ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Inspired Poetic View Of Ghastly Crime

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30897, 2 November 1965, Page 14

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Inspired Poetic View Of Ghastly Crime

What The Critics Say

THE PLAY: The Investigation, by Peter Weiss, with simultaneous premieres in 14 German theatres, both in East and West Germanies, and with a reading in the Aldwycb Theatre,- London, on October 19,

THE CRITICS: Berlin, a special correspondent of “The Times." London, the drama critic of “The Times.”

The wilfully planned and demoniacally organised extermination of five _ million human lives in the infamous wartime concentration camp in Auschwitz was so montrous an undertaking that the ordinary human mind is quite incapable of grasping its enormity. The facts, however, are there, cold and incontrovertible. They have been recorded in numerous official and unofficial publications. They were brought into the public eye once more at the 18-month-long Frankfurt trial which ended last summer.

They are the material of Peter Weiss's drama, entiled ‘The Investigation,” which its author has deliberately called “an Oratorium in 11 Cantos,” because no poet, not even the divinely inspired descendant of a Homer or a Sophocles, can hope to encompass the theme and reduce its dimensions in order to fit them into the framework of the four walls of a playhouse.

FORMAL TREATMENT Producing the work at the Freie Volksbuhne, Berlin, Piscator well knew that the only way to tame this indomitable material was to treat it formally as the stuff of a religious experience. Weiss’s condensation of the trial report is an inspired poetic view of a ghastly crime for which no man-made legal machinery, adequate or comprehensive enough exists. If the murderer of a child deserves such and such a punishment what are the just, deserts of a man who with his own hands strangled or smashed to pulp a dozen children? Or killed 500 victims? Or 50,000 such? The sentences at Frankfurt (which in no way figure in Wiess’s play, though they were read out at the

end of the public reading given simultaneously under the auspices of the Academy of Arts in east Berlin as a reflection of this very inadequacy) were not even token sentences. Piscator sees the text as requiem for the dead and has punctuated it throughout its divisions and subdivisions, during which the investigation into what happened takes place, with ear-splitting recorded electronic music, supported by solo voices and choir, specially composed by Luigi Nono. Manfred Wekwerth and Lothar Bellag (the latter replacing Erich Engel, whom illness had laid low) do almost the same thing, with, however, music selected from the works of Paul Dessau. Both scores have the effect of stunning the senses. Piscator stages the work in the theatre’s regular repertoire, where it will run for two months. EASTERN METHOD

The east Berliners preferred not to rush things and chose a different method. The text was distributed among professional actors and members of the Academy of Arts, many of them, like Alexander Abusch, the Cultural Minister, former inmates of the camp. This had the unforeseen effect of inviting one to distinguish between the two, and this it was, unfortunately, all too easy to do. It was, however, truly heartbreaking to hear Helene Weigel or Georgia Peet reading the lines allotted to them as two of the nine anonymous witnesses called on to retell events of such horror that the worst atrocity imagined by an Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright paled into an act of schoolboy truculence by comparison. Angelika Hurwitz and Hilde Krahl were their opposite numbers on the western side. Though one is numbed by the incredibility of the facts, one is left even more aghast by two elements in the drama that Weiss brings to the fore. First, there is the unbelievable stubbornness of the 18

accused. Denial is heaped upon denial; the doctors and the others seek to shelter behind one another and behind authority; never has the buck been passed by so many men so frequently though with so little effect. Did these human monsters really think that their impudent denials and their blind refusal to recall the squalid past would persuade the court to let them off scot free? Second, there is the perfectly well-established point that the able-bodied were sent to Auschwitz to be financially exploited as slavelabour for large German industrial concerns (they are named in the trial report and in the play, so let us not be squeamish about naming them here) concerns like LG.Farben, Siemens, Krupps, and the Buna-Werke (to say nothing of Topf and Sohne, who built the gas ovens and whose current advertisement, in the words of one witness, offers for sale an incinerator “perfected in the light of considerable experience”). Have these concerns, one is asked by Weiss to reflect, paid the

penalty of their murderous and inhuman traffic?

A word of praise should go to Hans-Ulrich Schmuckle for the sobering effect of the greymonochrome setting at the Freie Volksbuhne and another to all the company for their disciplined performances in the service of the author's and director’s humanist conception.

The experiment of staging the reading in the east Berlin Volkskammer against the background of a huge map of the camp is more disputable. "The Investigation” will also be regularly performed at the east Berlin Volksbuhne in November. It is an experience which the younger generation of Germans should not be allowed to miss. IN LONDON

The Aldwych Theatre in London was packed out and many people were turned away from the late-night reading of “The Investigation," on the same evening as the premiere in 14 German theatres.

Peter Brook, who prepared the Royal Shakespeare Com-

pany. reading, described It in a programme note as an act of solidarity with the German theatre, and anticipated the attacks which the play—a rigorous documentary edited from the 18 months Auschwitz trial—was likely to provoke. Heading the list of complaints was the phrase “It’s the Germans’ business, not ours.” if one has any reservation about the value of the event it is that the play might send British audiences away thinking precisely that. “The Investigation” is a work addressed to the German conscience: its last lines, spoken by a former Chief Officer of the camp, are an angry assertion that now Germany has re-established herself in the postwar world all memories of war crimes should.be laid aside. Outside Germany there is not much danger of this. GERMAN VILLAINS

And what the play does is less to present Auschwitz as a hideous parable for the whole of mankind than to reinforce traditional antiGerman feeling. Even the

presentation of the actual defendants by name has the effect of turning them into villains instead of showing them as acquiescent cogs in a satanic machine. For its local purpose, though, it is hard to see how Mr Weiss could have shaped the material better. And his handling of the witnesses enlarges the wort beyond personal revenge. The sickening chronicle of sadistic and bureaucratic inhumanity is there —the casual slaughter of children; the confinements in cells 3ft square; the transformation of young girls into aged crones. But beyond this there emerges the evil pattern of the system itself—a hierarchy of strength largely obliterating the distinction between guards and prisoners and endorsing the words of Sartre’s SS man in “Altona,” “the century might have been a good one had not man been watched from time immemorial by the cruel enemy who had sworn to destroy him: that hairless, evil, flesh-eating beast —man himself.”