Like many playwrights in the early German Democratic Republic, Inge and Heiner Müller took Bertolt Brecht's epic theater as a precedent for their own work towards a denaturalized and productive political theater. This approach derived largely from Brecht's ideal of an audience “das sich ein neues Leben aufbaut und die Geschehnisse auf der Bühne nicht mehr einfach hinnimmt … , sondern kräftig mitredet” (“that constructs a new life for itself and no longer simply accepts the events onstage as a given … , but joins in vigorously”), which meant focusing on the spectator's active engagement. Brecht's motivation was, as Laura Bradley summarizes, to “encourage spectators to watch performances critically and alertly, to judge and argue over what they had seen, and to consider [the] political and social relevance [of a play] to their own lives.” But direct comparisons between Brecht and other early-GDR playwrights only go so far, as young writers such as the Müllers also developed new tools for socialist audiences. Using Die Korrektur (The Correction) as an example, this paper compares and differentiates the Müllers’ approach to the stage-audience relationship from that of Brecht in order to explore some of the novel means for political activism and intercession developed during the period of socialist (re-) construction (Aufbau) in the GDR. Specifically, I examine how the Müllers’ method established an interdependent, dialectical relationship between audience and stage, in which spectators could and had to respond immediately to the sociopolitical criticism onstage. While I ground this analysis, in part, in Brecht's sketch of a dialectical theater, I suggest that emphasizing the spatiality of the theater—the theater as a site of live performance— more aptly captures the expansion and divergence in Die Korrektur. I argue that the Müllers develop a metaphorical space in which the political contests of the present play out and spectators can collaborate on their own place of belonging in the contemporaneous GDR.

The backdrop to this work was far from uncontested, however. As the SED began to establish socialist realism as the state-mandated method of cultural production in the 1950s, a rift emerged in the dramatic sphere.