Texts Waiting for History

Heiner Müller’s re-imaginings of William Shakespeare have puzzled and fascinated readers and spectators alike for the past forty-five years. For the first time, this study addresses all of Müller’s re-workings of Shakespeare, including dramatic adaptations, translations, poems, references in interviews and in his autobiography, as well as fragments of unfinished projects, not forgetting the strong Shakespearean echoes in Müller’s last play, Germania 3. An analysis of Müller’s diverse positions regarding different understandings of history and of its catastrophic violence suggests that Shakespeare is at the literary and theoretical core of Müller’s always complex and conflicted relation with philosophy of history and with the notions of heritage, fragmentation and difference.