Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust (review)

The Holocaust, the Shoah, or the Nazi genocide is the event (with many names) in the twentieth century to which not only researchers but the arts, too, return again and again. During the past year Roman Polanski's film The Pianist won the Oscar for best foreign film and Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Both Polanski and Kertész, like most writers and critics since the end of World War II, continue to confront the double question: how was what they have witnessed and are now describing possible, and is there an aesthetic language through which that "event" or certain aspects of it can be represented?

Vivian Patraka, whose insightful book was published in 1999, suggests that the aesthetic responses/reactions to the Shoah are part of a "continual process of critical engagement" (13), a form of dialogue both with and about it, a way not only to "measure" the past but also a critical tool for understanding our contemporary society. Spectacular Suffering engages its readers in such a dialogue, and even if I do not always agree with some of its more specific conclusions, the book makes interesting reading because Patraka approaches her subject carefully and with reverence, never drawing simplistic, one-dimensional conclusions. She also makes room for the reader to react and even to respond within her text. Her method is truly multi-disciplinary, confronting the issues of representation of the Shoah through historiographic, biographic, semiotic, feminist, and Brechtian theories as well as through other perspectives.

Patraka confronts a broad range of aesthetic and educational responses to the Shoah, analyzing a number of plays on the subject, though not systematically. For me the most interesting and challenging chapter in the book is the comparative analysis of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and the Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The question Patraka raises here is why the Nazi genocide of the Jews has been given such a prominent position in the U.S. capital and her conclusion is that by this Eurocentric gesture "the museum erases the historical reality that not only could genocide happen here, it has happened here, if not with the same obsessive deliberations associated with the Final Solution" (120). She goes on to claim that "our democratic discourse must repress highly visible representations of any genocide that occurred within our own national borders" (120) therefore this democratic discourse "must produce yet another set of highly visible representations of what it marks as a genocide occurring 'elsewhere'" (120). I understand this claim to mean that democratic discourses, in order to sustain the illusion of a viable society, repress the knowledge and recognition of atrocities committed at home. I wish Patraka had elaborated this critique more in her book. It is implied in much of what she says but only rarely spelled out.

The book is, however, first and foremost about dramatic works—about plays written by women, Americans, Jews, homosexuals, Holocaust survivors (some of whom are not Jewish) as well as by Jews who escaped Germany before the war. The identity and sometimes even the specific biography of a dramatist writing about the Shoah is important for Patraka, sometimes even more important than the theoretical key according to which this specific writer is analyzed. And even if she never says this explicitly, Patraka seems to imply that the life experience of a writer is crucial for the rhetorical stance of a certain play. It is a pity that she has not elaborated this in more detail as well. We also far too rarely get any information about the stage productions of the plays she discusses. When writing about the 1980 production of Peter Weiss' The Investigation, for instance,she does not provide any information at all about where it was presented or by whom. Instead the analysis turns into a polemic, arguing that this performance "may...