TDR: The Drama Review

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It would be an insult to the dead, to beg for sympathy or to lament their crushed nakedness. The event is beyond tears.

—George Tabori (in Schumacher 269)

It was just after ten o’clock in the evening, my first night in Munich last February. I was alone in a small room on the top floor of a pension, when I first heard the sirens. Startled, I stopped reading and listened, reflexively, irrationally, impossibly terrified and then, just as reflexively, irrationally, and impossibly, filled with laughter. It’s amazing, I thought, just like in The Diary of Anne Frank. For me, as an American and a Jew, the sound was instantly familiar and visceral, albeit conditioned by one of the more ubiquitous representations of the Nazi period rather than by my own lived experience. Jolted from the present, my imagination immediately conjured up the horror of arrest and transport, the sound of sirens followed by boots on stairs, fists on doors, and guttural shouts in German, of Auschwitz, and the skeletal remains of the victims.

Never again, indeed. Far from forgetting the Holocaust, much of the Western world now seems obsessed, saturated with narratives and images, authentic and manufactured, archived and commodified, of the camps, of Nazis and Jews and others, endlessly circulating, claiming our attention. Given the exponentially expanding discourse on the Holocaust, the act of theatrical representation seems especially ambivalent. Both Claude Schumacher, in Staging the Holocaust, and Vivian Patraka, in Spectacular Suffering, acknowledge the difficulties inherent in representing the Holocaust. The two books deal with these difficulties in very different ways. For Schumacher and his essayists the impossible and the unimaginable really are, and the tensions and contradictions inherent in representing the Holocaust remain unresolved and unresolvable. For Patraka, the problem is how to reconcile her multiculturalist and feminist values with the historical and geographic specificity of, and the centrality of Jews and men in the discourse about, the Holocaust. The essays in Schumacher’s collection represent a range of historical and geographic perspectives—European, Israeli, and American—and are sharply focused, so that the essayists often are explicitly pitted against each other in a conversation which has a history and an ongoing sense of conflict and confrontation. In contrast, as a solitary American writer surveying both dramatic and museum-centered performances of Holocaust memorialization, Patraka seems always to be reaching [End Page 174] for a point of contact with other oppressions and other genocides; for her representations of the Holocaust must be examined for effective inclusivity, women as well as men, non-Jewish victims as well as Jewish.

Claude Schumacher introduces the essays in Staging the Holocaust by recognizing that even for the survivors the Holocaust represented the “monstrously unimaginable” (2). The crucial questions for Schumacher as well as for the contributors to this volume are:

Can theatre provide the artefact that will help the spectator towards a better “grasp” of the Holocaust? Is such a theatrical “recreation” justified? And if it is, how can an actor hope to portray either the perpetrator or the victim, without glamorizing or demonizing the former and belittling or sanctifying the latter? (3)

Thus, for Schumacher, “To bear witness is one thing, but to ‘perform’ the testimony is another” (4). There is no formula for representing the unrepresentable, no prescription which resolves the uneasy relationship between remembering and theatricalizing, beyond the demand that the impossibility of resolution be recognized:

I shall venture to argue that the successful Shoah drama or performance is one that disturbs, offers no comfort, advances no solution; it is a play that leaves the reader or spectator perplexed, wanting to know more although convinced that no knowledge can ever cure him of his perplexity. It must be a play that generates stunned silence.

(8)

In contrast, from the start, Patraka appears to be looking through the issue of representing the Holocaust to address another set of issues, primarily feminist. In Spectacular Suffering she begins with the definitional problem of the term “Holocaust” which for her “brings with it all the protocols of the unspeakable, the incommensurate, and a sense of unlimited scope to pain and injustice” (1) as a way of positioning the one particular historical event within the context of the more general phenomenon of genocide. She considers both the way in which the “Jewish genocide [has come to act as] a paradigmatic frame for other genocides” (4) and the way in which “the struggle to represent the Holocaust in its goneness [the absence of its central figures] clarifies the limitations of representation in general” (4). More important to Patraka at many points in the book is the question of how gender might be seen to matter, how the representational problem of the Holocaust—making present the stories of those who did not survive—might be understood in light of, even conflated with, the feminist problem of women’s representational “absence.”

In Staging the Holocaust, Schumacher presents a remarkable collection of essays representing the depth and the breadth of the field. Each essay is accompanied by at least one photograph or image which visually grounds the reader, and the book closes with Alvin Goldfarb’s invaluable annotated bibliography of Holocaust plays (1933–1997), an update of his original contribution to Elinor Fuch’s Plays of the Holocaust (1987). The 17 essays in Staging the Holocaust are thick with theatrical and social history, as impressive for their descriptions and analyses of performances as for the way in which each author resists making a “final solution” to the problem of Holocaust representation. The titles are evocative, and taken together the authors are representative of the field.

The issues Schumacher raises in his introduction are taken up in the first essays: “Holocaust Theatre and the Problem Of Justice” (Robert Skloot), “The Power and Limits of the Metaphor of Survivors’ Testimony” (Hank Greenspan), “On the Fantastic in Holocaust Performances” (Freddie Rokem), “The Holocaust [End Page 175] Experience through Theatrical Profanation” (Gad Kaynar), and “Theatrical Interpretation of the Shoah: Image And Counter-Image” (Dan Laor). The collection then focuses on these ideas as they are circulated and contested in and by specific playtexts, performances, and writers.

It is easy, therefore, to point to Staging the Holocaust as an extraordinarily rich resource, one to be returned to repeatedly. Certain essays stand out for their insight and force. Hank Greenspan, for example, immediately confronts the problem of how survivor narratives are absorbed by American culture by offering the title of a talk he once gave: “How to Listen to Holocaust Survivors Without Hearing Anything” (27). He goes on to discuss the ways in which “we surround survivors’ speech with so much hype, so much ceremonial and rhetorical fencing, that we are almost able to seal it off completely” (29). He offers the example of his own radio play, Remnants, as an example of an attempt to trouble the audience’s relationship to survivor narratives, but also comes to recognize that the voices of the survivors are like the other voices of our ancestors: “Far from emerging from the Holocaust, they are what can be salvaged and transmitted in spite of the Holocaust” (38, emphasis in the original).

Freddie Rokem and Gad Kaynar, writing from Israel where stories about the Holocaust have been central to the formation of cultural identity, make cases for exposing and disrupting the conventions of Holocaust performance. At the end of his essay, Kaynar quotes Rokem directly asking, “What does it mean to tattoo a number on the arm in order to perform a Holocaust survivor?” and answers:

[T]o profane a symbol by staging a theatrical—namely, public—act of estranging it, recontextualizing it, misusing and abusing it and thereby crassly demartyrologizing or undemonizing the typology of character-structures connected with it, means to regenerate the real experience for which this trite and overprotective symbol pretends to stand by renouncing, or rejuvenating, the hollow sign. It is, thereby, not only an aesthetic but also an ideological and political act that erases the mythical and mystical uniqueness of the Shoah in order to revive it as a recharged and meaningful paradigm which bears on our present existence.

(69)

Seth Wolitz first recalls for the reader Robert Skloot’s list of objectives in Holocaust performance—“honouring the victims, teaching history to audiences, evoking emotional responses, discussing ethical issues, and suggesting solutions to universal, contemporary” (130)—and then uses this list to explore the implications of the Jewish State Theatre production of Der Kheshbn (The Final Bill [or Account or Reckoning]) by Mikhl Mirsky in 1963. However instead of simply judging the production for its complicity with the Communist regime and its concurrent tendencies toward the excesses of its Yiddish theatre devices, Wolitz points to the value of remembering the whole of Jewish theatrical and social history.

Echoing Greenspan, Rokem, and Kaynar, among others, and picking up Kristeva’s discussion of the relationship between horror and lust, Helga Finter focuses on a theatrical adaptation of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man by Teatro Stabile (in Turin) as a way of returning us to the critical problem of representing the Holocaust theatrically:

The problem of overcoming the psychic deafness noted earlier, while at the same time avoiding complicity with evil, changes into the question of what can be made audible and visible without giving into the perverse delectation of voyeurism. (232–23) [End Page 176]

Comparing the theatrical strategy of the Teatro Stabile production to that of Peter Weiss’s Investigation at the Volksbühne (Berlin), Finter points toward juxtaposing realism and abstraction, in “the dichotomy of oratorio and an impossible realistic representation” (252), and in the separation of “the noises of power and force from the noises of human suffering” (253).

Also pushing past the sacral aura of Holocaust representation is Anat Feinberg in her analysis of George Tabori’s Jubiläum. She says he:

tries to free the experience of confronting the past, to free the actors and the spectators from those conventions and taboos which burden and strain, distort and falsify it; from sentimental pity, sanctimonious judgement and from that hypocritical philo-Semitism which, to many, is the reverse side of anti-Semitism.

(269–70)

It is perhaps unfortunate that Spectacular Suffering should find itself on the same desk as Staging the Holocaust. For all its ambition and seriousness, Patraka’s book is disappointing. It is very limited and limiting, too brief and as such often oddly superficial and glib in skimming playtexts and commentaries rather than offering in-depth analyses, and throughout obfuscating with jargon where simplicity might yield deeper and more original results. In the end, what is presented is a categorical literary study more than a theatrical analysis, an orientation that is signaled by the total absence of photographs or other images from the book. Even the section on the Holocaust museums in Washington and Los Angeles, while offering some cogent observations about purpose and effect, generally fails to examine the more uncomfortable implications of such efforts. Indeed, taken as a whole, Spectacular Suffering reflects the very ambiguities and ambivalences that are manifest in the Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance (Los Angeles), “a Holocaust museum that seeks to serve not only as a place to memorialize victims of persecution but also as a laboratory for devising strategies to combat hate, violence, and prejudice in the present” (119).

Patraka thus surveys the vast field of Holocaust literature and scholarship, with a particular focus on the place of women in the discussion—at least until she comes to her final chapter. In “Shattered Cartographies” she considers the “tropes” of Holocaust representation, for example, the “trope of translation” as it appears in Leeny Sack’s The Survivor and the Translator and “the trope of carrying” in Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word (24–25). For me the word “trope” becomes quickly reductive; instead of giving readers an entry into new ways of evaluating how these plays problematize their own projects, the analysis of each text seldom extends beyond a single page. Patraka begins her second chapter (“Reproduction, Appropriation, and Binary Machinery”) by revisiting current writings on fascism in pursuit of plays that utilize particular strategies in representing the past as a way of attempting to expose and critique fascist structures in the present. She then turns quickly (the chapter is 15 pages) to a series of plays—Thomas Bernhard’s Eve of Retirement, Joan Schenkar’s The Last of Hitler, Martin Sherman’s Bent, and Peter Barnes’s Laughter!—as well as a number of films.

The heart of Spectacular Suffering seems to lie in the third and fourth chapters. “Feminism and the Jewish Subject” again takes up contemporary theory, beginning with Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985), and returns to Schenkar’s Last of Hitler as well as to the plays of Nelly Sachs and Charlotte Delbo, among others, to consider ways in which the position of the victim may be seen as contested. In “Realism, Gender, and Historical Crisis” Patraka focuses on Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine and Julia to address the representation of the liberator and the problem of gender in Hellman’s now rather dated polemics of heroism. Patraka’s effort in these chapters to examine the [End Page 177] relative absence, and suppression, of women as women from representations of the Holocaust is potentially provocative, with the possibility of pushing our understanding of the Holocaust representations as problems of masculine identification, or the loss thereof: “The problem, then, is to locate ‘Jewishness’ for women in regard both to the Holocaust and to the possibility of a collective identity that relates to that history” (55). Yet as with her discussion of the two Holocaust museums, the writing is more symptomatic and analytic, in a tension with the more dominant strands of thought about Holocaust representation rather than standing on its own to give her book necessary coherence, originality, and heart. The result is a discourse which strains at its own project and seems to replicate anti-Semitic ambivalence towards the Holocaust as something that happened to the Jews because they were Jews, without effectively challenging, resolving, or deepening this essentialist understanding.

Ironically, when Patraka makes the leap to the topic of Holocaust museums in her final chapter (“Spectacular Sufferings”) the absence of the theatrical in her analyses is most apparent. After all, while the museums are filled with texts of a sort, they are most interesting for their attempts to theatricalize the visitor’s relationship to history. While Patraka acknowledges the ways in which the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington creates a nationalist narrative of liberation and democracy from the material history of the Holocaust, she refuses to engage critically with the way in which the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance seeks to generalize from the specific historical experience of the Holocaust to contemporary, everyday examples of intolerance beyond recognizing the risk of “creating an abstract equivalence” (119). As with the rest of Spectacular Suffering, Patraka manages to quote from an astonishing array of elite philosophical and theoretical sources as well as to make use of original sources. Yet in contrast to the essayists in Staging the Holocaust, who in their brief chapters always appear to participate in the hugely contested ongoing conversation about the Holocaust in performance, she seems to be writing in isolation. Perhaps the theoretical point of departure of both books—that contradiction, ambiguity, and ambivalence are essential to effective theatricalization of the Holocaust—is true also of theoretical considerations of the topic. Otherwise why bother to add one’s voice to the clamor?