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from Special Section on George Tabori: Edited and Introduced by Martin Kagel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 August 2018
One of the dominant motifs in literature dealing with the Shoah is that of the Jewish sacrifice/victim. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Aqedah (the binding of Isaac) and the Passion of Christ are the most important narratives of sacrifice. Both deal with the factum brutum of violence, place the experience of violence within a comprehensive horizon of meaning, and form the point of departure and frame of reference for George Tabori's The Goldberg Variations. Tabori's metaphysical comedy is a self-reflective play that unites remembrance of the Shoah with artistic contemplation of the opportunities and limits of theater and performance. This chapter discusses one prominent example of Tabori's theater that does not turn away from the terror of history, but rather experiments with aesthetic forms and dramaturgical practices in the depiction of the Shoah while at the same time maintaining the possibility of redemption.
Violence and Sacrifice
IN THE COURSE OF the last decades, the longstanding literary debate on the “representation and memorialization of the Shoah” has been replaced by reflection on “the ways of representation and its prerequisites and consequences.” Yet the question, posed by Heiner Müller in May 1987, “[h]ow can we welcome beauty when the retina wears the traces of fingernail scratches on the walls of gas chambers: bodies of men, women, and children stacked on top of each other?” has not lost any of its relevance today, as it is this question that forces art to be self-reflective after Auschwitz.
An understanding of the structuring and stabilizing role of media in the creation of collective memory lies at the heart of this ongoing selfreflection. This is the understanding that, as James Edward Young has written, “what is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and [that] how events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form.” Every single “present” creates its own past in the form of a construction of remembrance and memory, in which the medium of representation (historiography, literature, film, memorials, and remembrance days) with its specific narratives assumes the role of co-author.
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