Heiner Müller

Biography

Heiner Müller, born on January 9, 1929 in Eppendorf, Saxony, is considered one of the most significant dramatists writing in German in the second half of the 20th century. But he also wrote prose, poetry and essays and gave numerous interviews. After his first successes in the 1950s with his so-called production plays, his play “The Resettler Woman or Life in the Country” in 1961 led to performance bans and to his expulsion from the Writers’ Association of the GDR. During the 1970s he worked as dramaturge and house writer at the Berliner Ensemble and the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In the 1980s Heiner Müller was able to travel back and forth between east and west from East Berlin; in 1984 he was accepted into the Academy of the Arts in the GDR; in 1986 he received the National Prize of the GDR 1st Class; in 1988 he was accepted back into the GDR Writers’ Association. After the end of the GDR his influence on the cultural and discursive landscape was particularly through his work as a director, as the last president of the Academy of the Arts Berlin (East) from 1990 to 1992 and from 1992 to 1995 as general administrator of the Berliner Ensemble. Heiner Müller died on December 30, 1995 in Berlin. His most important awards include the Büchner Prize (1985), the Kleist Prize (1990) and the European Theatre Prize (1991). In 1996 Müller was posthumously awarded the Theatre Prize Berlin.