Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels's Wolokolamsker Chaussee

Philip V. Bohlman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501346163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

By gathering historical and musical fragments from a Europe torn apart by the Second World War and the Cold War, East German playwright Heiner Müller and West German composer Heiner Goebbels created Wolokolamsker Chaussee as a musical panorama that stretched across modern European history at a moment of international crisis. The question at the heart of the recording was prescient in the waning years of the Cold War, but it remains no less critical for the "crisis of Europe" today: Is it possible for Europe to be unified? A vast range of musical styles-from folk song to hip-hop, from the symphonic canon to heavy metal-coalesce in the five acts, which expose the wounds of European history while struggling musically to heal them. This extraordinary recording from 1989/90 not only captures the sound of a historical moment, but also powerfully enacts responses to it. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese, Brazilian, and European music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

1 Russian Gambit

Again, we rode on in silence. Again, I listened to the German music, the prelude to the day.

Alexander Bek, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1962 [1944], 308)

The war was at its beginning, they are at their end

New songs arise from the valley

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 32)

In the Beginning, Silence Then Chaos

The first track of the Heiner Müller/Heiner Goebbels Wolokolamsker Chaussee begins in silence. Symbolically and rhetorically, for a recording to begin in silence is not to begin at all. Many listeners surely initially wonder whether they have even started the recording. In search of sound, they might return again to the track’s beginning, and again there is silence as, or instead of, a beginning. With the third attempt it is time to turn up the volume, just in case the problem lies in the amplifier or CD-player. Patience gives way to confusion, and we linger a bit longer, adjusting the volume and checking the settings, until, almost imperceptibly, the march-like percussion and string underpinnings that accompany the middle section, the so-called “Invasion Theme,” of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, gently course through the first half-minute of the recording, its gradual crescendo seemingly consummating a beginning for the recording journey upon which we are about to embark. Enter, the track’s two narrators, Ernst Stötzner and the metal band, Megalomaniax, the former affirming that we have arrived at the beginning of the track, the latter opening the sonic curtain with the explosions of heavy artillery shells, if still at a distance beyond the battlefields of Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

And then, all hell breaks loose. Megalomaniax unleashes the full fury of its heavy metal sound to enunciate time and place to affix the real beginnings for the narratives that will unfold across the five tracks of the recording: “two thousand kilometers from Berlin / one hundred twenty kilometers before reaching Moscow” (Müller 1988, 29). The soldiers of the Red Army find themselves in a dystopian world, in which the German offensive against the Soviet capital threatens imminently to accelerate and break through the Soviet lines, fully and finally. Beginnings and endings elide, blurred and eventually broken by the chaos that overtakes them at the historical moment presaging the rise and fall of other beginnings in the tracks that follow, swelling relentlessly until swallowed by the chaos on the final track. The silence of beginning will ineluctably yield to the chaos that disrupts and diverts the narrative path of the recording that has now begun.

Already in the initial lines of text performed on the first track, Müller and Goebbels make it clear where and when the episode of “Russian Gambit” takes place in Bek’s novel. We find ourselves between parts 1 and 2 of the novel, between the victories won by diversionary tactics and the concerted offensive attack on Moscow, which exceedingly diminished Soviet troops will need to thwart with new tactics, forged largely from newly won discipline. Parts 1 and 2 of the Müller/Goebbels recording take place during this period of respite and regrouping. Upon moving through that period in the first two tracks, Müller and Goebbels do not return directly to the Bek novel again.

The two tracks contrast with each other in almost every way, metonymically representing the extensively dual quality of the wounded dialectic. Track 1, sounding chaos, draws us into the space between the two parts of the defense of Moscow by representing it as dystopia. The many first-person narrators who constitute the dramatis personae give voice to roles that are more dissonant than consonant. The vocal registers cut across each other, often argumentatively, as if the characters are not listening to each other. To capture the attention of others, it is necessary to scream, to transgress vocal boundaries and seize the machinery of the metal band. Track 2, as we see in the chapter that follows, enters a parallel sonic world in the novel’s narrative as if landing on the shores of utopia. The first-person narrators are the same as on Track 1, Ernst Stötzner and Megalomaniax, but they exercise restraint and evoke calm. The contrast between the two tracks is for us critical because of the ways it situates the beginnings and endings that define the chiasmic moments whose sonic worlds we enter and exit in the course of Wolokolamsker Chaussee.

Of Laments and Love Songs

I stood there in my coat, freezing in the wind

The noise from the frontlines was like a love song.

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 37)

The narrative of Part I, “Russian Gambit,” is the most concise and focused of any of the five parts of the radio play and recording. With the backdrop of regrouping the Soviet troops for a cobbled-together battalion that Baurdschan Momysch-Uly will command in final defense of Moscow, the playwright and composer adapt one of the catalytic scenes from the center of the novel and situate it at the beginning of the radio play, where it allows them to launch a more extensive journey along Volokolamsk Highway. At the center of the episode is the encounter with a deserter from the skirmishes of the first part of the novel, who has shot himself in his hand so he might join the wounded in retreat from the frontlines. After accusations and counterclaims about whether the soldier did indeed shoot himself, the primary narrator makes clear that he must follow military regulations and execute the deserter “according to the laws of war” (ibid., 39). Appeals for sympathy and demonstrated willingness to rejoin the battalion to fight again at the frontline notwithstanding, the officer orders the soldier’s execution, requests he be stripped of his soldier’s uniform, and commands that he be buried. The track’s narrative concludes as the primary narrator, the battalion commandant, reflects on the meaning of death in war, whether all who die merely fulfill the inevitable consequences of war, willingly or unwillingly. As these reflections verge on madness and paranoia, the companion primary narrator, Megalomaniax, closes the final text of the track by intoning its beginning: “two thousand kilometers from Berlin / one hundred twenty kilometers before reaching Moscow” (Müller 1988, 29).

Both Müller and Goebbels utilize the first track to identify and then establish most of the leitmotifs that will spread across the subsequent tracks. The central themes of order and authority pervade the narrative, as both are at once asserted and challenged. In the end, order must be maintained, for it maps the path out of chaos; only through the exercise of authority can the wounded dialectic be healed. The sacrifice of the citizen’s body to the socialist state also takes the form of different motifs, and it does so by its contrast with the machinery of the state. Sound in its dialectical dimensions—human and mechanical—surfaces as a recurring leitmotif throughout the track. The Soviet soldiers recognized their enemy because “during the day we heard the frontlines … the planes and the tanks that sounded the arrogance of the Germans” (ibid.). The soldier accused of desertion, in contrast, could “only speak through closed lips,” his humanity thus silenced by his body (ibid., 39). Song, however, did not disappear from the dystopian chaos of the first track. Its locus, too, was the body and the voice, protected against the thunder unleashed by the machinery of the state, still recognizable as a love song.

From Chaos Arises Epic

Steppes and city together yield a battalion

Heiner Müller, Wolokolamsker Chaussee (1988, 36)

The surfeit of voices mustered in chaos notwithstanding, the playwright and composer transform the first track into the literary and musical genre of epic, and they do so by linking form and performance to Greek tragedy. The chaos that encompasses the beginning of the track necessitates that the listener sort through the mass of sound unleashed by the multiple narrators and the metal band, searching with active listening from the fragments that cohere as the chiasmic moment of story and history. There is risk in beginning the first track with chaos, for it might effectively alienate the listener, obscuring rather than affirming the formal and structural foundations of the entire recording. Heiner Müller averts that risk, however, by transforming text from the novel so that the listener can follow a poetic path along the unfolding hemistiches unambiguously to find firm sonic footing for the journey that follows. In order to achieve this formal end, he crafts a text that sounds not only the structure of epic, but also opens the common aural space heterophonically resounded by epic speech-song (see P. Bohlman 2012). It is into that aural space that Heiner Goebbels moves deftly and brilliantly with the musical forces he conjoins for the recording. The chaos of the first track, thus, becomes a literary and musical metonym for the “Russian Gambit” itself, which multiplies the moments of what Barbara Kordes calls “musical reading processes” (musikalische Lesarten) that distinguish the Müller/Goebbels collaborations (Kordes 2009).

Müller’s elevation of chaos to epic materializes at three different levels, each requiring a distinctive combination of poetic and dramatic techniques. First of all, Müller identifies the pertinent narrators in the novel’s tale of desertion and degradation, and he realizes these as first-person narrators in “Russian Gambit.” Whereas the novel relies almost entirely on the dual narrators’ voices of the author, Bek, and the battalion commander, Momysch-Uly, Müller lets each character in the story speak for himself. In this way, Müller resets the stage for a radio play, effecting a transformation of one literary genre to another. As specific and indebted to the novel as “Russian Gambit” may be, Müller also anonymizes the narrators by allowing their voices to blend together. We witness here, too, a process of opening toward the acts and tracks that follow by creating a common narrator’s space that stretches across the entire play and recording.

The careful reworking of text from the novel to fulfill the stichic, line-by-line structure of epic affords Müller a second level of transformation. It is sound itself—of individual words and the rhythms they form when joined through carefully crafted syntax—that guides Müller as he sutures textual fragments together. The caesurae that divide each line into hemistiches are clearly evident because of the ways they act as a sonic mirror for the text on either side. Sound takes priority over grammar in Müller’s location of the caesura, as for example in the following lines in the opening minutes of the track, in which sound is beautifully balanced, even as sense is sacrificed to the structure of epic hemistiches:

Der Deutsche Habt ihr / ihn gesehn Wie kämpft er

The German...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Sources and Translations
• Preface
• Introduction: Sounding the Wounded Dialectic
• 1 Russian Gambit
• 2 Forest near Moscow
• 3 The Duel
• 4 Centaurs
• 5 The Foundling
• Epilogue: The End of Epic as Its Beginning
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright