by Susan Sontag
The Eichmann trial was such a drama. It was not a tragedy itself, but the attempt, dramatically, to deal with and resolve a tragedy. It was, in the profoundest sense, theater. And, as such, it must be judged by other criteria in addition to those of legality and of morality. Because its purposes were not simply those of a historical inquest into the facts, an attempt to determine guilt and affix punishment, the trial of Eichmann did not always “work.” But the problem of the Eichmann trial was not its deficient legality, but the contradiction between its juridical form and its dramatic function. As Harold Rosenberg has pointed out: “The trial undertook the function of tragic poetry, that of making the pathetic and terrifying past live again in the mind. But it had to carry out this function on a world stage ruled by the utilitarian code.” There was a fundamental paradox in the Eichmann trial: it was primarily a great act of commitment through memory and the renewal of grief, yet it clothed itself in the forms of legality and scientific objectivity. The trial is a dramatic form which imparts to events a certain provisional neutrality; the outcome remains to be decided; the very word “defendant” implies that a defense is possible. In this sense, though Eichmann, as everyone expected, was condemned to death, the form of the trial favored Eichmann. Perhaps this is why many feel, in retrospect, that the trial was a frustrating experience, an anticlimax.
It remains to be seen whether art of a more easily recognizable type—art which need not pretend to be neutral—can do better. By far the most celebrated of all the works of art which take up the same functions of historical memory served by the Eichmann trial is The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter), the lengthy play by the young German playwright Rolf Hochhuth.13 Here we have a work of art as we ordinarily understand it—a work for the familiar theater of 8:30 curtains and intermissions, rather than for the austere public stage of the courtroom. Here there are actors, rather than real murderers and real survivors from hell. Yet it is not false to compare it with the Eichmann trial, because The Deputy is first of all a compilation, a record. Eichmann himself and many other real persons of the period are represented in the play; the speeches of the characters are drawn from historical records.
In modern times, this use of the theater as a forum for public, moral judgment has been shunted aside. The theater has largely become a place in which private quarrels and agonies are staged; the verdict which events render upon characters in most modern plays has no relevance beyond the play itself. The Deputy breaks with the completely private boundaries of most modern theater. And as it would be obtuse to refuse to evaluate the Eichmann trial as a public work of art, it would be frivolous to judge The Deputy simply as a work of art.
Some art—but not all—elects as its central purpose to tell the truth; and it must be judged by its fidelity to the truth, and by the relevance of the truth which it tells. By these standards, The Deputy is an important play. The case against the Nazi party, the SS, the German business elite, and most of the German people—none of which is slighted by Hochhuth—is too well known to need anyone’s assent. But The Deputy also stresses, and this is the controversial part of the play, a strong case for the complicity of the German Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII. This case I am convinced is true, and well taken. (See the ample documentation which Hochhuth has provided at the end of the play, and the excellent book by Guenter Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany.) And the importance, historical and moral, of this difficult truth at the present time cannot be overestimated.
In a preface (unfortunately not translated) to the German edition of the play, the director Erwin Piscator, who gave The Deputy its first production in Berlin, wrote that he saw Hochhuth’s play as a successor to the historical dramas of Shakespeare and Schiller and the epic theater of Brecht. All questions of quality aside, these comparisons—with classical historical drama and with epic theater when it deals with historical subjects—are misleading. It is the whole point of Hochhuth’s play that he has barely transformed his material. Unlike the plays of Shakespeare or Schiller or Brecht, Hochhuth’s play stands or falls by its fidelity to the complete historical truth.
This documentary intention of the play also indicates its limitations. The fact is that as not all works of art aim at educating and directing conscience, not all works of art which successfully perform a moral function greatly satisfy as art. I can think of only one dramatic work of the type of The Deputy, the short film Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, which satisfies equally as a moral act and as a work of art. Night and Fog, also a memorial to the tragedy of the six million, is highly selective, emotionally relentless, historically scrupulous, and—if the word seems not outrageous—beautiful. The Deputy is not a beautiful play. Nor does one necessarily ask that it be. Nevertheless, since one can assume the immense interest and moral importance of the play, the aesthetic questions need to be faced. Whatever The Deputy is as a moral event, it is not play-writing of the highest order.
There is the matter of length, for example. I don’t find The Deputy’s length objectionable. Probably it is, indeed, one of those works of art—like Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, the operas of Wagner, the best plays of O’Neill—which positively benefit from their outlandish length. The language, though, is a genuine liability. In this English version, it is flat, neither formal nor truly idiomatic. (“The Legation is extraterritorial—be off with you/ Or I’ll send for the police.”) Hochhuth may have arranged his lines in free-verse form on the page to emphasize the seriousness of his subject, or to reveal the banality of Nazi rhetoric. But I can’t imagine any plausible way of speaking these lines that conveys the effect (either one) that the author intended. A greater artistic fault is the thick chunks of documentation with which Hochhuth has loaded the play. The Deputy is clogged with undigested exposition. There are, to be sure, a number of extremely powerful scenes, particularly those involving the demonic SS doctor. Yet the fact remains that one of the principal and recurrent—and almost, by nature, undramatic—reasons for characters confronting each other in a scene is to inform each other of something. Hundreds of names, facts, statistics, reports of conversations, items of current news have been pumped into the dialogue. If the reading of The Deputy—I have not yet seen it performed—is tremendously moving, it is because of the weight of its subject, not because of its style or dramaturgy, both of which are extremely conventional.
I imagine that The Deputy could be highly satisfying on the stage. But its theatrical effectiveness depends on the director possessing an unusual kind of moral and aesthetic tact. A good production of The Deputy, I would think, must be ingeniously stylized. Yet in summoning the resources of the advanced modern theatre, with its bent toward the ritualistic rather than the realistic, the director must beware of undermining the power of the play, which lies in its factual authority, its evocation of a concrete historicity. This seems to me just what Hochhuth has inadvertently done in the one suggestion he makes for the The Deputy’s staging. Listing the characters, Hochhuth has made certain groupings of the shorter roles; all the roles in a single grouping are to be played by the same actor. Thus, the same actor is to play both Pius XII and Baron Rutta of the Reich’s Armament Cartel. Another grouping allows a Father in the Papal Legation, an SS sergeant, and a Jewish Kapo all to be played by a single actor. “For recent history,” Hochhuth explains, “has taught us that in the age of universal military conscription it is not necessarily to anyone’s credit or blame, or even a question of character, which uniform one wears or whether one stands on the side of the victims or the executioners.” I can’t believe that Hochhuth really subscribes to this facile, fashionable view of the interchangeability of persons and roles (his whole play precisely contradicts this view) and I should resent seeing it embodied in the staging as Hochhuth suggests. The same objection would not apply, however, to the superficially similar theatrical idea devised by Peter Brook for his production of the play in Paris: that the actors all wear identical blue cotton suits, over which, when identification is needed, are slipped the cardin
al’s scarlet coat, the priest’s soutane, the Nazi officer’s swastika armband, and so on.
* * *
That Hochhuth’s play has been the occasion of riots in Berlin, Paris, London, almost everywhere it has been performed, because it depicts (not just reports) the late Pius XII refusing to use the influence of the Catholic Church and oppose, either openly or through private diplomatic channels, the Nazi policy toward the Jews, is irrefutable indication of the valuable site which The Deputy occupies—between art and life. (In Rome, the play was closed by the police on the day it was to open.)
There is good reason to believe that protests by the Church might have saved many lives. Within Germany, when the Catholic hierarchy strongly opposed Hitler’s euthanasia program for elderly and incurably ill Aryans—the trial run for the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem—it was stopped. And the precedent of political neutrality cannot be allowed to stand as the Vatican’s excuse, since the Vatican had made forceful pronouncements on such matters of international politics as the Russian invasion of Finland. Most damaging to the case of those who regard the play as a calumny on Pius XII are extant documents which indicate that the Pope, like many conservative European rulers of the time, did approve of Hitler’s war against Russia and for that reason hesitated to oppose the German government actively. For the scene that depicts this fact, Hochhuth’s play has been slandered by many Catholics as an anti-Catholic tract. But either what Hochhuth reports is true or it is not. And, assuming that Hochhuth has his facts (and his notion of Christian courage) right, a good Catholic is no more bound to defend all the actions of Pius XII than he is to admire the libertine Popes of the Renaissance. Dante, whom no one would accuse of being anti-Catholic, consigned Celestine V to hell. Why may not a modern Christian—Hochhuth is a Lutheran—hold up as a standard to the then incumbent Deputy or Vicar of Christ the behavior of the Berlin provost, Bernard Lichtenberg (who publicly prayed for the Jews from his pulpit and volunteered to accompany the Jews to Dachau), or the Franciscan monk, Father Maximilian Kolbe (who died hideously in Auschwitz)?
In any case, the attack on the Pope is scarcely the only subject of The Deputy. The Pope appears in only one scene of the play. The action centers on the two heroes—the Jesuit priest Riccardo Fontana (mainly based on Provost Lichtenberg, with something of Father Kolbe) and the remarkable Kurt Gerstein, who joined the SS in order to gather facts to lay before the Papal Nuncio in Berlin. Hochhuth has not placed Gerstein and Fontana (Lichtenberg) in any “grouping,” to be played along with other roles by the same actor. There is nothing interchangeable about these men. Thus, the main point that The Deputy makes is not a recriminatory one. It is not only an attack on the hierarchy of the German Catholic Church and on the Pope and his advisors, but a statement that genuine honor and decency—though these may entail martyrdom—are possible, and mandatory for a Christian. Precisely because there were Germans who did choose, Hochhuth is saying, we have a right to accuse the others who refused to choose, to speak out, of an unforgivable cowardice.
[1964]
The death of tragedy
MODERN discussions of the possibility of tragedy are not exercises in literary analysis; they are exercises in cultural diagnostics, more or less disguised. The subject of literature has pre-empted much of the energy that formerly went into philosophy, until that subject was purged by the empiricists and logicians. The modern dilemmas of feeling, action, and belief are argued out on the field of literary masterpieces. Art is seen as a mirror of human capacities in a given historical period, as the preeminent form by which a culture defines itself, names itself, dramatizes itself. In particular, questions about the death of literary forms—is the long narrative poem still possible, or is it dead? the novel? verse drama? tragedy?—are of the greatest moment. The burial of a literary form is a moral act, a high achievement of the modern morality of honesty. For, as an act of self-definition, it is also a self-entombment.
Such burials are customarily accompanied by all the displays of mourning; for we mourn ourselves, when we name the lost potential of sensibility and attitude which the defunct form incarnated. In his Birth of Tragedy, which is really about the death of tragedy, Nietzsche blamed the radically new prestige of knowledge and conscious intelligence—which arose in ancient Greece with the figure of Socrates—for the waning of instinct and of the sense of reality which made tragedy impossible. All subsequent discussions of the topic have been similarly elegiac, or at least defensive: either mourning the death of tragedy, or hopefully trying to make “modern” tragedy out of the naturalistic-sentimental theater of Ibsen and Chekhov, of O’Neill, Miller, and Williams. It is one of the singular merits of Lionel Abel’s book14 that the customary accent of lament is missing. Nobody writes tragedies any more? Very well. Abel invites his readers to leave the funeral parlor and come to a party, a party celebrating the dramatic form which is ours, has been ours in fact for three hundred years: the metaplay.
Indeed there is hardly reason to mourn, since the corpse was only a distant relative. Tragedy, says Abel, is not and never has been the characteristic form of Western theater; most Western dramatists, bent on writing tragedy, have been unable to do so. Why? In a word: self-consciousness. First, the self-consciousness of the dramatist himself, and then that of his protagonists. “The Western playwright is unable to believe in the reality of a character who is lacking in self-consciousness. Lack of self-consciousness is as characteristic of Antigone, Oedipus, and Orestes, as self-consciousness is characteristic of Hamlet, that towering figure of Western metatheatre.” Thus, it is the metaplay—plots that depict the self-dramatization of conscious characters, a theater whose leading metaphors state that life is a dream and the world a stage—which has occupied the dramatic imagination of the West to the same degree that the Greek dramatic imagination was occupied with tragedy. Two important historical observations follow from this thesis. One is that tragedy is simply much rarer than has been supposed—the Greek plays, one play of Shakespeare (Macbeth), and a few plays of Racine. Tragedy is not the characteristic form of the Elizabethan or Spanish theater. Most Elizabethan serious drama consists of failed tragedies (Lear, Doctor Faustus) or successful metaplays (Hamlet, The Tempest). The other point relates to contemporary drama. In Abel’s account, Shakespeare and Calderón are the two great sources of a tradition which is gloriously revived in the “modern” theater of Shaw, Pirandello, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Brecht.
As a piece of cultural diagnostics, Abel’s book is in the grand continental tradition of meditation on the tribulations of subjectivity and self-consciousness, inaugurated by the romantic poets and Hegel and continued by Nietzsche, Spengler, the early Lukács, and Sartre. Their problems, their terminology loom behind Abel’s spare, untechnical essays. Where the Europeans are heavy, he travels light, without footnotes; where they write tomes, he has written a set of blunt essays; and where they are gloomy, he is crisply sanguine. In short, Abel has expounded a continental argument in the American manner: he has written the first American-style existentialist tract. His argument is clean-cut, pugnacious, prone to slogans, oversimplified—and, in the main, absolutely right. His book does not plumb the windy depths (but they are depths) of Lucien Goldmann’s great work on Pascal, Racine, and the idea of tragedy, Le Dieu Caché, which I would guess Abel has learned from. But its virtues, not the least of which are directness and brevity, are formidable. To an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with the writing of Lukács, Goldmann, Brecht, Duerrenmatt, et al., the very problems that Abel raises should come as a revelation. Abel’s book is far more stimulating than George Steiner’s Death of Tragedy and Martin Esslin’s The Theater of the Absurd. Indeed, no recent English or American writer on the theater has done anything as interesting or sophisticated.
As I have suggested, the diagnosis presupposed in Metatheatre—that modern man lives with an increasing burden of subjectivity, at the expense of his sense of the reality of the world—is not new. Nor do works for the theater constitute the
main texts which disclose this attitude and its correlative idea, reason as self-manipulation and role-playing. The two greatest documents of this attitude are Montaigne’s Essays and Machiavelli’s The Prince—both manuals of strategy which assume a gulf between the “public self” (the role) and the “private self” (the true self). The value of Abel’s book lies in the forthright application of this diagnosis to the drama. He is quite right, for example, in arguing that most of the plays of Shakespeare which their author, and everyone else since, have called tragedies are not, strictly speaking, tragedies at all. In fact, Abel could have gone even further. Not only are most of the putative tragedies really “metaplays”; so are most of the histories and comedies. The principal plays of Shakespeare are plays about self-consciousness, about characters not acting so much as dramatizing themselves in roles. Prince Hal is the man of perfected self-consciousness and self-control, triumphing over the man of rash, unself-conscious integrity, Hotspur, and over the sentimental, cowardly, self-conscious man of pleasure, Falstaff. Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are, hero and king. But Hamlet and Henry V see themselves as acting parts—the part of the avenger, the part of the heroic and confident king leading his troops to battle. Shakespeare’s fondness for the play-within-a-play and for putting his characters into disguise for long stretches of the story clearly partakes of the style of metatheater. From Prospero to the Police Chief in Genet’s The Balcony, the personages of metatheater are characters in search of an action.
* * *
I have said that Abel’s main thesis is right. But it is also, with respect to three issues, mistaken or incomplete.
First, his thesis would be more complete, and I think somewhat altered, if Abel had considered what comedy is. Without wanting to suggest that comedy and tragedy divide the dramatic universe between them, I would argue that they are best defined in relation to each other. The omission of comedy is particularly striking when one recalls that counterfeit, deceit, role-playing, manipulation, self-dramatization—basic elements of what Abel calls metatheater—are staples of comedy since Aristophanes. Comic plots are stories either of conscious self-manipulation and role-playing (Lysistrata, The Golden Ass, Tartuffe) or else of improbably unself-conscious—underconscious, one might say—characters (Candide, Buster Keaton, Gulliver, Don Quixote) playing strange roles which they assent to with a cheerful dumbness that secures their invulnerability. It might well be argued that the form which Abel calls the metaplay, particularly in its modern versions, represents a fusion of the posthumous spirit of tragedy with the most ancient principles of comedy. Some modern metaplays, such as Ionesco’s, are obviously comedies. It is hard, too, to deny that Beckett is writing, in Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days, a kind of comédie noire.
