Portrait of Heiner Müller for his 60th Birthday

Directed by

Alexander Kluge

This portrait of Heiner Müller on the occasion of his 60th birthday is devoted for the most part to having Müller recount events and memories from the first quarter of his life, starting with his birth on January 9, 1929 and closing with his immediate postwar experiences in the mid-1940's. This part memoire, part biographical sketch of his early life includes descriptions of his parents’ background and employment activities, the arrest and incarceration of his father in a concentration camp in 1933, Müller’s recollections of school life in Nazi Germany, Müller’s brief detention in an American POW camp at the end of the war and, upon release, his adventurous return to his home in the Soviet Zone in eastern Germany. These snapshots of his first 16 years also include anecdotes about Peter the Great and Andrei Platonov’s “Sluices of Epiphany” as well a meditation on a scene from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.