletmachine thus displays the workings of a
worn-out machine of history and text-production in a situation where the power
of myth is exhausted and the order of causality is broken and given up. While
seeking justification in Schmitt’s thesis that tragic conflicts and situations cannot
be invented, Müller goes further to claim that they have always already been no
more than just taken up, modified and played on; he thus radicalizes Schmitt’s
thesis of the limits of artistic invention in drama to question the very possibility
of an authentic tragic situation.
For many a contemporary critic in the West, this amounted to opposing the
inertia and hypocrisy of political life in East Germany in the late 1970s; in the
GDR, Die Hamletmaschine was perceived to be a sign of ideological confusion and
creative fatigue on the part of its author.71 History was no longer called upon to
break in solemnly into the time of the play, for the very notion of time had now
become stagnant, messy, and disillusioned. Twenty years after the crushing
of the Budapest resurrection and some ten years after the short-lived Prague
Spring, the hope of change appeared to Müller to be no more material than was
Hecuba to the invisible cohort of Schmitt’s readers, whom he did not trust to
know who she was.
Thus Müller asserts the irreducible heterology of history in drama, an artistic
form that in his recasting can provide neither comfort nor existential solutions,
but remains ideally placed to nurture one’s curiosity as to how contingency and
necessity are generically framed and negotiated in art.72

69 Cf. e.g. D. Barnett, “Some notes on the difficulties of operating Heiner Müller’s ‘Die Hamletma-
schine’,” German Life and Letters, 1995, Vol. 48, 75–85.
70 Cf. Jean-Louis Besson, “Hellsicht und Undurchsichtigkeit im Werke Heiner Müllers,” in Heiner
Müller – Rückblicke, Perspektiven, 128.
71 For the wider context, see M. Hamburger, “Are You a Party in this Business? Consolidation and
Subversion in East German Shakespeare Productions,” Shakespeare Survey, 1995, Vol. 48, 171–84.
72 An earlier version of this article was presented at the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory
Colloquium in Dubrovnik and as a lecture in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale
University. I wish to thank Vladimir Biti and David Quint, as well as their colleagues, for the hos-
pitality and the ensuing discussions. Research towards this article was supported through an
AHRB research leave and a Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
I am also grateful to Prof. Dr. Becker for allowing me access to the Schmitt Nachlass in Düssel-
dorf.