AFTER REVOLUTION: Teichoscopy and the End of Drama in Heiner Müller (Prof. Dr. Michael Auer)

Teichoscopy is a theatrical means of communicating occurrences that happen offstage. A figure, commonly subaltern and anonymous, climbs to an elevated position to report what it sees from this vantage point while the leading figure remains below to hear. From Aeschylus to Shakespeare, this intrusion of an outside prompting a figural inversion has served to call into question the social and political hierarchies presented onstage. However, teichoscopy becomes structurally impossible in the modern traditions of courtly and bourgeois drama, which increasingly strive to seal themselves off from their surroundings by bringing up a “fourth wall” (Diderot). In the age of revolutions, the technique thus gains a ground-breaking potential: Playwrights from Goethe to Brecht have employed it to stage a subversion of the institution of drama as such — opening, as it were, a window on alternative modernities in which drama is no more. This talk will show how Heiner Müller responds to this avant-gardist tendency of teichoscopy after the revolution has come to pass.

Organized by Wolfgang Hottner, André Eiermann, Ulla Kallenbach and the Research Group “Contemporary Aesthetics”