Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Inge Arteel Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, eds., Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2022. 200 pp. Scholarship on the Hungarian-born Jewish playwright and director George Tabori (1914–2007) is gaining new momentum, especially under the impulse of Martin Kagel, professor of German literature and culture at the University [End Page 135] of Georgia. After the 2018 publication of a substantial special section on Tabori in Nexus, the essay series in German Jewish Studies, Kagel has now co-edited with David Z. Saltz the book Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. So far, Tabori scholarship has predominantly addressed the generic and ethical specificities of Tabori's interaction with Holocaust remembrance culture, focusing on his provocative grotesque humor and his radically intertextual rewriting of dramatic and theatrical conventions. In her opening essay, eminent Tabori scholar Anat Feinberg stresses the need to look at other aspects of Tabori's work as well. Feinberg herself gives the example of Tabori's often overlooked experimental directorial practice in the 1970s and 1980s in Bremen and Vienna. Tracing Tabori's legacy means asking how the dramaturgical specificities of Tabori's work relate to theater and performance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At stake is first of all the embodied form of the survivor-witness so central to Tabori's dramaturgy. Several contributions tackle this question in a comparative approach. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer convincingly shows Tabori's connection with the newer avantgarde in confronting the physicality of Tabori's ritual dramaturgy with two theater performances by Israeli artists, Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (1991) by the Israeli Akko Theatre and Yael Ronen's Third Generation: Work in Progress (2008). Rebecca Rovit reads the drama of Tabori's contemporary Charlotte Delbo and two playwrights of the succeeding generation, Yehoshua Sobol and Peter Barnes, through the lens of Tabori's work. Rovit carefully outlines the quite diverse dramaturgical means with which these authors address the question of theater as a space to bear witness. Johanna Öttl, in her comparative reading of Tabori's The Cannibals with Robert Schindel's drama Dunkelstein (2010), shows how we can read Tabori's embodied theater as a way to present victims as singular self-determined subjects, whereas Schindel shows how this self-determination has been reduced to a mere convention in melodramatic cinema. Tabori's nonrealistic aesthetics, including his disturbing and grotesque humor, present a second and maybe even bigger challenge, especially when transposing his work to the formats of popular culture. Peter Höyng's contribution on Urs Odermatt's film adaptation (2009) of Tabori's Mein Kampf shows, though Höyng is careful not to voice too strong a judgment, how the film nullifies every aspect of Tabori's aesthetics. Ironically, it is the failed adaptation [End Page 136] that retrospectively makes Tabori's dramatic "palimpsest" (157) stand out as the highly complex and provocatively grotesque work it is. Barbara Wallace Grossman's chapter on so-called Holocaust musicals asks whether they can provide an equivalent for Tabori's disturbing laughter. The answer is nuanced: melodramatic Broadway productions do not pass the test at all, whereas some more stylized productions do explore musical theater "as an appropriate genre for presenting Holocaust narratives" (182). The challenges of a transcultural transposition in performance practice are touched upon by the director Laura Forti, who discusses the difficulties she faced when staging The Cannibals in Italy in 2002. Her contribution indirectly indicates how rewarding a more encompassing transnational investigation into Tabori's work could be, an approach that would reflect on how Tabori addresses the legacy of the Holocaust as a European one. Other contributions adopt a more historiographical and genealogical perspective. Klaus van den Berg compares two quite diverse stagings by Tabori of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 1966 and 1978. Van den Berg reads them in relation with Walter Benjamin's thoughts on "image-space" and "performing space," an approach very well suited to trace the shift from...