Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Malkin, Jeanette R

Titel

Mourning and the Body: Heiner Müller's Fathers and The Foundling Son

Ist Teil von

• Modern drama, 1996-10, Vol.39 (3), p.490-506

Ort / Verlag

Toronto [etc.]: University of Toronto Press

Erscheinungsjahr

1996

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For the person in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that "having pain" may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to "have certainty," while for the other person it is so elusive that "hearing about pain" may exist as the primary model of what it is "to have doubt." [...]pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.12 Thus, Scarry sees pain as the "unmaking of the world" for the sufferer, as the absolute reality. [...]the still-present memory of the very recent past became an ever-present stage image, against which the cold logic of passionless Enlightenment desire (Quartet), the heartless killing-machines who murder in the name of ideology (Mauser), the terror of the woods (Heracles 2), and the anger and loss of the foundling son, were all played out. "28 This basic psychoanalytical principle, which requires repeated acts of recall and emotional investment in order to overcome bereavement, is accomplished in art through symbolic practices.20 Trauerarbeit has become a popular notion in German cultural critique, used both to explain the "return to history" in German cinema and the "return of the repressed" in literature, theatre, and psycho-social analysis.30 The implication is that a psychic wound has been left gaping by the betrayals of German history, which can only be healed through a symbolic return to, and mediated internalizing of, mat history - rather than its repression. The "history collages" - such as Germania Death in Berlin (Germania Tod in Berlin, 1971), The Battle (Die Schlacht, 1974), or Gundling's Life Frederick of Prussia Lessing's Sleep Dream Scream (Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preussen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei, 1976) - flood the reader/audience with images and voices ranging from the Nibelungs to Stalin, from the French Revolution to Hitler, in sometimes grotesque, sometimes epic, styles.