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Our Dramaturg Weighs in.

3/1/2013

Normal People:
**Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum and “Ordinary Germans.”
by Ian Thal**

"Every single one of us in this room has had someone in each of our families who we loved, deeply, who directly participated in the slaughter of six million Jews."
(Lebensraum, Israel Horovitz. p. 25.)

"No significant aspect of German society [between 1933 and 1945] was untouched by anti-Jewish policy; from the economy, to society, to politics, to to culture, from cattle-farmers, to merchants, to the organization of small towns, to lawyers, doctors, physicists, and professors. No analysis of German society, no understanding or characterization of it, can be made without placing the persecution and extermination of Jews at its center[....] Hundreds of thousands of Germans contributed to the genocide and the still larger system of subjugation that was the vast concentration camp system[....] No other policy (of similar or greater scope) was carried out with more persistence or zeal, and with fewer difficulties, than the genocide, except perhaps the war itself. The Holocaust defines not only the history of Jews during the middle of the twentieth century but also the history of Germans."

(Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. p. 8.)

One of the key themes of Lebensraum is role that individuals have in determining the future. Ultimately, they choose whether to love, hate, forgive, take vengeance. They may be predisposed to make one choice over another, but ultimately, it's not a choice made for them.

By coincidence, as Horovitz was writing the play we are currently working on (the introduction is dated to 1997) the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen had just published his groundbreaking book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust is the single most well-documented atrocity in human history -- in part because the perpetrators were meticulous record keepers. In a lecture I once attended, the architectural historian Robert Van Pelt described the Auschwitz concentration camps as the best documented architectural project in history. While there are many aspects of the Holocaust that have not yet or only recently been addressed in detail, such as histories of specific camps, specific regions, specific individuals, it is rare that a work actually is groundbreaking.

Previous histories had focused on the planning and implementation of the Holocaust: the bureaucratic problem solving, the role that institutions played, the deeds and words of the leaders, and the ideology that motivated them. Little attention had ever been given to the actual perpetrators: what motivated them? How willing, how committed was their participation?

In short, historians have a general consensus as to what happened, how it happened, maybe even why it happened, but no one had seriously asked how "normal people" had become perpetrators. Without perpetrators, the Holocaust could not have happened.

"Few have neglected to provide for themselves an answer to the question, an answer that necessarily derives usually not from any intimate knowledge of the perpetrators and their deeds, but greatly from the individual's conception of human nature and social life." (Goldhagen, p. 5.)

These conceptions range from the notion that Hitler was so charismatic a leader that Germans (and Goldhagen notes that "these people were overwhelmingly and most importantly Germans" (p.6.)) could not help but obey, or that the perpetrators would themselves be killed if they did not obey (a notion that does not hold up to scrutiny, since there isn't a single instance of someone being killed for not engaging in an atrocity) to blind obedience to authority, to, most famously, Hannah Arendt's conception of "the banality of evil" which she offered as an explanation for Adolf Eichmann-- though it turned out that Arendt was wrong about Eichmann, rather than being a banal bureaucrat with no real anti-Semitic sentiment who simply following orders to make sure trains ran on time, the real Eichmann was an enthusiastic anti-Semite.

"The fixation on the mass killing to the exclusion of the other related actions of the perpetrators has lead to a radical misspecification of the explanatory task. The killing should be, for all the obvious reasons, at the center of scholarly attention. Yet is is not the only aspect of the German's treatment of the Jews that demands systematic scrutiny and explanation. Not only the killing but also how the Germans killed must be explained. A killer can endeavor to render the deaths of others-- whether he thinks the killing is just or unjust--- more or less painful, both physically and emotionally[....] An explanation that can seemingly make sense of Germans putting Jews to death, but not of the manner in which they did it, is a faulty explanation." (p 16-17.)

The survivors in Horovitz' play describe not just "utilitarian" cruelties based on rank prejudice, but sadism on a systemic level: for instance, memories of gang rapes figure quite prominently.

Zylberstein's own suffering and survival is also based on the whims of others. Uta Krebs could have refrained from reporting Tante Elke's family and pretended that she didn't know that there were Jews hiding in her building (it wasn't her job to hunt Jews.) For that matter, the suggestion that she simply reported them for having fancy clothing, is not the only plausible explanation since she does not speak of her own motives: she did, after all, make a sexual overture to an eleven-year-old boy: why not let the Gestapo get rid of the witnesses?

Furthermore, Zylberstein seemed to survive simply at the whim of Major Daniel Reitz who was willing to make an exception for the son of an actor who had amused him once in an Ernst Toller play (ironically, Toller was an author who had his citizenship revoked soon after the Nazis came to power.)

"The horrific nature of the operations was, of course, not a type of action on the part of the perpetrators, but one of the conditions of their actions that might be thought to have been so revolting and off-putting that its failure to have affected the perpetrators significantly is itself in need of explanation." (p. 19.)

Goldhagen theorizes that the Germans of that era were, anthropologically speaking, radically different than their contemporaries in other western countries. Ordinary Germans were able to knowingly participate and profit from not just mass killing, but rape, torture, and mutilations of men, women and children who were, objectively speaking, no threat to them because they subscribed to a set of beliefs that educated people in other countries would likely have regarded irrational, if not insane. Consequently, Goldhagen regards any theory that attempts to explain the perpetrators of the Holocaust without taking that into account, as explaining nothing.

Of course, Goldhagen is not a character in Horovitz' play.

However, given that it was "ordinary Germans" or "normal people" who perpetrated the Holocaust, the thesis presented by Zev Golem or Rifka Borenstein that, "I and many, many others believe this project is neo-Nazi based... designed to complete Hitler's mission: the elimination of world Jewry," or "If you think they do not plan to slaughter six-million more Jews,you are insane! They are Germans! They are born to kill Jews! They are defined by killing Jews!" (pp. 45-46) while objectively untrue both in contemporary early 21st century Germany and in the world of the play, it's an error based not in irrational hatred but in a categorical error: much as the Germans of the first half of the 20th century were not like Americans of the same era; the Germans of that era are not like the Germans of today.

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Israel Horovitz on LEBENSRAUM

3/1/2013

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Playwright Israel Horovitz was kind enough to forward to us some comments he made about the play from a long-forgotten news interview:

How would you describe this play to theatergoers?

Lebensraum is an extremely theatrical play – 3 actors play 50 or so different characters… Simply said, Lebensraum is a kind of fantasy-fable in which the German Chancellor makes what he describes as the press-conference of the century. He says he cannot live with the guilt he feels for what his parents and grandparents did during WWII/the Holocaust, and so he invites 6,000,000 Jews to come to Germany to live to replace the dead Jews… he offers these new citizens jobs. The play follows an out-of-work dockworker from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Bremerhaven, Germany, where he takes a job away from a German dockworker… A romance develops between the son of the American and the daughter of the German…

Where did you come up with the idea for the play?

I was in Germany seeing a bunch of my plays and encountered a bizarre anti-Jewish slur from an actress, who said "You can’t have Jewish character in plays in Germany… it doesn’t smell good..." This incident led to my talking quite seriously with one of my German translators, a young woman who had grown up not knowing a single Jew, until she went to translation school in England. Her (French) boyfriend told me how difficult it was for her traveling in the world as a young German woman, because people were generally anti-German after the war… I began to think that Germans of her generation would one day think "These abstract Jews are causing me a lot of trouble… and we’d be right back in it, again." I had the idea for a play in which 6,000,000 Jews are invited back to Germany…

Do you think Lebensraum has a lesson to tell about history and the chance of it repeating itself?

I have tried to create a modern day circumstance that mirrors what was going on in the world when Hitler came into power… that Jews were being blamed for Germany’s struggling economy, etc etc. So, yes, it is a heavy-duty warning that things forgotten are oft-repeated, and that there’s no limit to human cruelty. That said, the play is a lot of fun to watch. It’s extremely theatrical and is a blend of, well, comedy and tragedy…

The idea that a German Chancellor would make such an offer is bound to make some people laugh—do you consider it a ridiculous idea?

It’s a fanciful premise, yes. I don’t think the subject can be treated with somber seriousness and still find an audience. I have tried to find a new approach, a theatrical approach… I had a lot of fun writing this play… it wasn’t easy, but it gave me a great deal of pleasure… and I love watching it.

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Our Dramaturg Weighs in.

Normal People:
**Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum and “Ordinary Germans.”
by Ian Thal**

Israel Horovitz on LEBENSRAUM

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Our Dramaturg Weighs in.

Normal People:Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum and “Ordinary Germans.”by Ian Thal

Israel Horovitz on LEBENSRAUM

Author

Archives

Categories

Normal People:
**Israel Horovitz' Lebensraum and “Ordinary Germans.”
by Ian Thal**