Chapter 7: Major Players
from: Opfermann, Charlotte G. The Art of Darkness. Houston: University Trace Press, 2002. pp. 63-73.
Hannah Arendt wrote a scholarly obituary for Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann when she penned "Eichmann in Jerusalem"63 based on her observations and evaluations during his trial64. But he successfully wrote his own eloquent and grandiose eulogy much earlier when in 1942 he initiated the Freizeitgestaltung in the Ghetto Theresienstadt. That was twenty years before his trial and execution in Jerusalem. The Freizeitgestaltung department within the camp's internal structure was a mirage supposedly run by and for the prisoners.
A sketch drawn by Wilhelm Konrad in 1944 of an otherwise unidentified performance at the Kavalier barracks realistically portrays a lone actor on the stage, entertaining a half dozen patrons in the audience, seated on crude benches.
Only a few doors away from this room65 was the isolation ward for prisoners who suffered from diphtheria and other highly contageous diseases. I was installed here in late summer 1943. I was quarantined in this bare isolation ward, together with eight or ten very sick women. We received neither medical or nursing care nor medication. However, because of our illness we did not have to work and were permitted to benefit from bedrest. Some of us even got well.
Downstairs, in the former stable of the Kavalier (the one time cavalry barracks) were the dismal, catastrophically overcrowded quarters for insane prisoners. Just like the diphtheria patients on the second floor above, the unfortunate inmates in this 'mental ward' received neither nursing, medical care nor therapy. The quarantined patients in the infectious disease ward and the locked-up inmates behind the fence of the stable/ward for the mentally ill had neither Freizeit (free time) nor taste for entertainment. We were much too sick for such frivolity.
Eichmann's propaganda film was created in 1942-1944 by members of the Freizeitgestaltung under close supervision from a separate team of our captors. The film 'documented' the artistic engagement of the prisoners for a unique view of the camp from the outside. The propaganda film followed the movie making practices of the time. Eichmann and his team could not hope to compete with the much more famous, more successful, vastly influential and widely viewed propaganda film Jud Suess (The Jew Suess) by the leading National Socialist producer Veit Harlan66. Jud Suess premiered on September 24, 1940 and its anti Semitic message facilitated the murder of European Jews at the hands of various German perpetrator entities: Wehrmacht, Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst SA and SS. Like a similar project, Der Ewige Jude (the Eternal Jew), these were propaganda tools intended to support, underscore and justify the goals of the Final Solution and its aim of total extermination of Europe's Jewish population.
Werner Krauss, Ferdinand Marian and Kristina Soederbaum assisted Veit Harlan in performing roles for ]ud Suess. Twenty million Germans watched the film Jud Suess between 1940 and 1945. It was mandatory viewing for concentration camp guards, members of the SS, police and Hitler Youth and many other party organizations67. My grade school teacher, Fraeulein Pusch, dutifully marched our entire class of sixty students from Hebbelschule in the poet's quarter of town to the Thalia Theater at Kirchgasse in the heart of the shopping district. During the early years of the National Socialist regime I was not yet excluded from such class activities but endured silently and confused some subtle discrimination at her hands. After viewing the film "Hitlerjunge Quex" we studied other heroes and martyrs of the early Nazi Party movement and memorized Adolf Hitler's biography. Fraeulein Pusch energetically promoted the new regime, but refrained from open attacks on me, the only Jewish member in her class of sixty students.
The German movie production company UFA (Universum Film-AG) was created in 1917 during World War I as the propaganda instrument BUFA (Bild und Film Ami). The firm was converted into a private organization after the end of that war.
During the twelve years of the Thousand Year Third Reich, UFA resumed its initial function again as one of Reichsminister for Propaganda Dr. Josef Goebbels' important tools for shaping public opinion. The UFA roster included legendary stars like Zarah Leander, Brigitte Helm, Hans Albers, Emil Jannings, Heinz Ruehmann, Heinrich George as well as great directors and producers like Fritz Lang68 and Josef von Sternberg.
Major Nazi era propaganda films such as "Hitlerjunge Quex", "SA Mann Brand" and "Hans Westmar"69 were mandatory viewing for schoolchildren, students, and party functionaries. However, compared to the enormous popularity of "Jud Suess" and "The Eternal Jew", they were only moderately successful.
Kurt Gerron, a one-time member of the UFA roster of artists, is the better known of the two producers of Adolf Eichmann's propoganda film. After UFA70 had dismissed all Jewish employes on March 29, 1933, he escaped first to Austria, then to France, eventually to Holland. He arrived in Theresienstadt with a transport of Dutch Jews from the camp Westerbork.
Mentioning UFA and the German film production between the two wars evokes memories of "Metropolis", "The Blue Angel", and "Muenchhausen" (in color), in addition to "Jud Suess".
During the Nazi years UFA perfected script writing and film production techniques with which they translated important events and settings into effective teaching and propaganda tools for the benefit of the Reich and its policies. The now 99-years old dancer, actress, and film director Leni Riefenstahl was Goering's, Goebbels', and Hitler's great friend and frequent dinner companion. Under Adolf Hitler's personal orders71 she translated the ceremonial march formations of thousands of faithful party members at the Nuernberg rallies, then seen in person by a viewing public of two million, into a breathtaking screen encounter for sixty million.
Her famous 1934/35 masterpiece "Triumph of the Will" and the innovative filming of the 1936 Olympic Games are still widely admired industry classics because of the many technical innovations she employed.
Adolf Eichmann was well aware of the potential for this propaganda tool. But where Riefenstahl, Harlan Veit and others succeeded, Eichmann and his team were complete failures. Only some serious historians and researchers of Nazi era propaganda works have ever heard of the Eichmann movie, and then only by its post War title "The Fuehrer makes the Jews the gift of a City."
At the time of the Nuernberg War Crimes Trials72 the Nazi defendants staged their own perfect, effective, self-serving claim: they were only obeying orders. This scenario has withstood the test of time and -right or wrong- has entered into the history books.
Several years later, during the first Auschwitz Trial73 in Frankfurt, Peter de Mendelsohn was one of the journalists who followed the proceedings from the gallery. He wrote that the tribunal concentrated unduly on the person of the late Adolf Hitler, 'blaming the light bulb and not the light'. The Auschwitz Prozess provided a scenario similar to the International War Crimes Trial in Nuernberg twenty years before.
Another member of the fascinated spectators74 at the first Frankfurt Auschwitz Prozess (Auschwitz Trial) was Peter Weiss75. He was born into a 'mixed marriage' in Berlin. But his family had escaped Nazi persecution by leaving the country. Weiss was very much affected by what he saw and heard (as were many young Germans among the 1960s viewing public) and subsequently wrote a powerful play "Die Ermittlung" (The Investigation). All of Weiss' dramatic scripts create powerful interactive, personal relationships between viewers, actors, visual objects and the presentation on stage.
The play "Die Ermittlung" has recently76 been staged in a new adaptation by Jochen Gerz at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin. Like Peter Weiss, Jochen Gerz creates art forms in many media which often become spectacular events entirely of and by themselves.
The decisions, the rationale and the mood of the various concentration camps' SS commanders in the 1940s was guided by orders received from headquarters, the ReichsSicherheitsHauptAmt (RSHA) in Berlin, at times augmented by special instructions from the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler. All were brilliantly guided by the evil genius and the—still—effective propaganda machine of the Reichsminister fuer Propaganda Dr. Joseph Goebbels.
Peter Weiss caught the mood of the Third Reich and its time in another well known drama Marat/Sade77 which premiered on April 4, 1964 in Berlin. He fully understood that dreams are essential for living, even under the most inhuman conditions. And for the Theresienstadt inmates, as spectators and participants in this Freizeitgestaltung, the cultural experiences offered seemed like a dream come true, if only for a little while and for a select few. Many believed the dream. It did contribute to their quality of life in a setting where that phrase sounds ironic, cynical and entirely inappropriate.
During the years 1942 to 1945 the participating artists created many immortal works of art, music, paintings and drama in a setting which resembled an insane asylum in every way. In many respects, it was their last will and testament, their hands reaching from the grave to a world which just might survive—even if they did not.
Seemingly, Marat/Sade deals with the French Revolution and presents vividly portrayed, mostly imagined, experiences of some inmates at the insane asylum Charenton near Paris. The patients interact with their aristocratic audience (also played by inmates of the hospital) on stage. On the surface, the play portrays the brutal stabbing of the French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat by the young aristocrat Charlotte Corday on July 13, 1793.
However, Peter Weiss makes a powerful statement about Germany and the entire free world during the much more recent bloody years of World War II. This technique of play-writing was used extensively by Berthold Brecht. It is often labelled 'alienation' and places the action on the stage at a distance (in time and place) from the viewing public. Peter Brook produced the Marat/Sade play in England with the Royal Shakespeare Company and said in his foreword
"Starting with its title, everything about this play is designed to crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelligently what has happened to him, then give him a kick into the balls, then bring him back to his senses again. It's not exactly Brecht and it's not Shakespeare either, but it's very Elizabethan and very much of our time."
It can be claimed that no other play by a German writer has enjoyed success equal to Marat/Sade, not since the years after the end of World War II when all the world was fascinated by Berthold Brecht. After April 29,19 64 when the Marat/Sade play premiered in West Berlin, Peter Weiss was acknowledged as one of the most remarkable members of the post-War generation of German artists . His intensely intellectual play has been translated into many different languages and has been successfully produced all over the world. All the most outstanding directors have directed it at one time or another.
Peter Weiss was born in Berlin in 1916. According to the Nazi's 1935 Nuernberg Racial laws, he was half Jewish, a Mischling. As such, he was destined to be sterilized, possibly killed. But the family escaped to Sweden before the outbreak of World War II. In addition to his writing, Weiss was also a well-known painter, a theatrical and operatic producer and he directed films.
During a visit to Prag in 1937, Weiss met the equally multi-talented Petr Kien (1919-1944) who was later a prominent and immensely popular member of the prisoner artist group affiliated with the Freizeitgstaltung inTheresienstadt, from 1941 until his deportation to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944.
Petr Kien worked also on the production of Adolf Eichmann's propaganda movie "Report from the Jewish Settlement Theresienstadt". Under the supervision of that film crew's special team of SS guards, he wrote one of several scripts.
Remembering Petr Kien and his tragic death, Peter Weiss later wrote in his novel "Abschied von den Eltern" (Leavetaking) "Fliehe, Petr Kien, fliehe..." (Flee, Petr Kien, flee...).
Kien was one of the most prolific members of the Freizeitgestaltung group, even though he is less well known than some others. He enjoyed privileged prisoner status, as did about two hundred other artists, one-time scientific, political and military greats. This entitled him to better housing, increased food rations and less arduous work assignment. He worked in the Zeichenstube , where under the leadership of Bedrich (Fritz) Taussig (who used the nickname "Fritta") he and fellow graphic artists drew vignettes for the illustrated reports sent from the internal Jewish camp administration's Zentralevidenz to the SS Kommandantur.
On his own and in his free time he drew numerous large and small, realistic sketches which depicted life and death in the camp. Such illustrations were briskly bought and sold (in exchange for food or articles of clothing—we had no money) and were traded among the inmates much like baseball cards in today's America. We prized these possessions and they often decorated the walls near our cots. Kien also made sketches of his many friends among the Freizeitgestaltung artists.
As a sixteen year old student, Petr Kien had written a prophetic ode about the end of German literature in the Czech-Bohemian environment: "Vom Ende der Literatur in boehmischen Laendern", leaning loosely on the writings of a 15th century Bohemian author (Johannes von Tepl):
I fear the huge, blue darkness of death.
I am gripped by fear
when I think of him
who kills off the old, small children and weak women
or those who are weakened by illness....
Kien wrote the libretto for Viktor Ullmann's opera "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" (the Emperor of Atlantis) which satirizes Adolf Hitler (portrayed as the Kaiser Ueberall, the name pointedly recalling Germany's national anthem "Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles"). The piece dramatizes the struggle between a brutal tyrant and his hapless subjects.
The entire libretto is a powerful meditation on the subject of death. Fully acknowledging the organized mass murder and the industrialized killing which surrounded us, Kien creates the character of Death who refuses to do his job until the cruel tyrant Ueberall is conquered and succumbs. The opera carries the subtitle Die Todverweigerung (death declines). The longing for a normal, natural death consumes the Emperor's subjects, just as it did occupy our thoughts at the time:
"Death, return! Hunger, Love, Life" .
Amidst all the misery, hunger, sickness, desperation and dying around us, we longed for normalcy, even for a normal death.
Death's powerful monologue shows Kien's uncanny understanding for this longing:
"I am Death, the gardener....
It is I who frees you from pestilence,
Not the pest.
It is I who delivers you from your suffering,
I am not he who makes you suffer...."
Unfortunately, some experts now use an English translation of the Kaiser's name "Ueberall" and refer to him as 'Overall'78. This misses the point: the wicked Kaiser persona and his name Ueberall link him specifically and intentionally to the proud German anthem 'Deutschland ueber alles'. It identifies him as Adolf Hitler, as our enemy, a German perpetrator. And Petr Kien's brilliant vision of a Kaiser Ueberall who himself becomes the victim of death79, ultimately, clearly makes this complicated point: when death refuses to do the Kaiser's bidding, the victims will live. But once the Kaiser succumbs, his victims can die as well.
In a similar vein, Paul Celan would comment "...der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland..." (Death is a Master from Germany). Celan's and Kien's Death are take-charge types. Both artists, Kien and Celan, knew their subject well.
This Kaiser persona, himself conquered by death, introduces the concept of our eternal, lasting triumph—of good conquering evil. Innocence was our armor. The few survivors' living are the true, lasting victory. This fact testifies long after the librettist's own death, after the death of the composer and of the millions of perpetrators, even after Kaiser Adolf Hitler's suicide at the end of his War.
Petr Kien plays God and decrees that, if the victims of Ueberall do not die, then we—his victims—have won. He was nothing short of prophetic: the powerful libretto, its message and Viktor Ullmann's immortal music live on. They tell our story, a riveting drama in the deceptively simple manner of a medieval morality play, to a forever unbelieving world.
Whenever and wherever Marat/Sade is played, the audience is fascinated by the powerful personality of the mad Marquis de Sade80 who whips his performing madmen-actors, his fellow asylum inmates, as he directs their performance. He keeps them in check by force of extreme cruelty and willpower.
"How close is any living being to falling
into a state of madness,
and how strong are the artifices that keep us all
from being engulfed by chaos?"
The question grabs the Marat/Sade theater audience by the throat and threatens to drag them into the abyss of a mental asylum. The Nazi prisons, ghettos and extermination camps were not unlike the insane asylum Charenton near Paris which Weiss uses as the setting for his play. Like an ominous cloud, the knowledge of the 1940s Nazi Euthanasia T4 extermination programs of the Reich's mental patients hovers over every performance.
Adolf Eichmann and his henchmen were the almighty master Herrenmenschen puppeteers. They controlled the artists, the performers and the audience in the same fashion as the mad Marquis de Sade—in the play—controls his fellow-actors and fellow-patients. The guards whipped, tortured, beat and killed us. And the Nazi perpetrators to this day still hold sway over the minds of those who fall prey to their calculated propaganda, long after the writers-directors-producers of the real life-and-death Holocaust drama and the few surviving victims have departed from the scene, long after the killers have met their Maker or, if they live in hiding, have faded into oblivion.
Marat/Sade is one of the best-known works of the 'theatre of cruelty', a term used by Antonin Artaud81 to describe an approach to theatrical performance that keeps the effect of the spoken word to a minimum, using instead physicality and sound in order to jolt the spectators out of their complacency. This makes the patrons in Marat/Sade [on and off stage] become active participants of the performance.
Inmate-audiences and inmate-performers in Theresienstadt's Freizeitgestaltung programs had a unique setting for the productions which they offered at the time. Our daily life and the suffering, dying, hunger, thirst and disease all around us compared with no theatrical or cultural setting known to man. The survivors of this real life drama can empathize with the Marquis de Sade's victims on today's stage. These are our murdered brothers and sisters who have come to life, thanks to the creative genius of Peter Weiss. And they tell our story.
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selected notes:
64. which, ultimately, ended with his conviction and hanging
65. identified as 'Hall number 16'
66. see ARD documentary movie about the 1948/49 trial of Harlan Veit
67. Ludwigshafener Rundschau 10-27-2001
68. who declined Goebbels' offer to head the UFA concern and left Berlin in 1933, instead
69. about Horst Wessel
70. where Gerron had starred i.a. in "The Blue Angel" with Marlene Dietrich
71. ibid.
72. from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946
73. 1963-1965
74. estimated at 20,000
75. 1916-1982
76. 2001
77. The full name of that play in its English version by Geoffrey Skelton is:"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." Atheneum New York 1965
78 'Overall' is an article of clothing—a working man's blue jean garment.This name would arbitrarily change the meaning and the opera's message.
79. as Hitler was to die eventually by his own hand
80. Sade spent his last years (1801 to 1814) in the Charenton institution
81. Artaud was not a stranger of insane the asylum experience: all told, he spent roughly 15 of his 52 years in institutions of one sort or another. His idea of a theater of cruelty is set down in his work "Le theatre et son double", 1938-1945, and has significantly influenced modern notions of theatrical performance.
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