Darkness We Carry

Contents

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pp. ix-x

Introduction

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pp. xi-xvi

It was sent to me by a Polish friend, an elderly professor and survivor of the Bialystok Ghetto and the concentration camps, whom I met in Warsaw in 1978. Learning of my interest in the drama of the Holocaust, he told me of the death of his wife and two little daughters during those terrible years. Some months later I received this letter from him. ...

CHAPTER ONE: Choice and/or Survival

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pp. 3-19

These images, and dozens more like them, have become part of the iconography of our modern civilization, a visual reminder of those years, only a generation ago, when Nazi evil nearly usurped humanity's dominion in its attempt to destroy Europe's Jewish population. They come to us by way of photographs and films, and provide documentary evidence, in visceral ...

CHAPTER TWO: Tragedy and the Holocaust

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pp. 20-42

They also live with the harder truth that despite passion and concern, the answers to significant moral and aesthetic questions remain elusive. What has changed over the course of much time, especially the accelerated time of the last half-century, is the awareness of a greater urgency to these questions and a greater burden we carry to ...

CHAPTER THREE: The (Tragi)Comic Vision

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pp. 43-67

Although it would be difficult to find a Holocaust play that could be called a comedy, it is easy to find plays on the Holocaust theme that use comic strategies to make their points, one of which surely is to help show the terror of the Holocaust. This kind of Holocaust drama may involve comic characters, structures, or viewpoints ...

CHAPTER FOUR: Revisions and Reversals

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pp. 68-93

At one extreme, the appearance of the German oppressors is more felt than seen, implicated figures (behind whom sits a genocidal bureaucracy) whose presence and barbarity are at the visual and aural margins of stage performance. Such is the case with Charlotte Delbo's Who Will Carry the Word? and Goodrich and ...

CHAPTER FIVE: Some German Voices

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pp. 94-115

Since the end of the war, German-language drama has developed in ways that exemplify the most adventurous experiments in the world of theatre production, while at the same time, as we would expect, revealing the deepest concerns of the German culture. In the introduction to The Theatre of the Holocaust, I referred ...

CHAPTER SIX: Responses and Responsibilities

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pp. 116-130

What standards should be used to determine the achievement of a piece of Holocaust literature and, in particular, a Holocaust drama? Aside from the general observation that no serious artistic work of any kind can succeed if it lacks technical skill, human insight, and moral passion, in the case of drama there is an additional ...

Notes

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pp. 131-144

Index

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pp. 145-147