Die Schlacht [The Battle / The Slaughter, 1951/1974], in a real sense Müller’s “first” play, had to wait over twenty years for performance and publication. But even by 1975, these five short scenes had lost nothing of their avant-garde, provocative quality, and in many ways their uncompromising bleakness forms a more fitting overture to Müller’s later work than the “difficult optimism” of Der Lohndrücker, Die Korrektur and Die Bauern, which had to struggle against an overwhelming sense of catastrophe. The victory of socialism was only apparent and temporary.
The title of the play is intentionally ambiguous – it connotes both the monstrous Germanic cosmology of Hitler’s war and the crude reality of humans slaughtering and butchering one another in a no-holds-barred struggle for survival. In each scene, Müller breaks open taboos which both German...
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Citation: Milfull, John. "Die Schlacht". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 March 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=14460, accessed 05 December 2025.]
