Darkness We Carry

CHAPTER FOUR: Revisions and Reversals

C H A P T E R zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQ Four Revisions and Reversals zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZ A lie makes you the hangman's assistant. It betrays the victim, and this is intolerable—because you are mimicking the victim, and the most important thing you know is the innocence you share with him. So if you lie, the world stops being sane, there is no justice to condemn suffering, and no difference between guilt and innocence —and only the mad know how to live with so much despair. —Edward Bond Introduction to Bingo I 1 HE appearance of Jews on the stage in dramas of the Holocaust is inevitably accompanied by the presence of the Nazis with whom they are inextricably bound.1 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 Hackett's The Diary of Anne Frank. At the other extreme, Nazis assume more prominent force by becoming fully conceived and actualized characters in their war against the Jews, occasionally assuming a central focus in those dramas. The Nazi doctor (modeled after Josef Mengele) in Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy and Kittel in Joshua SoboPs Ghetto are two such characters who represent fully defined examples of the Nazi mentality and the genocidal strategy it conceived. The middle ground between these two extremes is occupied by a vast range of dramatic characters whose unambiguous status as Nazi or Jew is less clearly established. In fact, much interest and theatrical zyxwvutsr 68 Revisions and Reversals 69 zyxwvutsrq excitement (not to say outrage) in plays of the Holocaust is generated by characters whose actions seem to place them in the worlds of both oppressor and oppressed. Chaim Rumkowski in Harold and Edith Lieberman's Throne of Straw and Jacob Gens in Ghetto are examples of one type of this character, Jews who display the "Nazi tendencies" of intolerance, cruelty, and betrayal. Through certain problematical and negative aspects of their personality or behavior, they are associated with the war against the Jews, all the while remaining Jews. (In a reverse situation, plays also have been written that feature "humane" Nazis, those who show traits of kindness, compassion, or remorse. The young German soldier who commits suicide in Michael Brady's Korczak's Children is one example. Of larger significance is Martin Engel, the sensitive, intelligent, and unapologetic protagonist of Michael Cristofer's Black Angel,2 who, after many years in prison for war crimes, returns to complicate and incite the passions of the French village he has chosen to retire to.) There is a crucial distinction to make, however, in any discussion of the many plays that involve characters with identities overlapping Jew and Nazi. Figures such as Rumkowski, Gens, or even the Commandant in Kenneth Bernard's How We Danced While We Burned, know that their position places them in a state of ethical contamination and that their actions are, in some actual way, contributing to the Germans ' loathsome work, i.e., producing war materiel or, most horribly, aiding in the extermination process itself. Nonetheless, these characters possess the crucial distinguishing characteristic that disallows them from being seen as identical to the Nazis: an ethical awareness that lets them acknowledge—to themselves and to audiences observing them—the terrible and repugnant dilemma they are caught in. Thus, Rumkowski, Gens, Blaustain (in Resort 76), and Kurtzik (in Theodore Herstand's The Emigration of Adam Kurtzik) all understand, or come to understand, that despite their best intentions, moral purity is impossible to maintain in their degrading circumstances, and their social struggle is redefined to incorporate a more personal one of salvaging the greatest amount of ethical passion possible in the confrontation with evil. No matter how heinous their behavior or how complicitous their actions, they are never entirely "lost" in our eyes because they retain an unkillable moral consciousness. There is also psychological as well as historical justification for the creation of characters whose deeds issue from both passionate certainty and helpless confusion: as moral individuals we are simply not what we would aspire to become. It is true that only the rarest of 70 Revisions and Reversals zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZY known individuals, in history or art, confront evil with moral purity. Still, it...