Cold War Compassion: The Politics of Pity in Tom Stoppard’s and Heiner Müller’s

At the same time on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, two avant-garde playwrights decided to remake a 2400-year-old tragedy. Heiner Müller (1929-1996) and Tom Stoppard (1937-) are widely regarded as two of the most innovative dramatists of East Germany and Great Britain and respectively. In 1965, Stoppard submitted a script for a spy thriller to Granada TV and Müller published his first play since being banned from the East German Writers’ Association in 1961. Though unbeknownst to each other and writing for drastically different purposes, media, and audiences, they both lit upon Sophocles’