Heiner Müller is considered to be not only the most important playwright to emerge from the German Democratic Republic but also the East German playwright most heavily influenced by Bertolt Brecht.Müller “began where Brecht left off,” pushing further along the path of Brecht’s theatrical projects and theories and even taking up projects that had been left unfinished by Brecht himself.In the 1970s, with his “farewell to the learning play,” Müller seemed for a time to be distancing himself from his mentor.And yet the accusation of “literary patricide” sometimes made against him runs counter to the fact that Müller continued his interest in Brecht right up until his death in 1995.Since then, avant-garde theater artists have continued to honor the legacy of both playwrights.

This article explores Bertolt Brecht’s significance for the most advanced forms of contemporary experimental and avant-garde theater.Brecht is one of the most popular and most-produced playwrights world-wide, and certainly in Germany; however many mainstream productions tend to deprive his work of its radical political and aesthetic edge.Nevertheless, contemporary avant-garde and experimental theaterwould be fundamentally unthinkable without Brecht, and it is particularly indebted to the most radical phase of Brecht’s career, when he and his team were working on learning plays (Lehrstücke) in the late 1920s and early 1930s during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Brecht’s conception of a separation of the elements, of putting mechanisms of power clearly on display, and of creating collective agency that, via script-based theater, tendentially removed power from the hands of writers and directors, are fundamental building blocks of contemporary experimental theater. The article explores such forms and their impact on the basis of experimental work by Robert Wilson, Wanda Golonka, and She She Pop.