Asked to describe Heiner Müller, the average theatergoer of 1990 in Frankfurt am Main might have responded that he is a sort of socialist William Shakespeare who would not exist had it not been for the Socialist Unity party (SED) of East Germany and the Prussian monarchy. Since the 1970s he has been widely considered by critics and the public to be the most provocative contemporary dramatist in all of Germany. Many festivals in Western Europe have prominently featured Müller's works--most notably the Frankfurt Experimenta 6, a seventeen-day festival in May and June 1990 in which seventy performances of his dramas were presented by theater companies from Eastern and Western Europe before an audience of twenty thousand. The mayor of Frankfurt pronounced Müller the most important dramatist of the German language; the president of the East Berlin Academy of the Arts declared his works a...