“The Coffin Seller’s Bankruptcy” at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

as part of Experimenta 6
inspired by the text of the same name by Heiner Müller (world premiere)
Text narrated by Otto Sander

“…The Bankruptcy of the Coffin Seller” is written on an arrow pointing the way to the exhibition rooms. The Vienna Master School for Stage Design (Director: Erich Wonder) has created more than eighty rooms: as responses to a previously unpublished text by Heiner Müller, written in 1951 and rediscovered in a colleague’s estate. Six typewritten pages, a “fragment.”
The Great Coffin Seller is bankrupt. His business had flourished for decades, writes Müller. Today is the last day. The old signs still hang in the shop window: “Rest affordably, representatively, comfortably.” Now the crowd storms into the back room—customers from back in the day: “Hang him!” In the city, “the flag of prostitution” flutters, and the coffin seller’s employees no longer understand the world. The boards are now being turned into furniture and tables on which the crowd eats sausage. The emptiness of decline. Wasn’t the coffin dealer a vegetarian? The riot rages like a clearance sale.
As a young man, Müller had entered a translation contest: Polish poems and Stalinist hymns for an anthology. They paid 350 marks per hymn, says Müller. “I could manage four hymns a night.” After that, there was a short story contest. That’s how “The Coffin Seller” came about, an anti-capitalist parable that now—suddenly the coffin dealer is no longer Hitler, but Honecker—takes a sinister turn. It became the only small premiere of this “Experimenta.”

At the Schirn, Otto Sander recites the text from a tape, his voice slightly distorted. Crossing a wide walkway made of planks—presumably bargain finds from the bankrupt coffin trade—one steps onto a platform, a stage, bounded by three black partition walls—the whole thing a learning path through Müller’s theater. The stage itself, this installation asserts, no longer matters. For behind it—“With the horizon, the memory of the coast fades”—there are further spaces. As if through embrasures, one looks through the black walls into the next world, each as large as a stage model.

One of these vistas is once again blocked by a black wall; only a few stones have been chipped away. You can see a black table on a grid of light, and on the table, a plate and a glass. Not a soul in sight. If you bend down, you see that this space is not a room at all, but a patch of landscape, surrounded by a gray wall and secured like a prison. If you kneel low enough, you’ll also discover the sky above. Fire over a piece of the GDR.
Again and again, shafts, up and down, ash and tunnels, with light inside that is radiation. Even the more realistic designs are not a bit friendlier: a tiled shower room with blue water channels and, in the center, a sacrificial stone that glows from within. In these nightmarishly beautiful rooms, there is nothing but absence, boathouses on the Acheron, turtles. The exhibition by the Wonder students is an early highlight of Müller’s “Experimenta”.”

Helmut Schödel in „Wir sind ein blödes Volk, Ein Heiner-Müller-Tagebuch zur Frankfurter Experimenta 6"
in the ZEIT on June 8, 1990