Holocaust Stages

Theatrical Performance During The Holocaust: Texts/documents/memoirs Edited By Rebecca Rovit And Alvin Goldfarb 1999: Johns Hopkins University Press

When neighbors see the star you're wearing
Do they start to hiss and jeer?
Had enough of hostile staring?
Pack your bags and join me here.

Here's a crazy world of show biz
Full of laughter, fun and games
The only thing I'd like to know is
How we all get out again.

--Excerpts from "Einladung" [Invitation], a cabaret song from
Theresienstadt concentration camp, by Leo Strauss (1897-1944), translation by Roy Kift

Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust presents documents, memoirs, and secondary articles on the organization of public performances of music and theater from 1933 to 1945. These sources describe the creative life of trapped communities, uncovering a series of complicated phenomena: the positive emotions elicited through art experienced in a context of profound despair; an audience's pleasure at familiar music contaminated by pain and loss; the temporary suppression of grief in the face of artistic energy; and the complexity of comic distraction in an environment of murderous violence. During the Holocaust, artists were determined to work, to conduct their lives within the familiar frameworks of productivity and purpose. In Admitting the Holocaust, Lawrence Langer describes this phenomenon not as "spiritual resistance," as some are tempted to, but as "how a strangulating people managed to go on breathing." Rovit and Goldfarb's book sets up an opposition between the use of performance during the later years of the war--characterized by state-sanctioned plays and cabarets that occupied prisoners until they were transported to their death--and the use of performance as a source of information, comfort, and catharsis for the victims.

The source materials in Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust emphasize the musical and theatrical experiences of German, Dutch, and Czech Jews and political dissidents, focusing less on the well-documented phenomenon of Yiddish cabaret and theater in Poland and Lithuania. The first third of the book concerns the prewar, Nazi-supervised German-Jewish Kulturbund activities of 1933-39. The last third of the book is given over to information on the cabaret, theater, and music of Theresienstadt, a Czech fortress-town-turned-concentration-camp in which artists and intellectuals from Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Holland were incarcerated. The town became a stage-set ghetto, shown off periodically to the Red Cross as a center of Jewish art and cultural activity.

The material in both of these sections demonstrates the irony of the paternalistic German claim, both before and during the war, to have encouraged and fostered distinctive elements of a separate Jewish culture by isolating Jews and forbidding them participation in Aryan culture. A complementary irony can be found in the eagerness with which German Jews, in the first days of their isolation and unemployment, organized to allow actors and musicians to continue working by providing entertainment for the potential "market" of Germany's culture-hungry Jews, now forbidden access to the society and art they had informed and invigorated. The Nazi regime succeeded in reversing the remarkable cultural integration of the Weimar Republic, pushing assimilated German-Jewish artists and audiences back into the embrace of Jewish culture, willing or not.

Several texts discuss the prewar Nazi bureaucratization of cultural life and the wartime creativity of the Westerbork and Terezin transit camps. As early as 1933, Jews were systematically precluded from participation in a range of professions, including the arts; they were dismissed from orchestras and theaters and forbidden to appear before German audiences or to interpret the German repertoire. Jewish civic and cultural leaders responded by organizing what they envisioned as an officially tolerated cultural association that would provide employment for Jewish musicians and theater artists and become a source of entertainment for the isolated Jewish population. The Kulturbund soon fell under the control of Germany's propaganda ministry. Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust includes transcripts of meetings between the Jewish Kulturbund representative and the Propaganda Ministry, where officials dictated guidelines for future programming, including proscriptions...