THE MISSING RING. AND WHAT DOESN’T ADD UP IN "NATHANS TOD" BY GEORG TABORI

Abstract

L’anello che manca. E quello che non torna in Nathans Tod di Georg Tabori propose a modern rereading of Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise ( Nathan der Weise ): Georg Tabori’s Nathans Death ( Nathans Tod) . The paper aims for a comparative analysis of the famous ring parable. Asked by the Sultan to decide which of the three religions owns the truth, Nathan narrates the fable of a magic ring that has been passed from generation to generation and finally lost, when a father with three sons makes two copies of the original one. The ring symbolises the tyranny of a unique truth that has to be overcome, in order to achieve tolerance. My interest focuses on two moments of Tabori’s rewriting of this fable. On the one hand, I analyse the way in which Tabori glosses over the ring parable in the dialogue between Nathan and Saladin thanks to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightement ( Dialektik der Aufklarung ) and to Arendt’s Man in Dark Times ( Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten ). In the economic and social paradigm of the modern Totalitarianism there is no more place for tolerance. On the other hand, I reflect on the new context in which Tabori places the ring fable narrated by Nathan just before his death in front of the bodies of his dead sons. I consider that choice to be a parody: The contrast between the original context of enunciation and the modern one is the way in which Lessing’s tolerance is finally checkmated.