Wolokolamsker Chaussee III – "The Duel" by Heiner Müller | Reading | Play

“Four years in power and this is where we stand / Our tanks are our last resort / And out there, the world is passing us by / From Cuba to Cambodia and so on”

from: Heiner Müller: Wolokolamsker Chaussee III – The Duel

In Anna Seghers’ 1968 short story *The Duel*, Professor Winkelfried seeks to impose his pedagogical convictions on the lecturer Karl Bötcher – during a physics examination taken by the working-class student Helwig. Both men studied together during the Nazi regime, though Winkelfried, who conformed to the regime, was able to pursue a career as a professor. Bötcher was sent to a concentration camp as a communist and was only able to work as a teacher after 1945. The ‘duel’ between Bötcher and Winkelfried centres on the question of whether a worker can meet the demands of a university and take on leadership roles in the enterprises of the new society.

In the 1987 play *Duell bei Müller*, the factory director Bötcher encounters Helwig, who has since become his deputy at the VEB Oktober and challenges him during the workers’ uprising of 17 June 1953.

Written as Bötcher’s inner monologue, his memories of the conflicts in the early years of the GDR are dramatically intensified. The Soviet tanks that put an end to the uprising may have saved the SED’s rule, but at the same time they destroyed any hope of democratic socialism.

Staging by Solaf Almusleh

• Read by Florian Müller and Noé Lausch, students at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, Berlin