The playwright Heiner Mueller was born in East Germany in 1929. His work is complex, but the large body of work which he has written since the early 1960s has made him one of Europe's leading dramatists. Since the Berlin Wall came down he has travelled freely in Europe, speaking to students and experimental groups. This book contains an introduction to Mueller's work, and a selection of his plays, poetry, short prose and essays.

This best-selling volume contains several of the German author's most controversial dramas, in which he radically questions how culture, myth, art, and social relations create history. Includes: "Hamletmachine, Correction, The Task, Quartet, Despoiled Shore, " and "Gundling's Life." One of the most original theatrical minds of our time, Muller, who resided in East Berlin before his death in 1995, was a frequent collaborator of Robert Wilson.

"The most important German playwright since Brecht." -- John Rockwell, New York Times

Against the background of recent social upheavals in the former German Democratic Republic, Heiner Mller's articulation of his country's history and politics assumes a startling intensity.

Due to the limited number of digits or bits per storage location in electronic computers, round-off errors arise during arithmetic operations. Depending upon the kind of operation, the structure of the data, and the skillfulness of the program, these errors increase and spread out more or less quickly during a continued computation process in which the computed data affected by errors are themselves used for generating new data. The purpose of this investigation was to learn about the increase of round-off errors in linear programming procedures. Less attention was paid to the theory of round-off errors or to the effectiveness of error elimination procedures. In regard to these questions the results of in vestigations which have been made on round-off errors in a more general context dealing with matrix inversion and eigenvalue problems could be used for the purposes of this paper. The emphasis of this investigation lay rather on studying the behavior of typical linear programming problems from the pOint of view of error cumulation."

Reihenfolgeprobleme stehen im Fachgebiet des Operations Research seit einiger Zeit im Mittelpunkt des Interesses. Nachdem bis vor wenigen Jahren fur viele Reihenfolgeprobleme noch keine brauchbaren Loesungs- verfahren bekannt waren, wurden seit etwa 1960 verschiedene Verfahren entwickelt, die kleine und mittelgrosse Probleme mit wirtschaftlich ver- tretbarem Aufwand exakt und groessere Probleme mit hinreichender Genauigkeit zu loesen gestatteten. In der vorliegenden Arbeit sollen diese Verfahren diskutiert und vor allem uber die mit ihnen an zahlreichen Beispielen gewonnenen Erfahrungen berichtet werden. Bei der Beschrei- bung der Verfahren stehen algorithmische Gesichtspunkte und Fragen der Eignung zur Programmierung fur elektronische Rechenautomaten im Vordergrund. Einige neuere Verfahren wurden auf Rechenautomaten getestet. Die dabei erzielten Ergebnisse werden ausfuhrlich analysiert. Bei der Darstellung habe ich mich von der Maxime leiten lassen, ein schnell lesbares Buch hervorzubringen. Dem Leser, gleichgultig ob Theoretiker oder Praktiker, moechte ich damit die Gelegenheit bieten, sich mit einem Minimum an Zeit in die wesentlichen Strukturen der Reihenfolgeprobleme und deren Loesungsverfahren einzuarbeiten. Zu diesem Zweck habe ich bei der Beschreibung der Loesungsverfahren jeweils nach einfuhrenden Eroerterungen Beispiele zur Demonstration herangezogen und erst abschliessend die allgemeingultigen Formulierun- gen der Verfahren gegeben. Auf mathematischen Formalismus habe ich weitgehend verzichtet, soweit er nicht zum Verstandnis der Probleme und Verfahren erforderlich oder zum Lesen der wichtigsten Fachliteratur unumganglich war.

"Heiner Muller After Shakespeare" makes available for the first time "Macbeth" and "Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome," the last of the Shakespeare-inspired plays of the renowned German author to be translated into English. His reflections on the importance of his chosen dramatic model are highlighted in the text of his address "Shakespeare A Difference," also included in the volume. Muller (1929-1995), whose "Hamletmachine" is a contemporary classic, is regarded as one of the most profound visionaries of twentieth-century drama and at the time of his death was one of Europe's leading intellectual figures. His Shakespeare plays are startling in their imagery and poetry and uncompromising depiction of the violence of power and politics. Truly, they are plays for our age.
Since first introducing his work to the English-speaking world in 1983 with "Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage," PAJ Publications has also published several other volumes by the author: "Explosion of a Memory," "The Battle," "The Heiner Muller Reader." They include his dramatic works as well as poems, speeches, and interviews. "Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage" is one of PAJ's best-selling titles, with over 10,000 volumes in print.
The volume is translated by Carl Weber and Paul David Young. Weber has edited and translated all the Muller volumes, as well as plays by Kleist, Handke, and Kroetz. Also a director, he is professor emeritus at Stanford University. Young is the recipient of the Kennedy Center's Paul Vogel Playwriting Award. He is currently working on a film version of his play "In the Summer Pavilion."
"Heiner Muller was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and will undoubtedly be among the most indispensable of the 21st, the terrors of which his plays seem to have anticipated and anatomized. As Shakespeare's dramatic poems emerged from an historical moment of a great linguistic and cultural synthesis, Muller's gorgeous, mind-bending and altering upgrades of Shakespeare mark our present crisis-moment of linguistic and cultural discombobulation, if not disintegration." - Tony Kushner, playwright
"Heiner Muller's unmistakable voice--ferocious and brilliant, brutal and profoun -- burns through in pitch-perfect translations. "Macbeth" and "Anatomy Titus Fall of Rome" are the perfect Shakespearean vehicles for Muller's vision of the bloody twentieth century. These plays are not just great theatre--and they are great theatre--they are indispensable documents of European culture." - Oskar Eustis, artistic director, The Public Theater
"Heiner Muller's plays, astonishing in their punch and poetry, are imbued with muscularity, richness and theatricality. His influence on the field is palpable and PAJ's publications of brilliant translations will help to ensure that Muller's wide-open vision of the theatre will proliferate. We urgently need his combination of the political, personal and aesthetic in our current culture." - Anne Bogart, artistic director, Siti Company
"A new volume of Heiner Muller's coruscating, deeply damaged performance prose/ poetry arrives just in time for further chapters of the continued degradation and decline of the West. His theatre pieces take on galling new dimensions as democracies all over the world are in crisis and citizens of Arab countries pour into the streets to demand self-determination.... Heiner Muller was a connoisseur of tyranny. The violence and the decay are already in the language, and thus his rendezvous with Shakespeare.... After the fire, there is space for new growth in an old forest." - Peter Sellars, director

Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the most important German dramatists since Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Muller (1929-95) still remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This collection of plays aims to change that, presenting new translations and opening up his work to a larger audience. Collected here are three of his plays--"Philoctetes," "The Horatian," and "Mauser"--whose poetic texts evidence the influence of Shakespeare, classical Greek tragedy, and avant-garde political theater on his works. Together they constitute what Muller called an "experimental series," which both develops and critiques Brecht's theory of the "Lehrstuck," or "learning play." Based on a tragedy by Sophocles, "Philoctetes" dramatizes the confrontation between politics, morality, and the desire for revenge. "The Horatian" uses an incident from ancient Rome as an example of ways of approaching the moral ambiguity of the past. Finally, "Mauser," set during the Russian civil war, examines the nature and ethics of revolutionary violence. The plays are accompanied by supporting materials written by Muller himself, as well as an introduction by Uwe Schutte that contextualizes the plays and speaks of their continued relevance today.