The Effects of Transformations: The Case of George Tabori's Mutters Courage

Abstract

George Tabori's work as playwright and director has helped transform contemporary theatre in the German-speaking world. Moreover, his oeuvre has profoundly challenged ideas central to German cultural production, philosophical and epistemological concepts at the core of Western culture per se, and so-called Holocaust literature. This influence has not gone unnoticed outside the community of theatre practitioners as reflected in numerous recent works on Tabori (e.g. Bayerdorffer; Feinberg; Hoyng; Strumpel). This article will contribute to this discussion of Tabori's influence and status by exploring the nexus between transnationality and media transformation in his work, using as a specific case of this connection his Mutters Courage, a work that exists in various versions and in different media – as a dramatic text (MC), a novella (MC-E), a radio play (MC-R), and, last but not least, as a film directed by Michael Verhoeven (MCF).' It will propose that Tabori's exploration of different media is motivated by his transnational position as an artist and also reinforces this position as intentionality. It will demonstrate that through playing – ein Spielen (Hoyng, word 3; Tabori, Hamlet 119) – Tabori creates media effects that address a core philosophical idea of his oeuvre, probing all-too-neatly conceived victimperpetrator constellations in innovative and evolving ways, namely by exploiting the tension between German-Jewish symbiosis and transnationality. A Hungarian-born, Jewish holder of a British passport (Feinberg, Embodied ix), Tabori ranks among the most prolific stage directors and playwrights of the German-speaking world today. He has carved out this position since 1972, when he permanently relocated to Europe after twelve years of exile in Britain (1935-1947) and nearly twenty years in the United States (1947-1968). The latter years were marked by mixed success as an author of screenplays and modest beginnings as a novelist, by productive collaborations with Lee Strasberg's Actors