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C 2002) Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, January 2002 (°
Film and Theater Review and Commentary
A Season of Holocaust Theater Richard Brockman1
There were quite a few plays presented this past year on New York stages that dealt in one way or another with the Holocaust. I am not sure why this year there were so many: perhaps it was coincidence; perhaps it had something to do with the fact that survivors of the Holocaust are now old and soon none will be alive to bear witness; perhaps it has something to do with the fact that genocide, war crimes, state sanctioned acts of brutality and inhumanity are harder to conceal because of improved global communications; perhaps it has something to do with a better understanding of trauma; or perhaps it has to do with the need to remember things that leave an indelible mark on humanity at a time when change happens so fast. For whatever reason, or combination of reasons, there have been quite a few plays presented this past year on New York stages about the Holocaust. There was one Holocaust-related play that I tried hard to see—Mel Brooks’ The Producers. You cannot get a ticket to The Producers for love or money using conventional or unconventional uses of love or money— until the fall of 2003. When I called the show’s publicity office, a very harried woman told me that there were no press seats being issued to anyone, from any publication, nor for any reason. I started to say, “But I am writing a piece about—.” She had hung up before I got to the word, “Holocaust.” I spoke with two influential, New York theater friends and they just laughed when I got to the real reason for my call. There is a story, that may be true, that someone approached one of the show’s producers, Rocco Landesman, asking if he could get a pair of tickets for a friend who was “dying of cancer.” Landesman replied, “That’s not good enough” (Lahr, 2001). Thus, I will have to wait for two and a half years to see The Producers (unless a reader happens to have an extra ticket). I will wait with some impatience and continue to 1 Correspondence
should be directed to Richard Brockman, M.D., 15 West 81st Street, New York, NY 10024–6022. 119 C 2002 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 1521-1401/02/0100-0119/0 °
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seek conventional and unconventional means to get a ticket. I will do this because there are few people alive who have the talent and chutzpah to throw shtick at Hitler, the SS, and the Holocaust—“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party.” Mel Brooks is one such man. Indeed he has done it twice—once on film and now at the St. James Theater on Broadway. I will try to get a ticket not just because I am convinced that The Producers is great musical theater; I will try to get a ticket because I am convinced that Brooks achieves comic perspective like few other writers today. And, perspective is necessary. If one attempts to dramatize the Holocaust head on, one fails. One cannot dramatize an emotion or an event that is overwhelming and incomprehensible. Indeed, that is not just a problem for the theater—but for art, for science, for history, and for psychoanalysis. Sometimes explanations fail. There are events that cannot be explained. There are emotions that cannot be imagined. And sometimes it is only by looking away, that one can see anything at all. So in looking at the plays of the Holocaust, I began by looking away. I looked to a text that was written decades before the Holocaust. I went to Freud’s “Group psychology and the analysis of the ego.” It was written in 1921, a time of relative peace in Europe. The Great War was over. Central Europe was rebuilding. The consequences of the Treaty of Versailles were in place, but not fully stirred by French occupation of the Ruhr Valley. Anti-Semitism was present and ugly, but tacitly accepted. Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party were politically alive, but not yet politically strong. It was during this time that Freud wrote, “A group knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. It goes directly to extremes; if a suspicion is expressed, it is instantly changed into an incontrovertible certainty; a trace of antipathy is turned into furious hatred.” It was as if Freud saw the ground being prepared for Hitler before history did. “Inclined as it is to extremes, a group can only be excited by an excessive stimulus. Anyone who wishes to produce an effect upon it needs no logical adjustment in his arguments; he must paint in the most forcible colours, he must exaggerate, and he must repeat the same thing again and again” (p. 78). These ideas in a different context are truly terrifying, “An organization comes from the propaganda of the word . . . The important thing is not whether an idea is right; the decisive thing is whether one can present it effectively to the masses” (Goebbels, 1936). Put into practice, those ideas become history. “Everything he touched, Hitler radicalized,” noted Ian Kershaw, author of a recently completed twovolume biography of the despot. “If there was a secret to Hitler’s success, it was the belief that his road was the right road, that he was walking hand in hand with Providence” (New York Times, March 19, 2001).
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There is a higher ordering and we all are nothing else than its agents . . . and what has happened is the fulfillment of the wish and the will of Providence. I would now give thanks to Him who let me return to my homeland in order that I might now lead it into my German Reich! Tomorrow may every German recognize the hour and measure its import and bow in humility before the Almighty, who in a few weeks has wrought a miracle upon us! (Adolf Hitler, Vienna, April, 1938)
Of course, Hitler was interrupted numerous times during the speech by the ecstatic cries of an Austrian people whom he had just subjugated, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” “A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master,” Freud wrote in that same Vienna seventeen years before the Anschluss. “It has such a thirst for obedience that it submits instinctively to anyone who appoints himself its master” (p. 81). Freud went on, “The individual loses his power of criticism, and lets himself slip into the affect. . . . The cruder and simpler emotional impulses are the more apt to spread through a group in this way” (1921, pp. 84–85). Hitler was able to sense the cruder and simpler emotional impulses of hatred and envy that were stirring. “He has the amazing gift of sensing what is in the air,” Joseph Goebbels wrote about his Fuhrer. “He has the ability to express things so clearly, logically, and directly that listeners are convinced that is what they have always thought themselves.” Hitler was able to take these cruder impulses now belonging to the horde as far as they would go: genocide. “My feelings as a Christian point me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter,” Hitler proclaimed in a speech on April 12, 1922. “It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized those Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at the last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.” Ferdinand Bruckner wrote Race in the summer of 1933. The play deals with the hopes and dreams, and then the compromises and demise of a Jewish youth studying to be a doctor in 1933 in Berlin, the city where Bruckner himself had gone to study. By the spring of 1933, the Reichstag building had been burned; the “Reichstag Fire Decree” had been enacted suspending civil rights and leading to mass arrests of communists and others felt to be subversive. On April 1, 1933, there was a German national boycott of Jewish shops; it was to be the first of what would be many government-sponsored acts of Anti-Semitism. In a sense nothing about this play is dramatic. The play’s strength is that it is written from a place deep within the events it portrays. It is a play seen from the perspective of one whose face has been pressed against the glass— pressed by the writer’s own hand and the hand of the now burgeoning Nazi
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party. It is a play that screams out, “Look, look what is happening! Look before it is too late!” That it was written and first performed in 1933 is an accomplishment of the highest order. “In the case of Race,” the playwright wrote in a letter from the PEN club in June of 1934, “I paid all the more attention to exact official documentation since the deepest mystery about the events in Germany is their official nature.” The playwright continued, “The burning of books accompanied by singing; the medieval condemnation of lovers who belong to different faiths; the military occupation of small Jewish shops—these were not attacks by individuals . . . . these were enterprises directed by the highest government posers. Proudly and with official celebrations these events were proclaimed.” From the perspective of group psychology, the deepest mystery is not that these events were sanctioned by the State, but that for these wanton acts to have occurred at all, they had to have been sanctioned by the State or by some effective leader who could churn a group into a horde. “In obedience to the new authority,” Freud wrote, “the individual may put his former ‘conscience’ out of action, and so surrender to the attraction of the increased pleasure that is certainly obtained from the removal of inhibitions.” (p. 85). Once fashioned into a horde by demagoguery and oratorical skills, in particular those skills of Hitler and Goebbels, the behavior of the mass is chillingly comprehensible—“These rhetorical geniuses are the drummers of fate. They are the speakers that make history” (Goebbels, 1936). Race premiered in Zurich on November 30th, 1933. “The actors were nervous, dragging,” Bruckner wrote in his diary. “But, the audience was moved and profoundly shaken, as I have never experienced before.” Attempts to stage the play in Vienna were rejected, “My orphaned child Race cannot be staged in Vienna. The theater would explode. Although the government’s official attitude is against Germany, every dignitary refused to authorize the production” (July 19th, 1934). The play did not come to Vienna, the birthplace of the playwright, until 1951. In The last letter (La derniere lettre), a play adapted from the novel, Life and Fate, by the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, the dark figure of a woman appears alone on stage. She wears a long black dress and a yellow star of David on her chest. She addresses the audience as if she were talking into the night, across barbed wire and thousands of miles. “Vita,” she calls out, “I want you to know about my last days. Like that, it will be easier for me to die.” Vasily Grossman, born in 1905, was a Soviet war correspondent who traveled with the Red Army to Berlin. On that path, Grossman witnessed the Nazi atrocities at Treblinka and the mass graves where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered and buried. One of those buried in one of those graves was his mother.
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Years later Grossman wrote Life and Fate in an attempt to deal with what he had witnessed and with what had happened to his family and to his soul. Chapter 17 of his novel is written as a letter of a mother to a son, a son that she knows she will never see again because she knows she will be executed the following morning and dumped into a mass grave. It is fiction, just as Race is fiction. And it is fact, just as Race is fact. But The last letter is not about history in the same way that Race is about history. The last letter is not a warning shot in the sense that Race was a warning shot fired across the bow of a ship of state that refused to see the dangers ahead. The last letter is aimed at the heart. It is private and personal. One almost feels like an intruder, to be there listening to this woman talking to her boy, yet one cannot turn away from her face nor from the sound of her voice. “It was difficult to read the first time,” the brilliant French actress, Catherine Samie, said about the script, a script that had been adapted by Frederick Wiseman (Titicutt Follies, High School, and Welfare, among many other films). “I cried like an animal,” she went on. “I am an old woman. I knew about the war. I had seen classmates taken out of school by the hair, including my closest friend. None of them came back” (New York Times, May 27th, 2001). The woman standing alone on the dark stage reached for memory, “I said goodbye to the house and garden. I sat for a few minutes under the tree. Two women began arguing in front of me about which of them would have my chairs, and which my writing-desk. I said goodbye to them and they both began to cry. . . . Some people are very strange.” Plays that take on the Holocaust, approach it usually from one of two perspectives. Race establishes an appalling historical truth that we the audience watch and to which we must bear passive witness. The last letter establishes an emotional truth that is often familiar to the viewer (the experience of loss and death), but set in a frame that is totally unfamiliar. “Can you guess what I felt, Vityenka, once I was behind the barbed wire?” she asks. “I felt relieved to be inside this cattle-pen. Now I’m no longer a beast deprived of rights—simply an unfortunate human being. And that’s easier to bear.” We are asked to watch the one from a distance of horror and passive helplessness. We are asked to watch the other more intimately. “Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much. At other times, I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much.” We know what that’s like. We know what it is like to love and even to love too much. “I can hear women weeping on the street, and policemen swearing; as I look at these pages, they seem to protect me from a terrible world . . . How
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can I finish this letter?” she asks her son; she asks us, all of us knowing what will happen when she does. “Remember that your mother’s love is always with you. Vityenka . . . this is the last line of your mother’s last letter. Live, live, live . . .” In 1933, the purge of Jewish intellectuals in Germany had begun in earnest. Jewish doctors were removed from medical schools and then prohibited from the practice of medicine. Jewish law professors were removed from their posts. “Younger men with the proper Nazi party credentials filled the openings. All of these professors vied in writing books and articles that would be pleasing to the Nazis” (Asimov, 1998). This was the background for what it was to be a member of the judiciary in Nazi Germany. This was the background for Abby Mann’s “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Judgment at Nuremberg began as a book, then in 1959 aired as a teleplay on Playhouse 90. As Abby Mann recalls, “The most discussed thing about the TV show was when Claude Rains said, ‘How can you ask me to predict the deaths of millions of people in . . . ?’ ‘Gas ovens’ got bleeped out because the show had a sponsor that was a gas company.” It was an extraordinary piece of censorship, made even more so by virtue of the fact that the play raises questions of independence and abuse of power. In 1961, the film, Judgment at Nuremberg, opened, winning Oscars for Abby Mann and for Maximillian Schell in the role of the young defense attorney, Oscar Rolfe. Last year, Judgment at Nuremberg opened as a play on Broadway again with Maximillian Schell, only this time playing the role of the accused jurist, Ernst Janning—the man that Schell, as the young defense attorney, had defended forty years ago. Watching Schell, the actor, face Rolfe, the character, was a little like watching a man looking at himself in a mirror across time. Judgment at Nuremberg goes back to the third Nuremberg trial (there were thirteen in all), where members of the Nazi legal system were indicted. Ernst Janning is a composite character based on historical figures, including Franz Schlegelberger who was a member of the Ministry of Justice in the Third Reich. Schlegelberger raised the defense that were he to have resigned from the bench, he would have been replaced by a Nazi zealot and therefore he stayed and served a judicial system that he knew was corrupt, in order to preserve justice as best he could. As described in the play, Janning was an aristocrat, a scholar, and an author. As one of the framers of the Weimar constitution, he was someone who hated Hitler and the Nazis. In the play, the defense attorney, Oscar Rolfe, presents an argument similar to Schlegelberger’s. But Rolfe also argues that at a certain point in time, not just Germany, but the entire world knew that genocide was a policy of the Third Reich. Indeed, anyone who had monitored Hitler’s speeches or who had read Mein Kampf, knew what he felt for the
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Jews. Hitler recounted in his diary, a walk he had taken thru Vienna’s Inner City, “I suddenly encountered an apparition in a black caftan and black sidelocks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought. I observed the man furtively and cautiously, but the longer I stared at this foreign face, the more my first question assumed a new form: Is this a German?” And then, Hitler’s chilling epiphany, “Wherever I went I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity” (Mein Kampf, p. 56). Oscar Rolfe’s argument in defense of his client and mentor, Ernst Janning, was to accuse the world. Janning knew, but so too did the world. Indeed it was impossible not to know. And thus, he would argue, if the judgment of Nuremberg is to find Ernst Janning guilty, then the judgment of Nuremberg must be to find the world guilty, because the world knew at a certain point in time that the Third Reich was engaged in genocide and knowing this, the allied powers chose to ignore what they knew. The allied powers chose to pursue only military objectives and chose to allow genocide until those other objectives had been attained. But isn’t that just what Ernst Janning had done? Wasn’t he trying to mitigate damage until another means could be accessed? Wasn’t he responding the way the allies had responded? Wasn’t he responding the way anyone would have responded? The question turns like a mirror, “Isn’t that what anyone would have done?” The set for Judgment at Nuremberg includes rows of boxed mirrors that at times reflect the audience back to itself. Like Rolfe turning the question, like Maximillian Schell looking across time at himself, perspective turns. Because the play, finally, is not about emotion. The play, finally, is not about bearing witness. The play, finally, is not even about the hypothetical; “What would you have done had you been there?” The play, I think, is about a broader question, “Would you have followed the group?” The question probes how one lives and feels and thinks as an individual, when one lives and feels and thinks in groups. It was a question that Freud confronted. Freud seemed to answer that individual freedom came from the creative act, “The myth is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology. . . . The poet who had taken this step and had in this way set himself free from the group in his imagination, is nevertheless able to find his way back to its reality” (1921, p. 136). What I think Freud saw as a Jew walking and pondering in the Inner City where Hitler had walked, was that it was an illusion to think that one could ever fully escape, for better or for worse, from the overlapping groups to which one belonged. Through the creative act, however, one could attain the perspective that allowed for freedom. We cannot fully see the groups to which we belong because they are a part of us, but we can turn away and then turn back, and in so doing, gain
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perspective on the group and on our place in it, anew. That is, I think, one of the judgments of Nuremberg. We are social beings, we belong to civilized groups, there is great strength and beauty in that. But, civilization itself must be examined, and to do that, the individual must pull away from that which informs his noblest and basest self. He must pull away, and reflect because sometimes it is only by looking away, that one sees. In Mel Brooks’ The Producers, I’ve been told there is an audition for the role of Hitler. The hopefuls sing with profound solemnity. They are interrupted by the crazed, helmeted playwright, “Franz Liebkind,” who shows them how a real Fuhrer would have sung it, “Mit a bang, Mit a boom, Mit a bing-boom bing-bang boom! . . . Mit a zetz, mit a zap, mit a zing!” What an absurd and wildly ironic point of view.
REFERENCES Asimov, M. (1998). Judges judging judges. UCLA Law Review. Los Angeles. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18, 67–143. London: Hogarth Press. Goebbels, J. (1936). The Fuhrer as a speaker (Das Fuhrer als Redner) (pp. 27–34). Hamburg, Germany. Hitler, A. (1943). Mein Kampf. Boston, Massachusetts. Lahr, J. (2001, May 7). Gold Rush. The New Yorker, 84–6.
