Challenging the Selectivity of Memory in 1950s West Germany: Erwin Sylvanus’s Dr. Korczak and the Children

Abstract

The end of the Cold War and German unification have brought about a more complete treatment of the Nazi past in Germany, one that includes the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Since the early 1990s, perpetrators have increasingly become a part of the discourse about the Nazi past, in historiography as well as in fictional literature. I would argue, however, that perpetrators have been part of the cultural memory of (West) Germany since the first post-war decades. Many dramatists wrote plays that included Nazi perpetrators as characters and, in doing so, confronted Germans with this difficult and suppressed memory. One of these was Erwin Sylvanus, who wrote Dr. Korczak and the Children in 1957 in order to challenge his contemporaries’ faulty memory of their difficult past. With his play, Sylvanus countered their strategies of distancing themselves from the crimes of the Holocaust and from those who committed them. Employing a Pirandellian technique, he presented Germans with a Nazi character who reminded them that the perpetrators had come from out of their midst and were still with them in the present. After its world premiere in 1957, the play was performed in West Germany numerous times in the late 1950s and early 1960s. An examination of newspaper reviews written in response to these stagings reveals, however, that the playwright’s attempt at stimulating more critical self-reflection in discourse about the Nazi past was largely unsuccessful. The majority of reviewers interpreted the productions as a memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and they saw these performances as celebrating the spirit of humanism exemplified in the play by the character of Janusz Korczak. This reception illustrates Germans’ conflicted struggle with remembering the perpetrators’ experience and highlights the role of the media in the construction of cultural memory.