Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Conetmporary Theatre

by Freddie Rokem

Overview

In his examination of the ways in which theatre participates in the ongoing representations of and debates about the past, Freddie Rokem concentrates on the ways in which theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust, showing us that by “performing history” actors bring the historical past and the theatrical present together.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587293368
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	04/25/2002
Series:	Studies Theatre Hist & Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Freddie Rokem is a professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Philosophers and Thespians: Thinking Performance, Strindberg’s Secret Codes, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre (Iowa, 2000), and Theatrical Space in Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg: Public Forms of Privacy.

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Performing HISTORY THEATRICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE PAST IN CONTEMPORARY THEATRE
By Freddie Rokem
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2000 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-588-1



Chapter One Refractions of the Shoah on Israeli Stages

Theatre and Survival

It was very theatrical: in go people at one end and out comes smoke at the other. -Danny Horowitz

Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen -Paul Celan

Israeli culture and its public discourses resonate powerfully with stories and memories from the Shoah. They have been central for the creation of a collective Israeli identity. The awesome dialectics between Destruction and Revival - Shoah ve'T'kuma in Hebrew - has been inscribed in the consciousness of every Israeli. As might be expected, the Israeli theatre is one of the many seismographs measuring and confronting the extreme complexities of these stories from and about the Shoah as they are constantly retold from our own gradually growing time-perspective in relation to that past. Israeli society is obsessed by the efforts to understand the Shoah and what significance it holds for the survivors. The Israeli theatre performances dealing directly or indirectly with the Shoah must therefore be seen as an integral aspect of the more comprehensive "work of mourning" and "working-through" which is an important element in the Israeli ideological texture, occupying Israeli society and culture in innumerable ways.

The representations of the Shoah presented on Israeli stages are quite different from the ones which have been created in other places, including the United States and Germany. When making such a claim it is necessary to keep in mind that the Jewish majority of the Israeli society perceives itself as a direct continuation of the survivors of the Nazi genocide; the Shoah has been constructed as a collective experience, even for those who did not experience it directly. These "secondary" survivors, the Israeli Jews who were not directly or biographically affected by the Shoah itself, have integrated that trauma as a basis of identification with the state founded only three years after the end of the Second World War. Even the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, as well as those living in the occupied areas or under the rule of what is now called the Palestinian Authority (the future Palestinian state) or in exile, have also been affected in different ways by the trauma experienced by the Jewish people. One of the questions raised by some of the performances about the Shoah, like Ghetto and Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa, is how the sufferings of the Palestinians as a result of the foundation of the state of Israel are related to the extermination of six million Jews during the Second World War. Can all the actions carried out by the Israelis be justified on the basis of that threat; or should Israelis, on the basis of the "Holocaust-experience," be more sensitive to the sufferings of others?

There are, of course, survivors of the Shoah and relatives of victims living in countries other than Israel, but the Israeli society has fostered a self-perception through which its very existence provides the "proof" that in spite of its horrendous toll of human suffering and degradation, the "Final Solution" did not triumph. The history and the experience of the Shoah in Israel must necessarily be written from the perspective of the victims. Schematically, it is possible to claim that the American understanding of the Shoah will primarily be dominated by the role of the United States, together with the other Allied countries, as liberators. The first image which meets a vistor in the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., is of American soldiers arriving in one of the death camps. The German perspective, in trying to cope with the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War, has inevitably been influenced by the fact that these actions were initiated by people who spoke German. These clearly different national perspectives on the past have no doubt also deeply influenced the strategies in these respective cultures for creating aesthetic representations of this particular past.

In the Israeli context, which this chapter examines, the Shoah serves as a very charged focal point, a kind of filter for the collective Israeli consciousness through which most of the major events of present-day Israeli life are experienced and interpreted, thus superimposing these events on the already existing collective framework of what a "threat" is and what its results can be. During times of crisis the notion of the Shoah as the ultimate form of threat is automatically activated by Israelis as an almost "genetically" coded reaction or defense mechanism. The mention of a name, a place, or a person connected to the Shoah in a contemporary context activates a whole set of intellectual and emotional responses, which, like a chain reaction, trigger and even manipulate not only the discourse about the past but the understanding of the present-day situation as well. Thus Saddam Hussein's threat during the Gulf War in 1991 to bomb Israel with scud missiles equipped with poisonous gas was both cognitively and emotionally interpreted by many Israelis in the context of the Shoah experience, repeating that threat. Moshe Zuckerman has shown how the Israeli press, partly on the basis of the fact that certain components for the manufacture of the Iraqi gas had been supplied by German companies, developed the equation "Saddam = Hitler." And as the discussion of The Boy Dreams shows, for Hanoch Levin the notion of threat became a central feature of his theatrical world.

If the equation between "Hitler" and different Arab leaders has mainly been nourished by right-wing politicians, a complementary discourse concerning the relationship between the present and that specific past has also developed among the Israeli left. The Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip (inhabited by more than two million Palestinians) in 1967, the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in the early 1980s directed mainly against the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo), when the right-wing Israeli prime minister Menahem Begin called Yasir Arafat the "Hitler of Beirut"; and the Intifada, the Palestinian revolt against the continuing Israeli occupation, have led to significant changes in the Israeli self-perception as victims. These events have, at least among the left, led to the painful understanding that Israelis are not necessarily the victims, but in these situations are actually the perpetrators, while it is the Palestininans who have become the victims. From having been two more or less separate issues, the Shoah and the Palestinian "problem" have become, since the beginning of the 1980s, closely connected and even significantly and painfully dependent on each other in many of the Israeli public discourses.

No matter which of the two basic ideological commitments or modes of action has been chosen in relation to the Palestinian issue, denying the national rights of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for self-determination or affirming them, these attitudes have more and more frequently become an extension of the confrontation with the experience of the evil, pain, and suffering experienced during the Shoah and a test-case for how the "lessons" of history ought be learned. On the other hand, the Shoah has become the scale by which the intentions of Israel's enemies are measured, as a direct continuation of the Nazi "Final Solution"; on the other, a dangerous warning that the state of Israel is committing atrocities which, if they are not stopped in time, may gradually develop into actions which will in some way resemble those previously committed against the Jews. The late Israeli philosopher and scholar Yeshaiahu Leibovitz has probably been most extreme in this respect, classifying the actions of the Israeli soldiers toward the Palestinians as "Judeo-Nazi." The fact that he was an orthodox Jew and a Zionist drew a lot of attention to this claim.

The Israeli theatre has almost exclusively expressed the left-wing position. It is no exaggeration to claim that these gradual changes of sensitivity - perceiving the Palestinians as the victims of the former (Jewish) victims, looking at history as a constant recurrence of the repressed and at aggression toward others as something the Israelis have tragically inherited from their own experiences during the Shoah - have become an important subtext of the Israeli theatre during the 1980s, and not only in performances about the Shoah. This complex subtext even became visible on the stage before it was so clearly formulated in most other cultural discourses, except in journalistic writing. It is, however, difficult to say at this point what the ideological and political impact of these perceptions has been. It seems to me that since the early 1990s, when two of the performances examined here premiered, the more established Israeli theatres have undergone some significant structural and economic changes which have made it much more difficult for them to intervene in or even change the cultural discourse to the same extent as some of the earlier performances did in the mid-1980s. The Israeli theatre has in many ways become more "careful" and less provocative or "subversive."

Regardless of how the ideological and political reverberations of the issues themselves are resolved (and they usually remain inconclusive on the stage), the overwhelming presence of the Shoah in the Israeli consciousness is at the same time both a challenge and a burden for the Israeli theatre. It is no doubt a truism to say that the French Revolution has become a general concept of noble ideals and lost opportunities, of dreams destroyed by fanaticism. When representing different aspects of the Shoah and its results, however, the theatre has a much more difficult task. The concreteness of the theatrical medium itself and primarily the terrible realities of the Nazi era - still real as private memories to many Israelis and passed on to the second and third generations as an unsurmountable trauma - make this an almost impossible mission. This chapter examines how the Israeli theatre has confronted a subject ominously charged with destructive energies, which at the same time forces us to confront the most important and most painful ideological and political issues the country is struggling to solve.

The Theatrical Modes of Israeli Shoah Performances

Beginning in the theatre of the early 1980s, it is possible to distinguish a simultaneous mixture of at least three different genres or modes of representation in Israeli plays and performances about the Shoah - the testimonial, the documentary, and the fantastic. Previously these modes of representation had been much more separated, each appearing more or less by itself. It is very difficult to understand exactly how and for what aesthetic and ideological reasons such hybrid generic forms of theatre evolve. In this particular case it seems clear, though, that as the trauma of the Shoah gradually became more distant in time the incomprehensibility of the events themselves was growing. The inherent difficulties in communicating what had happened on "the planet Auschwitz," as Ka-Tsetnik (Yechiel De-Nur), one of the central witnesses at the Adolf Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, termed it, became an even more urgent problem, which works of art, like performances, had to cope with. Paradoxically, in a move which in away even contradicted its ominous concreteness, this transformed the Shoah into a kind of "extraterrestrial" event, which underwent a strong mythologization in the more official Israeli discourses. It was surrounded by the aura of "never again," a slogan which separated the event from the present reality, as if it belonged to a different kind of temporal existence.

One possible reason for casting performances from the early 1980s as first-person testimony of a survivor was to give them a subjectively based specificity. Michael Bernstein has rightly argued that

one of the most pervasive myths of our era, a myth perhaps even partially arising out of our collective response to the horrors of the concentration camps, is the absolute authority given to the first-person testimony. Such narratives, whether by camp survivors or by those who have endured rape, child abuse, or any devastating trauma, are habitually regarded as though they were completely unmediated, as though language, gesture, and imagery could become transparent if the experience being expressed is sufficiently horrific. Testimony wrung out of a person under extreme duress is thus seen as the most true, the most unmediated, the most trustworthy. In contemporary aesthetics, for example, the force of much "performance art" relies precisely - and I think precariously - on just such a faith in the authenticity of first-person testimony.

To this day any attempt to question the events in the concentration camps can be dismissed by a witness-victim, whose words and experiences still carry much more weight than any other form of documentation. But at the same time, Bernstein argues, there is something precarious about such testimonies; they are one of "the most pervasive myths of our era." What I argue here is that the theatre about the Shoah can probably not do without some form of testimony and witnessing and that they are even central to the very notion of performing history. The theatrical-aesthetic aspects of this argument are developed in the last chapter of this book; here I focus primarily on their thematic and generic dimensions.

Shoshana Felman, writing about Claude Lanzman's film Shoah, has taken a similar position, arguing from what I understand to be an essentialist position that

the necessity of testimony it [this film] affirms in reality stems, paradoxically enough, from the impossibility of testimony that the film at the same time dramatizes. I would suggest that this impossibility of testimony by which the film is traversed, with which it struggles and against which it precisely builds itself is, in effect, the most profound and most crucial subject of the film. In its enactment of the Holocaust as the event-without-a-witness, as the traumatic impact of a historically ungraspable primal scene which erases both its witness and its witnessing Shoah explores the very boundaries of testimony by exploring, at the same time, the historical impossibility of witnessing and the historical impossibility of escaping the predicament of being-and having to become a witness.

Felman's position is not primarily determined by Lanzman's manipulation of his witnesses, an aspect of his film which has been severely criticized by Dominick LaCapra, but rather by the impossibility of grasping what she terms this "primal scene" of history. If this is a primal scene in the Freudian sense, it suffers from the same kind of uncertainty which Freud argued that this scene has. Even if it did not actually occur, Freud claimed, every individual will construct such an "experience," while the Shoah is history. The problem, however, with the first-person witnesses, in the case of Shoah and in theatre performances, is not the "impossibility of witnessing" because the Shoah was too horrendous (what Felman terms a "primal scene which erases" the witness), but the ways in which the testimony itself, the words of the witness, can become embedded within a theatrical discourse or a performance.

In many Israeli performances about the Shoah one of the characters is a witness drawing his or her authority from some kind of direct experience of the Shoah, in spite of the problematic status of such first-person narratives. In analyzing the specific examples below I draw attention to the manner in which such a fictional character is presented on the stage, in order to function as a witness. But the witness is not the only element of a theatre performance, no matter how central he or she is in creating a basic authenticity. Therefore the more comprehensive discursive contexts within which a first-person testimony is presented on the stage and what actually happens to the witness as a dramatic character also have to be examined. In the early 1980s a form of theatre developed in Israel in which the testimony gradually became embedded within two additional modes or genres of theatrical representation. One of these modes featured a documentary drama, which focused either on a situation from the Second World War, presented "in medias res," or on the subsequent fate of the survivors in the present. In both cases, the events were presented in the "objective," realistic style. In contrast to these documentary possibilities, a self-reflexive dramatic mode was introduced, creating various forms of metatheatre. This mode also created the basis for the fantastic in performances about the Shoah. In the performances examined here the relations between these three modes of representation (testimony, documentation, and metatheatre/the fantastic) vary from case to case, placing a different emphasis on each.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface Introduction The Notions of “Performing History” Refractions of the Shoah on Israeli Stages Theatre and Survival The Theatrical Modes of Israeli Shoah Performances Yehoshua Sobol, "Ghetto" Dudu Ma’ayan, "Arbeit macht frei vom Toitland Europa" Hanoch Levin, "The Boy Dreams" Three European Productions about the French Revolution Peter Brook, "Marat/Sade" Ariane Mnouchkine, "1789" Ingmar Bergman, "Madame de Sade" Three American Productions of "Danton’s Death" Büchner’s Play and Its Beholders The Production Qualities The Individualized Crowd The Execution Theatrical Energies Textual Energies From Textual to Performative Energies Performance Energies The Eavesdropper and the Survivor-Witness Metaphysical Energies Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index