Abstract
CRITICAL REACTION TO DOCUMENTARY THEATER and particularly to Peter Weiss's The Investigation, has been predominantly negative. "Never was an author less important," is one theme of the criticism. The Investigation is, to date, the most extreme case of the genre of documntary theater because its text follows so closely the documents of the trial in Frankfurt and other published reports on the history of Auschwitz. This paper will not deal with the content of the play, but only with its form, in order to reveal its artistic structure. Its structure as creative effort does not spring from the writer's free imagination, but from the effort to imagine-literally to have the image before his eyes-of the things, the events, and the men of Auschwitz. Just as a collage artist does not manufacture the parts of his composition, the newspaper clippings and the rags, but uses what he finds, so Weiss forms his play from existing elements.
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