MÜLLER: It’s real work for me to reflect on that now. I was raised in one dictatorship and grew into the next dictatorship, which started out as an anti-dictatorship with which I could identify. Very roughly speaking, I could also identify with Stalin. Stalin was the one who killed Hitler. After that, things became problematic. I was raised in this first dictatorship in a rather schizophrenic situation: Outside was “Heil Hitler!” and at home everything was okay. This tension emerged in a different way in the next dictatorship. That’s what is strange about it; I learned how to deal with it. I think it gave me a lot of experience as a writer and a lot of very contradictory material. Precisely this black foil of dictatorship and this broken or ambivalent relationship to the state was a movens, a motivation, for me to write.
I never doubted that this GDR existed only in dependence on the Soviet Union and that the population here lived under the status of a colonized people.
SPIEGEL: And for certain historical reasons you considered that appropriate?
MÜLLER: You can’t really say that, because I’m a writer, not a politician. I could work with it. Art has nothing to do with morality.
SPIEGEL: No, but there is also the person Heiner Müller.
MÜLLER: Only to a certain extent. The longer you write, the more the person is consumed. One point with regard to myself was this: What was useful for writing, totally void of morality and politics, was that we were also living in a Third World situation. Socialism in the GDR in its Stalinist form meant nothing more than the colonization of one’s own population. You can still see that today in the subway immediately. GDR citizens have a concealed glance. You can identify them right away as the people with the concealed glance. Even the children. It is the glance of the colonized.
SPIEGEL: Do you mean the situation of oppression helped you, it clarified things?
MÜLLER: There was greater experiential pressure than I could have had in Hamburg.
SPIEGEL: There is another clause to the Müller quotation we cited at the beginning of this interview. “We want to resist” the subjugation. How do you expect to resist in a situation in which German unity is long since a fait accompli?
MÜLLER: Let me give you an example. At the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Peter Ludwig – the great GDR patron – just had an argument with his museum directors, who decided: this GDR art emerged in an unjust system, it was painted in un-freedom [Unfreiheit]. Therefore, it belongs in the basement and is not allowed to be displayed. That trend exists here, too. Just a few days ago, I heard: GDR art will no longer be shown in GDR museums; it belongs in the basement.
SPIEGEL: So you mean resistance to getting plowed under?
MÜLLER: To the simple equation of culture or art or literature with the system in which it was created.
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