The Holocaust, one of the defining catastrophes in human history, demands our continuous efforts at representation and interpretation. As the event itself becomes more distant, artists have to find new ways of bringing it to life for their contemporaries. (The urgency of this need was apparent at last year’s Academy Awards, when the Oscar for Best Director went to Roman Polanski for The Pianist, and Caroline Link’s Nowhere in Africa was chosen as Best Foreign-Language Film.) Yet it is not only artists who must rethink the Holocaust for a new generation but critics too, if they are to serve the public well.
Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance (Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre)
Cambridge University Press
372 pages
$144.61
For the performing arts, and for critics of the performing arts, the Holocaust poses a particular challenge. Mass extermination calls into question many of the philosophical notions drama and theater have relied on throughout their history: character, identity, and will; agency and choice; justice and redemption; human dignity, morality, and meaning itself. The Holocaust also seems to make a mockery of the most basic elements of drama: hamartia and conflict; complication and suspense; reversal, climax, and denouement. And if even human imagination finds the Holocaust difficult to fathom, isn’t the stage—with its material means, such as actors, scenery, props, lighting, and sound—still more likely to distort our grasp of such an experience? Indeed, theatrical performance may be especially prone to doing an injustice to the victims of the Holocaust, by wrapping the Shoah in a two-hour entertainment package, by turning it into trivial spectacle, by exploiting it in order to fascinate the audience. Or might the theater—with its irreducible presence of a community of actors and spectators—hold special opportunities? What can drama and theater, as distinct from the other arts, contribute to our ongoing attempts at understanding the Holocaust?
Such questions have lately been discussed in a number of critical works. Perhaps the widest-ranging of these is Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, edited by Claude Schumacher. Seventeen contributors—academic researchers of drama and theater as well as practitioners of the stage—from Israel, the United States, Germany, and Great Britain offer a rich array of topics and approaches: some sketch larger developments of general historical or aesthetic import, others describe or analyze individual authors or particular works and stagings.
In a succinct introductory chapter, Schumacher circumscribes the arena of his collection, asking what it is that can make the theatrical representation of the Holocaust legitimate, and “how an actor [can] hope to portray either the perpetrator or the victim, without glamorizing or demonizing the former and belittling or sanctifying the latter.” In the lead essay, Robert Skloot goes so far as to suggest that today, with the very idea of justice shaken by postmodernism, neither playwrights nor actors nor spectators feel up to the task of judging the Nazi perpetrators. But is this loss of faith in justice and a corresponding disinclination to render judgment—even in the case of the Nazis—as widespread as Skloot supposes?
Freddie Rokem analyzes how Israeli theater since 1980 has explored new ways of diminishing the incommunicability of the Holocaust, not only through first-person testimony and documentary realism, but, more paradoxically, through what Tzvetan Todorov calls “the fantastic”: “an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this [. . .] world.” During the Holocaust, under the control of incomprehensible forces, Jews must have experienced the world as fantastic. The Israeli performances Rokem discusses—such as Uncle Arthur, Adam’s Purim Party, Ghetto, and Arbeit Macht Frei—attempt to relate precisely this experience, in order then to establish that what may seem fantastic did in fact take place. The key to this strategy is the arrangement of a certain relation between stage and audience: through the structure of performance-within-performance, these stagings induce self-reflection, skepticism, and hesitation, leading to the spectator’s inability to move forward. But what, we may ask, is achieved by reproducing the historical victim’s paralysis in the spectator?
Like Rokem, Gad Kaynar analyzes how recent Israeli performances have tried to reach beyond their society’s routine rituals of commemorating the Shoah—his examples include many of the same plays Rokem discusses, plus The Child (Boy) Dreams, Piwnica, Hametz, and Adam Son of a Dog. In order to invent a newly authentic vision of the Holocaust and to make possible more genuine forms of remembrance, these performances profane Israel’s most sacred taboos: they revel in grotesque travesty and irreverent kitsch, and even force their spectators to “collaborate” in the enjoyment of a theater of cruelty. By highlighting their own theatricality, they display a Shoah-as-performance and introduce ideas of pretense and myth into the discussion of the Holocaust. Kaynar claims that this recent approach is different from the by now outworn association of Nazi demonism and theatrical decadence, as presented in Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and examined in Friedlander’s Essay on Kitsch and Death (1982).
Alvin Goldfarb looks at plays by four American dramatists—Emily Mann, Wendy Kesselman, Barbara Lebow, and Jon Robin Baitz—in which the leading character is a Holocaust survivor. All four authors employ the formulae of the well-made play. Focusing on the individual survivor, they avoid harsh consequences and suggest that, after the Holocaust, familial redemption was possible. Goldfarb charges them with oversimplifying and romanticizing their subject, turning it into the stuff of melodrama and leading to a domesticated image of the Holocaust. But need resolution as such diminish the complexity and the enormity of the dehumanization that took place during the Shoah?
John Ireland’s and Dorothy Knowles’ respective studies of Armand Gatti underline an artistic position that appears to be shared by most of the volume’s contributors as well as the dramatists and directors they discuss: that conventional realism and documentary theater are unable to communicate the particular experience of the Holocaust, and that, in fact, imaginative, subjective, and somewhat abstract forms of creation end up having a more “real” effect on the spectator. Gatti himself has developed a stage language inspired by Chinese theater, without regular characters and plots.
That only a certain level of artistic anti-realism can overcome the deafness with which survivors’ testimonies are usually met is also the presupposition of Helga Finter’s treatment of Primo Levi’s stage version of Se questo è un uomo. By transcending realism, art can do more than describe the horror. It can explore what happens when a human soul encounters evil, and it can establish a cultural and psychic connection to the spectator. At the same time, it runs the risk of evoking a kind of voyeurism, a perverse pleasure in a fellow human’s abjection. For Levi, the challenge consists in steering clear of such complicity with evil and in being heard nevertheless. The solution: to let the theater make its audience aware of their unconscious desire for destruction. According to Finter’s theoretically deep and historically detailed analysis, Levi manages—through set design, accessories, lighting, music, chorus, and stylized acting—to avoid the dangers of, on the one hand, turning the Shoah into an unrepresentable mystery, and, on the other hand, allowing for easy catharsis and cheap relief. Finter’s understanding of the risks and the opportunities of Holocaust theater thus corresponds with the views expressed by Rokem, Kaynar, Ireland, and Knowles.
Anat Feinberg reads George Tabori’s Jubiläumas subverting sanctimonious victim worship and philo-Semitism. Through black humor and repulsive vulgarisms, Tabori’s theater creates a “locus of remembrance.” In this space, the audience can perform the work of mourning, not as an automatic ritual, but as an intensely personal and concrete sense experience that involves the spectator physically, emotionally, and intellectually, and that requires individual choices. According to Tabori, these choices, which determine which side we are on, are what make us human. Feinberg even dares to introduce two terms that are off-limits for the volume’s other contributors: she suggests that Tabori, after remembering and working through the memories, aims at productive forgetting; and she claims that “the principle of hope (“Prinzip Hoffnung”) is crucial to Tabori’s theatre.” Feinberg concludes by crediting Tabori’s special perspective as enabling “us to recognize the true dimensions of the tragedy.” The question remains if that latter term—tragedy—is here in its rightful place.
Jeanette R. Malkin describes Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz as driven by anger and resentment, with no compensating literary, religious, or metaphysical structures, and with no possibility of forgiveness or reconciliation. On the contrary, through a sophisticated arrangement of the play’s setting and the place of performance—and thus again in certain respects similar to the self-reflexive strategies discussed by Rokem, Kaynar, Finter, and Feinberg—Bernhard forces his Vienna audience to acknowledge their own complicity in, and denial of, the Holocaust.
Essays by Hank Greenspan, Atay Citron, Dan Laor, Seth Wolitz, Roy Kift, Yehuda Moraly, Claude Schumacher, and Alexander Stillmark expand the volume’s pronounced international perspective. Not all of the book’s contributions are on the same stylistic level, and the typographical errors, especially in the notes and with foreign-language items, are at times annoying. Particularly helpful is Alvin Goldfarb’s descriptive bibliography of over 200 Holocaust plays written between 1933 and 1997, as are the select bibliography of secondary literature and the numerous illustrations. Staging the Holocaust is highly recommended for anyone seeking detailed insights into the history, and recent performances, of Holocaust theater.
Jan Lüder Hagens is assistant professor of German at the University of Notre Dame.
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