8 - Beyond the Impasse?: Barbara Köhler's “Elektra. Spiegelungen”

Summary

QUESTIONED ABOUT HER POEM-CYCLE “Elektra. Spiegelungen” (Electra. Mirrorings) in an interview recorded in 1993, Barbara Köhler said: “Perhaps the whole cycle was a commentary on, a mirroring of Die Hamletmaschine.” In the same interview, she describes the work as an attempt “to escape the murder-machinery,” and as having more to do with the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit) than with (by implication Müller's) vendetta.

The texts that make up the cycle “Elektra. Spiegelungen,” written between 1984 and early 1985, are among the earliest in Köhler's first collection, Deutsches Roulette (1991), and so stand at the very inception of her oeuvre. It was a period in which she was a participant in the socalled “unofficial scene” in the GDR, a term used to designate the loosely connected groups of writers, visual artists, photographers, printmakers, songwriters, and musicians who in large part avoided state-controlled institutions for the publication and dissemination of their work, instead circulating hand-printed samizdat editions among friends and co-artists and performing in cafés and galleries or in private apartments. Artistic creativity within the confines of this “scene” was often dialogic, collaborative. Thus the “Elektra” cycle was not only conceived as a counter-work to Müller's “Hamlet,” but also arose out of a creative exchange between Köhler and the graphic artist Gudrun Höritzsch, in which each responded to the other's work in their own medium. The very first publication of the joint work was in an edition of fifteen copies, with Köhler's poems and Höritzsch's woodcuts interleafed in a folder.