Holocaust Theme in Drama

“Resort 76 and the Holocaust Theme in Drama,” unpublished excerpt from class journal, spring 2001

Rigorous in its pursuit of realism and verisimilitude, the Holocaust stage drama Resort 76 somehow comes off unreal and contrived. It left me asking many questions about the Holocaust theme in drama, questions that offered no simple answers.

First question: Is the Holocaust theme so politically charged that these characters can only make the “right” decisions in the end? If so, does that restrict the narrative options? Is this a quality inherent to Holocaust drama? Is it a condition of Holocaust drama?

Dealing only with Holocaust literature that articulates and shares views consonant with the dominant paradigm — that Nazis are evil; that European Jews, guilty of none of the anti-Semitic charges leveled against them, were persecuted and murdered during Hitler’s 12-year Reich; that the Holocaust occurred — the Holocaust theme carries with it certain assumptions. These assumptions include those just specified — that Nazis are evil, etc. As reader or viewer, one assumes the playwright believes these things valid and incontrovertible. Therefore, the playwright who violates this covenant, whether by suggesting that Nazis were, in fact, not evil or that Jews deserved their fate, will find himself (one hopes) the object of calamitous scorn.

Of course, the playwright who works faithfully within these strictures cannot make a claim on truth simply by imparting axioms — Nazis are evil, innocent Jews were persecuted and murdered. The playwright who adheres too rigidly to these axioms may succumb to sanctimony, stolidity or simplicity. Nazis can still be evil and Jews innocent without casting this relationship in terms melodramatic and one-sided.

That’s why, I would argue, a Holocaust-themed play like Good works much more effectively than does Resort 76. The latter succumbs to sanctimony. Not only do the characters in the play make the “right” decisions, rather sanctimoniously, even the Aryan outsider, Krause, a Nazi stand-in, makes the “right” decision, killing himself when shown the hideous materiality of ghetto life. In departing from the notion that Nazis and their sympathizers are purely evil, Wincelberg ascribes to Krause values that seemingly accord with his own — and with basic notions of integrity and humanity. By making Krause the sole representative of the outsider-oppressor, Wincelberg’s suggestion that evil and indifference need only be shown the path to righteousness — that by simply seeing the squalor and misery being imposed on Jews by Nazi proscription might be sufficient to disgrace an otherwise unapologetic anti-Semite — seems particularly reckless.

Resort 76 raises another interesting question. How much can be talked about and addressed on stage? It is a question that presupposes in some way the brutal visual and rhetorical imagery the very phrase “The Holocaust” invokes. The Holocaust as it exists in the popular imagination (as I approximate it, from a distinctly American perspective, at a half-century’s distance) is something bleak, remote, black and white, with striped shirts, emaciated, appalling. There are but two players in this Holocaust drama: anonymous Jews and one-dimensional SS men, whose numbers we like to think were small — a savage, dominant few — when we know the logistical demands of the systematic slaughter of millions discredits such fanciful thinking. (It is also worth noting, of course, that it was not only SS men who were involved in the genocidal apparatus of the “Final Solution,” but the German military, the German police, ordinary German citizens, and even Jews themselves.)

It is for writer, historian, and playwright to give this story nuance and the substance of life. In so doing, authors of fiction and non-fiction alike may give expression to illimitable narrative possibilities, derived from the historical record, individual chronicle or personal recollection, and the imagination. This range of Holocaust “material” is readily demonstrated by a sampling of Holocaust plays: Throne of Straw (historical record); Who Will Carry the Word? (historical record, personal recollection); Diary of Anne Frank (individual chronicle); Dreams of Anne Frank (individual chronicle, imagination). Some plays take the viewer (or reader) out of the “conventional” concentration camp or ghetto setting (Good, Edith Stein, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Model Apartment) or place us vividly in it (Who Will Carry the Word?, Ghetto, The Cannibals, Bent). Some don’t address the corporeality of atrocity. Some do. In either case, the question, “How much can be talked about and addressed on stage?” is relevant.

Who Will Carry the Word? seems to be a very real expression of the grim agonies of the Nazi death camp. The women in Delbo’s play grieve, suffer, and die, some at the hands of camp guards, some by their own hand, some by “natural” causes (a perverse distortion of such a term). With two exceptions, they all die. Is it too much? I would argue no (which is not to say it’s too little, of course).

In Bent, Max, under Nazi orders — and struggling to survive — strikes Rudy repeatedly, chest blow after chest blow, finally killing him. Is it too much? This example seems to me more debatable, especially when one considers the variability of theatrical production — one production might make the scene especially brutal whereas another might somehow modify its impact. But I would most likely conclude no, it’s not too much in rendering with honesty the vile circumstances of the Holocaust.

The question of intellectual rather than physical excess assumes possibly greater consequence. C.P. Taylor (Good) and Peter Barnes (Auschwitz) by highly calculated means implicate their audiences in Nazi practice. Taylor does so more or less directly through the lead character, the levelheaded, sensitive academic John Halder. More direct is the final scene of the first act in which Halder, and the audience by implication, is carried away by nationalistic fervor on the blithe, buoyant strains of “The Drinking Song,” during which everyone on stage sings along. An exhilarating scene, only Halder is yielding to a nationalistic fervor presided over by Nazis. Less direct are the incremental allowances Halder makes to the Nazi campaign of terror, culminating with Kristellnacht. More troubling is the confused logic Halder deploys in “coming to grips with reality,” spewing forth nebulous phrases like “objective moral truth” and “objective, immutable laws of the universe” to obfuscate and exonerate the Nazi program.

Barnes uses a form of obfuscation in concealing from the central characters of his play — and the audience — the true nature of their activities. Barnes’ obfuscation is that used by the Nazis in devising an innocuous-sounding nomenclature whose actual content produced in aggregate the Nazi killing machine. By making this cheerful band of Nazis the vehicle for good-humored shtick, Barnes gives to Gottleb’s later revelations of Nazi atrocities a harrowing edge. Compounding the effect is the obscene spectacle of the sanitation men that gives the play a scenic episode more graphic and uncompromising than perhaps any other we’ve encountered.

Joshua Sobol’s Ghetto addresses the issue of what is and what is not appropriate in Holocaust theater using the ethical conundrum posed by the character Kruk: can there be theater “in a graveyard”? Edith Stein follows a similar approach, giving consideration to a different conundrum posed interiorly: can there be a convent in a “graveyard”?

Finally, Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. test the limits of appropriateness by allowing their title characters — Lemon and A(dolph) H(itler) — a full airing of their corrupt views without refutation; indeed, both characters deliver lengthy monologues to conclude their respective plays. To find Adolph Hitler himself defending with cold rationality the Nazi record, or Lemon articulating her own methodically considered, if patently specious, notions, constitutes the most deliberate affront to dramatic propriety one might hope to endure.

The crucial component of these plays is their ability to provoke, at both a visceral and cerebral level. In so doing, these plays, far more than others that tread safer ethical ground (Resort 76, Diary of Anne Frank, Korczak and the Children), demarcate bold new margins in the debate over how much can be talked about and addressed on stage.