SPIEGEL: In your view, was there such a thing as a GDR culture?
MÜLLER: I don’t know. In literature there were certainly things that were relatively specific to what emerged in the GDR. But it was still written in German, and in the end there was a criterion for whether it was good German or not. In this respect there were never two literatures. Of course, both sides had trivial literature. The one here was state-run and the one there was commercial; that was the difference.
SPIEGEL: What do you view as GDR achievements worthy of preservation? And how should they be saved?
MÜLLER: If I only knew! For example, I was away for five days; I was in France or somewhere. There’s a bookstore in my building. In these five days the book display had changed beyond recognition. There were only DuMont travel guides and cookbooks on the shelves. It doesn’t have to be GDR books, but a lot of our publishers have published a lot of high-quality international works. None of that is possible anymore if they were printed in the GDR.
SPIEGEL: Because your people don’t want to buy it anymore?
MÜLLER: Of course. Sure. My resistance is to the quick assimilation.
SPIEGEL: Isn’t the resistance also a bit of a defiant reaction by an offended intellectual? [ . . . ]
MÜLLER: [ . . . ] I’m not offended.
SPIEGEL: But a lot of your artistic colleagues are, because the revolution ran right past them.
MÜLLER: Where to? I was rather skeptical from the outset. As soon as I hear the word “Volk,” I get leery. It isn’t my “Volk,” my people. I understood very well, especially in the fall of last year, why Brecht always insisted on saying “population” instead of “people.” A slogan like “We are one population,” of course, does not work. It doesn’t have any spark at all.
SPIEGEL: There was also the slogan: “We are a stupid people.”
MÜLLER: Yeah, I liked that. Even better was: “I am Volker.”* One banner read: “Wir sind das Volk” [“We are the people”], and next to it someone wrote, “I am Volker.” We will need the guy who wrote that. We have to strengthen those forces.
But back to the revolution. I don’t think we should look at it so emotionally, so heroically. What really happened there was that a government went bankrupt. Well, the credit chains break at the weakest link, just like other chains.
SPIEGEL: But maybe we shouldn’t look at it all that unemotionally either. A real fortress has been razed. It cannot just be ridiculed with an “I am Volker.”
* Volker is a German men’s name – trans.
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