[

/

, 1951/1974], in a real sense Müller’s “first” play, had to wait over twenty years for performance and publication. But even by 1975, these five short scenes had lost nothing of their avant-garde, provocative quality, and in many ways their uncompromising bleakness forms a more fitting overture to Müller’s later work than the “difficult optimism” of

,

and

, which had to struggle against an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. The victory of socialism was only apparent and temporary.

The title of the play is intentionally ambiguous – it connotes both the monstrous Germanic cosmology of Hitler’s war and the crude reality of humans slaughtering and butchering one another in a no-holds-barred

881 words

Citation: Milfull, John. "Die Schlacht". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14460, accessed 21 November 2024.]