Heiner Müllier, who died at the end of December 1995, was Germany's most acclaimed and controversial contemporary playwright. Before the political unification of 1989, he held the anomalous position of a writer, thinker, and practitioner of theatre who was at home, and extolled, in both East and West. Pre-1989 Müllier, occupied, as he put it, that chasm between the "two German capitals Berlin," whose "shared and not shared history" he saw — and portrayed as — "piled up by the latest earthquake as a borderline between two continents.” As in much of Müllier's writing (and directing), Walter Benjamin's "piled up" ruins of history became the image that connected the memories of a catastrophic past to the failures and repressions of the present. And as in much of his writing (and directing), Müllier used a postmodem theatre aesthetic to recover the repressions and betrayals of Western (and especially German) history. In his quasi-autobiographical play The Foundling, that ruinous past returns as highly concentrated layers of memory — as an act of mourning by a "foundling" son self-exiled from East to West Berlin. Centered on the broken body of the stepfather figure, and on the historical ideologies that tortured and disciplined it, The Foundling is a bitter elegy to the terrors of German history as translated into the flesh of its victims/perpetrators.