The book “I owe the world a dead man. Conversations with Heiner Müller” includes recordings of conversations with Alexander Kluge that took place between 1988 and 1993. The Cretan king Idomeneo, returning home from the Trojan War, was caught in a violent storm and swore to the god of the sea Poseidon to sacrifice to him, if he survived, the first man he met on the shore. His own son came out to meet him, and the king broke his promise. Thus Idomeneo was indebted to the world of a dead man.
Heiner Müller and Alexander Kluge reflect in six talks on the links between humanism and barbarism in ancient and modern thinking. They struggle for an understanding of antiquity and modernity that is not distorted by enlightenment and idealism. This is how a skeptical position, far removed from the “democratic consensus,” takes shape. These conversations are like a sharp knife stabbing into the flesh of thinking and writing.
