Heinrich, A.

English

Enlighten

          Heinrich, A. (2012) Theater and Holocaust: review of Plunka, Gene A., Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. H-Net Reviews . ISSN 1538-0661      Copyright © 2012 The Authors      http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/73503       Deposited on: 9 January 2013                    Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Gene A. Plunka. Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2010, c2009. vi + 447 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-49425-0; $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-18242-3.Reviewed by Anselm C. Heinrich (Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies)Published on H-German (July, 2012)Commissioned by Benita BlessingTheater and HolocaustIn this illuminating study, Gene Plunka traces,discusses, and evaluates the theater of the Holocaust;i.e., plays which “pay homage to the victims, educateaudiences, induce an empathetic response from theaudience, raise moral and ethical questions for discus-sion/debate, and draw lessons from history” (p. i).Under thirteen different thematic headings, Plunkadiscusses approximately thirty “seminal” plays. Heprovides biographical information about the play-wrights, production histories of the plays, as wellas information about their sociopolitical contexts.Plunka approaches Holocaust plays from two angles.First, he intends to discuss their faithfulness to theShoah, and second he wants to find out whether theywork effectively as pieces of theater.In his introduction, Plunka convincingly sets thescene by usefully discussing, among other writers,Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, particularlyconcerning the question as to whether art can everdeal with the Shoah. He makes it clear that writersand dramatists have not complied with demands putforward by Adorno and Elie Wiesel for a “literatureof silence,” and have instead “insisted that the mostsignificant way to pay homage to the dead is throughan obligation to bear witness” (pp. 14-15). Plunkaclearly advocates dealing with the Holocaust in worksof art, and “drama seems to be an ideal medium torepresent these eternal conflicts and dilemmas” (p.16). However, his claim that “despite the objectionsfrom Wiesel and Adorno, drama has proven to be aneffective medium for representing the Holocaust” (p.16) seems a bit simplistic. Relating to his own selec-tion of plays in this volume, it is highly questionableif any of these succeed in “representing” the Holo-caust and whether this is actually possible–or indeedintended by the respective playwrights. Overall, how-ever, Plunka largely achieves the goals laid out in hisintroduction in order to provide the necessary contextfor his investigation. For example, he stresses the im-portance of the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 in Israel,or the 1963-65 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which gaverise to a new dramatic genre, Documentary Theater.In the second chapter, entitled “Staging the Ba-nality of Evil,” Plunka discusses four plays whichfollow Arendt’s treatise on the Eichmann trial andthe man himself, and in particular relate to her dic-tum of the banality of evil. Plunka looks at a di-verse and exciting range of plays and discusses Don-ald Freed’s Secret Honor, The White Crow: Eich-mann in Jerusalem (1989), Cecil Philip Taylor’s Good(1981), Peter Barnes’s Laughter (1978) (consistingof the two one-act plays Tsar and Auschwitz ), andThomas Bernhard’s Vor dem Ruhestand (1979). Thenext chapter, “Culture and the Holocaust,” focuses ona very different aspect (and the relation to the formeris not quite clear). Plunka discusses three plays con-cerned with the role of culture in ghetto and concen-tration camp life with the danger of imminent deathconstantly hanging over the interned Joshua Sobol’sGhetto (1984), Fania Fenelon’s 1980 television filmPlaying for Time and Liliane Atlan’s Mister Fugueor Earth Sick (1967) all deal in one way or anotherwith culture as a way of mental and physical survival.In his fascinating fourth chapter, “The Holocaustas Literature of the Body,” Plunka discusses the hu-man body and its importance in survival during theHolocaust as people lost their individuality, and werereduced to their mere physicality. Culture and in-tellect were all but useless in the camp environment,where the only remaining dignity was linked to an1H-Net Reviewsintact/functioning body. At the same time, however,the jobs that these bodies carried out were often “me-nial tasks of no significance, such as moving a pile ofrocks from one location to another and then backagain” (p. 73). Although Plunka is certainly righthere this point seems to overlook the forced laboraspect, for example in relation to the huge facto-ries erected close to Auschwitz- Birkenau, in whichthousands of prisoners were exploited for Germany’swar effort. In this chapter Plunka looks at Char-lotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? (1966) andMichel Vinaver’s Overboard (1969).In chapter 5, “Transcending the Holocaust,”Plunka discusses plays which leave the particular con-ditions of 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s Germany be-hind “by universalizing the experience” (p. 94), andhe looks at Nelly Sachs’s Eli: A Mystery Play of theSufferings of Israel (1951) and The Diary of AnneFrank (1955) in a dramatic version by Lilian Hell-man, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett. Thechoice of these two very different plays, however, isnot entirely clear, although Plunka tries to make someconnections in this regard.Plunka then proceeds to discuss in chapter 6, un-der the title “Marxism and the Holocaust,” playswhose Marxist message is of primary importance.Under this heading he turns to Tony Kushner’s ABright Room Called Day (1985) and Peter Weiss’sThe Investigation (1965). This rather narrow inter-pretation of Weiss’s seminal play and its labeling asa “propagandist play” (p. 130) is unfortunate anddoes not really do it justice. It might have been morerewarding to group together a few plays under theheading of Documentary Theater, a movement thathas its roots in the 1960s atmosphere of “coming toterms with the past.” Such a chapter would also havelinked back to the discussion in the introduction ofAdorno, Arendt, and Wiesel–an opportunity missed.Chapters 7 and 8 are–rather unfortunately–entitled “Aryan Responsibility During the Holocaust”1 and 2. It is not clear why Plunka uses this termfrom Nazi ideology instead of “German” or “Nazi.”Plunka rightly asserts though that while the Nazi per-petrators often denied that there was any “individualresponsibility” (p. 143) as they were only obeying or-ders, research has shown that this claim can hardly besustained. Relating to this, Plunka discusses RichardNorton-Taylor’s Nuremberg (1996), Gilles Segal’s Allthe Tricks but One (1993), and Arthur Miller’s In-cident at Vichy (1964). Chapter 8 is entirely de-voted to Rolf Hochhuth’s The Representative (1963),“the most controversial and the most cited twentieth-century Holocaust drama” (p. 170).In his challenging ninth chapter, “Heroism andMoral Responsibility in the Ghettoes,” Plunka looksat plays relating to four major ghettoes in Budapest,Vilna, Lodz, and Warsaw–such as Motti Lerner’sKastner (1985), which dramatizes the difficult de-cisions taken by Zionist Rudolf Kastner, who nego-tiated with the Nazis to save Hungarian Jews andwas put on trial in Israel after the war. Other playsdiscussed in this chapter are Joshua Sobol’s Adam(1989), set in Vilna, and Harold and Edith Lieber-man’s Throne of Straw (1972), set in Lodz.In his nuanced chapter 10, “Dignity in the Con-centration Camps,” Plunka turns his attention toplays “which explore the ethics of human behaviourin a unique environment where maintaining dignitysurely meant death” (p. 251). He looks at two plays“that examine whether the preservation of dignityand morality in the concentration camps outweighedsurvival” (p. 236): Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979)and George Tabori’s The Cannibals (1968).In the following three chapters Plunka turns hisattention to post-1945 and the memories of Holo-caust survivors. In “Holocaust Survivors in UnitedStates and Israel” Plunka discusses Barbara Lebow’sA Shayna Maidel (1984), Leah Goldberg’s Lady ofthe Castle (1974), and Ben-Zion Tomer’s Children ofthe Shadows (1962)–plays “that probe the difficultiesthat survivors had in adjusting to their new lives” (p.252) in the two countries that accepted the largestnumbers of Jewish e´migre´s after the war. In the fol-lowing fascinating chapter, Plunka looks at “The Sur-vivor Syndrome and the Effects of the Holocaust onSurvivor Families.” He makes it clear that apart froma strong feeling of guilt many victims only managedto survive because they wanted to bear witness tothe Holocaust after the war. His three well-chosenplays are Gilles Se´gal’s The Puppetmaster of Lodz(1984), Peter Flannery’s Singer (1989), and Jean-Claude Grumberg’s The Workroom (1981). Linkingwell to these plays is the following chapter on “Holo-caust Survivor Memory,” which focuses on the “falli-bility of Holocaust memory” (p. 303). Plunka turnsto Emily Mann’s documentary drama Annulla: AnAutobiography (1984) and Armand Gatti’s The Sec-ond Life of Tatenberg Camp (1979). And finally, in“The Holocaust and Collective Memory,” Plunka de-2H-Net Reviewsvotes a whole chapter to Harold Pinter’s Ashes toAshes (1996) as a play “which bears witness to theHolocaust and reminds us of our complicity in theworld’s suffering” (p. 326).Unfortunately, there are one or two mistakes andoversights in Plunka’s otherwise gripping account.For example, Plunka claims that “the exterminationof Jews began in June 1941” when it might reason-ably be argued that this had already started with theGerman invasion of Poland in 1939 and mobile killingsquads that murdered tens of thousands of peoplebehind the front lines (p. 1). Plunka meticulouslylists the victims of Nazi oppression and quotes theestablished figures of eleven million victims overall,of which six million were Jewish. He continues to listexact figures for all the other victim groups but, sur-prisingly, fails to say anything about the millions ofnon-Jewish Polish and Soviet citizens and millions ofRussian soldiers murdered by Nazi Germany.[1] Giventhe fact that he appears so thorough until that point,the omission is surprising. Apart from this there are afew spelling mistakes when quoting from the originalGerman. On page 9 he quotes the court case of theFrankfurt Auschwitz trial as “Stafsache gegen Mulkaund andere” when it should have been “Strafsache.”Plunka uses a capital “J” in “Judenrein,” when thisshould be “judenrein” (p. 20 and throughout). Onpage 104, the German city of Karlsruhe appears as“Karlstruhe.”Apart from this, and more importantly, it is notquite clear which criteria Plunka uses in identifyinghis chosen plays. Plunka states that he examines themost “salient” plays (p. 18)–but by what standard?Critical or commercial success? Number of trans-lations and productions? International reception?-Length of run? Plunka adds that he does not wantto discuss “minor dramas,” but again, we might askwhat “minor” means in this context (p. 18). Plunkaseems to be clearer about the plays he does not wantto discuss, but this does not make his decisions aboutthe ones that are in his study much clearer.At the same time, Plunka needs to congratu-lated for a passionate in-depth investigation whichattempts to do the impossible. Although he fails tomake his criteria for selection sufficiently clear, it ap-pears that he has largely identified the most influen-tial plays on the topic. The way he groups themunder headings is equally convincing–although thechapter structure and the chapter titles are not al-ways entirely convincing–and it makes it easy to nav-igate through his book. A final conclusion would havebeen a plus but, given the topic, maybe there couldbe none.Note[1]. See, for example, Ludolf Herbst, Das nation-alsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945 (Darmstadt:Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 398; andLoren Kruger, The National Stage: Theater and Cul-tural Legitimation in England, France and America(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.Citation: Anselm C. Heinrich. Review of Plunka, Gene A., Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity.H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2012.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32871This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.3

Theater and Holocaust: review of Plunka, Gene A., Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity

Enlighten: Publications

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Heinrich, A. (2012) Theater and Holocaust: review of Plunka, Gene A., 
Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. H-Net Reviews . ISSN 1538-
0661 
 
 
 
 
 
Copyright © 2012 The Authors 
 
 
 
 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/73503 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Deposited on: 9 January 2013 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
Gene A. Plunka. Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2010, c2009. vi + 447 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-49425-0; $45.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-
18242-3.
Reviewed by Anselm C. Heinrich (Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies)
Published on H-German (July, 2012)
Commissioned by Benita Blessing
Theater and Holocaust
In this illuminating study, Gene Plunka traces,
discusses, and evaluates the theater of the Holocaust;
i.e., plays which “pay homage to the victims, educate
audiences, induce an empathetic response from the
audience, raise moral and ethical questions for discus-
sion/debate, and draw lessons from history” (p. i).
Under thirteen different thematic headings, Plunka
discusses approximately thirty “seminal” plays. He
provides biographical information about the play-
wrights, production histories of the plays, as well
as information about their sociopolitical contexts.
Plunka approaches Holocaust plays from two angles.
First, he intends to discuss their faithfulness to the
Shoah, and second he wants to find out whether they
work effectively as pieces of theater.
In his introduction, Plunka convincingly sets the
scene by usefully discussing, among other writers,
Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, particularly
concerning the question as to whether art can ever
deal with the Shoah. He makes it clear that writers
and dramatists have not complied with demands put
forward by Adorno and Elie Wiesel for a “literature
of silence,” and have instead “insisted that the most
significant way to pay homage to the dead is through
an obligation to bear witness” (pp. 14-15). Plunka
clearly advocates dealing with the Holocaust in works
of art, and “drama seems to be an ideal medium to
represent these eternal conflicts and dilemmas” (p.
16). However, his claim that “despite the objections
from Wiesel and Adorno, drama has proven to be an
effective medium for representing the Holocaust” (p.
16) seems a bit simplistic. Relating to his own selec-
tion of plays in this volume, it is highly questionable
if any of these succeed in “representing” the Holo-
caust and whether this is actually possible–or indeed
intended by the respective playwrights. Overall, how-
ever, Plunka largely achieves the goals laid out in his
introduction in order to provide the necessary context
for his investigation. For example, he stresses the im-
portance of the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 in Israel,
or the 1963-65 Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which gave
rise to a new dramatic genre, Documentary Theater.
In the second chapter, entitled “Staging the Ba-
nality of Evil,” Plunka discusses four plays which
follow Arendt’s treatise on the Eichmann trial and
the man himself, and in particular relate to her dic-
tum of the banality of evil. Plunka looks at a di-
verse and exciting range of plays and discusses Don-
ald Freed’s Secret Honor, The White Crow: Eich-
mann in Jerusalem (1989), Cecil Philip Taylor’s Good
(1981), Peter Barnes’s Laughter (1978) (consisting
of the two one-act plays Tsar and Auschwitz ), and
Thomas Bernhard’s Vor dem Ruhestand (1979). The
next chapter, “Culture and the Holocaust,” focuses on
a very different aspect (and the relation to the former
is not quite clear). Plunka discusses three plays con-
cerned with the role of culture in ghetto and concen-
tration camp life with the danger of imminent death
constantly hanging over the interned Joshua Sobol’s
Ghetto (1984), Fania Fenelon’s 1980 television film
Playing for Time and Liliane Atlan’s Mister Fugue
or Earth Sick (1967) all deal in one way or another
with culture as a way of mental and physical survival.
In his fascinating fourth chapter, “The Holocaust
as Literature of the Body,” Plunka discusses the hu-
man body and its importance in survival during the
Holocaust as people lost their individuality, and were
reduced to their mere physicality. Culture and in-
tellect were all but useless in the camp environment,
where the only remaining dignity was linked to an
1
H-Net Reviews
intact/functioning body. At the same time, however,
the jobs that these bodies carried out were often “me-
nial tasks of no significance, such as moving a pile of
rocks from one location to another and then back
again” (p. 73). Although Plunka is certainly right
here this point seems to overlook the forced labor
aspect, for example in relation to the huge facto-
ries erected close to Auschwitz- Birkenau, in which
thousands of prisoners were exploited for Germany’s
war effort. In this chapter Plunka looks at Char-
lotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? (1966) and
Michel Vinaver’s Overboard (1969).
In chapter 5, “Transcending the Holocaust,”
Plunka discusses plays which leave the particular con-
ditions of 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s Germany be-
hind “by universalizing the experience” (p. 94), and
he looks at Nelly Sachs’s Eli: A Mystery Play of the
Sufferings of Israel (1951) and The Diary of Anne
Frank (1955) in a dramatic version by Lilian Hell-
man, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett. The
choice of these two very different plays, however, is
not entirely clear, although Plunka tries to make some
connections in this regard.
Plunka then proceeds to discuss in chapter 6, un-
der the title “Marxism and the Holocaust,” plays
whose Marxist message is of primary importance.
Under this heading he turns to Tony Kushner’s A
Bright Room Called Day (1985) and Peter Weiss’s
The Investigation (1965). This rather narrow inter-
pretation of Weiss’s seminal play and its labeling as
a “propagandist play” (p. 130) is unfortunate and
does not really do it justice. It might have been more
rewarding to group together a few plays under the
heading of Documentary Theater, a movement that
has its roots in the 1960s atmosphere of “coming to
terms with the past.” Such a chapter would also have
linked back to the discussion in the introduction of
Adorno, Arendt, and Wiesel–an opportunity missed.
Chapters 7 and 8 are–rather unfortunately–
entitled “Aryan Responsibility During the Holocaust”
1 and 2. It is not clear why Plunka uses this term
from Nazi ideology instead of “German” or “Nazi.”
Plunka rightly asserts though that while the Nazi per-
petrators often denied that there was any “individual
responsibility” (p. 143) as they were only obeying or-
ders, research has shown that this claim can hardly be
sustained. Relating to this, Plunka discusses Richard
Norton-Taylor’s Nuremberg (1996), Gilles Segal’s All
the Tricks but One (1993), and Arthur Miller’s In-
cident at Vichy (1964). Chapter 8 is entirely de-
voted to Rolf Hochhuth’s The Representative (1963),
“the most controversial and the most cited twentieth-
century Holocaust drama” (p. 170).
In his challenging ninth chapter, “Heroism and
Moral Responsibility in the Ghettoes,” Plunka looks
at plays relating to four major ghettoes in Budapest,
Vilna, Lodz, and Warsaw–such as Motti Lerner’s
Kastner (1985), which dramatizes the difficult de-
cisions taken by Zionist Rudolf Kastner, who nego-
tiated with the Nazis to save Hungarian Jews and
was put on trial in Israel after the war. Other plays
discussed in this chapter are Joshua Sobol’s Adam
(1989), set in Vilna, and Harold and Edith Lieber-
man’s Throne of Straw (1972), set in Lodz.
In his nuanced chapter 10, “Dignity in the Con-
centration Camps,” Plunka turns his attention to
plays “which explore the ethics of human behaviour
in a unique environment where maintaining dignity
surely meant death” (p. 251). He looks at two plays
“that examine whether the preservation of dignity
and morality in the concentration camps outweighed
survival” (p. 236): Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979)
and George Tabori’s The Cannibals (1968).
In the following three chapters Plunka turns his
attention to post-1945 and the memories of Holo-
caust survivors. In “Holocaust Survivors in United
States and Israel” Plunka discusses Barbara Lebow’s
A Shayna Maidel (1984), Leah Goldberg’s Lady of
the Castle (1974), and Ben-Zion Tomer’s Children of
the Shadows (1962)–plays “that probe the difficulties
that survivors had in adjusting to their new lives” (p.
252) in the two countries that accepted the largest
numbers of Jewish e´migre´s after the war. In the fol-
lowing fascinating chapter, Plunka looks at “The Sur-
vivor Syndrome and the Effects of the Holocaust on
Survivor Families.” He makes it clear that apart from
a strong feeling of guilt many victims only managed
to survive because they wanted to bear witness to
the Holocaust after the war. His three well-chosen
plays are Gilles Se´gal’s The Puppetmaster of Lodz
(1984), Peter Flannery’s Singer (1989), and Jean-
Claude Grumberg’s The Workroom (1981). Linking
well to these plays is the following chapter on “Holo-
caust Survivor Memory,” which focuses on the “falli-
bility of Holocaust memory” (p. 303). Plunka turns
to Emily Mann’s documentary drama Annulla: An
Autobiography (1984) and Armand Gatti’s The Sec-
ond Life of Tatenberg Camp (1979). And finally, in
“The Holocaust and Collective Memory,” Plunka de-
2
H-Net Reviews
votes a whole chapter to Harold Pinter’s Ashes to
Ashes (1996) as a play “which bears witness to the
Holocaust and reminds us of our complicity in the
world’s suffering” (p. 326).
Unfortunately, there are one or two mistakes and
oversights in Plunka’s otherwise gripping account.
For example, Plunka claims that “the extermination
of Jews began in June 1941” when it might reason-
ably be argued that this had already started with the
German invasion of Poland in 1939 and mobile killing
squads that murdered tens of thousands of people
behind the front lines (p. 1). Plunka meticulously
lists the victims of Nazi oppression and quotes the
established figures of eleven million victims overall,
of which six million were Jewish. He continues to list
exact figures for all the other victim groups but, sur-
prisingly, fails to say anything about the millions of
non-Jewish Polish and Soviet citizens and millions of
Russian soldiers murdered by Nazi Germany.[1] Given
the fact that he appears so thorough until that point,
the omission is surprising. Apart from this there are a
few spelling mistakes when quoting from the original
German. On page 9 he quotes the court case of the
Frankfurt Auschwitz trial as “Stafsache gegen Mulka
und andere” when it should have been “Strafsache.”
Plunka uses a capital “J” in “Judenrein,” when this
should be “judenrein” (p. 20 and throughout). On
page 104, the German city of Karlsruhe appears as
“Karlstruhe.”
Apart from this, and more importantly, it is not
quite clear which criteria Plunka uses in identifying
his chosen plays. Plunka states that he examines the
most “salient” plays (p. 18)–but by what standard?
Critical or commercial success? Number of trans-
lations and productions? International reception?-
Length of run? Plunka adds that he does not want
to discuss “minor dramas,” but again, we might ask
what “minor” means in this context (p. 18). Plunka
seems to be clearer about the plays he does not want
to discuss, but this does not make his decisions about
the ones that are in his study much clearer.
At the same time, Plunka needs to congratu-
lated for a passionate in-depth investigation which
attempts to do the impossible. Although he fails to
make his criteria for selection sufficiently clear, it ap-
pears that he has largely identified the most influen-
tial plays on the topic. The way he groups them
under headings is equally convincing–although the
chapter structure and the chapter titles are not al-
ways entirely convincing–and it makes it easy to nav-
igate through his book. A final conclusion would have
been a plus but, given the topic, maybe there could
be none.
Note
[1]. See, for example, Ludolf Herbst, Das nation-
alsozialistische Deutschland 1933-1945 (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), 398; and
Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theater and Cul-
tural Legitimation in England, France and America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Anselm C. Heinrich. Review of Plunka, Gene A., Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity.
H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2012.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32871
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-
No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
3


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Theater and Holocaust: review of Plunka, Gene A., Holocaust Drama: The Theater of Atrocity

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