Staged

Show Trials, Political Theater, and the Aesthetics of Judgment

Minou Arjomand

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231545730
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

Theater requires artifice, justice demands truth. Are these demands as irreconcilable as the pejorative term "show trials" suggests? After the Second World War, canonical directors and playwrights sought to claim a new public role for theater by restaging the era's great trials as shows. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the Auschwitz trials were all performed multiple times, first in courts and then in theaters. Does justice require both courtrooms and stages?

In Staged, Minou Arjomand draws on a rich archive of postwar German and American rehearsals and performances to reveal how theater can become a place for forms of storytelling and judgment that are inadmissible in a court of law but indispensable for public life. She unveils the affinities between dramatists like Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Peter Weiss and philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, showing how they responded to the rise of fascism with a new politics of performance. Linking performance with theories of aesthetics, history, and politics, Arjomand argues that it is not subject matter that makes theater political but rather the act of judging a performance in the company of others. Staged weaves together theater history and political philosophy into a powerful and timely case for the importance of theaters as public institutions.

Chapter One

HANNAH ARENDT

Judging in Dark Times

The Eichmann trial was held in a courtroom that was also a theater, the auditorium of the newly built home of Beth Ha’am (the People’s House) in Jerusalem.1 The People’s House had begun in 1904 as a program of cultural events and public discussions, inspired by European community centers founded in the late nineteenth century to promote proletarian culture and class consciousness. The Jerusalem People’s House, socialist and Zionist in orientation, sought to build a national popular culture united through the Hebrew language. Theater was a central part of its project to create a national public out of ethnically and culturally diverse immigrants from Europe and Asia as well as older Jewish communities living in Palestine. Plans for a permanent People’s House building developed in the late 1920s but moved slowly. The complex was not completed until 1960, when the People’s House was chosen as the venue for the Eichmann trial and was subsequently quickly finished. The symbolic importance of the People’s House was paramount because it incorporated the Eichmann trial and testimony about the Holocaust into Israeli national identity. The Beth Ha’am building was thus transformed into Beth Hamishpath (the House of Justice). The 750-seat theater was turned into a courtroom, and a second building, intended as an adult-education center, became Eichmann’s jail.2

The theatrical design of the auditorium was not lost on visitors to the trial. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem begins with a description of the auditorium’s “orchestra and gallery, with proscenium and stage, and with side doors for the actors’ entrance.”3 It is a suitable location for a “show trial,” she remarks, with David Ben-Gurion hovering backstage as the “invisible stage manager of the proceedings.”4 The question of whether the Eichmann trial was a show trial immediately became a matter of debate, but not always in the ways we might expect. Susan Sontag provocatively celebrated the trial as “the most interesting and moving work of art of the past ten years.” For Sontag, the trial expressed “a great outcry of historical agony,” and its function “was that of the tragic drama: above and beyond judgment and punishment, catharsis.”5 Arendt’s description of the trial’s theatricality in Eichmann in Jerusalem is equally provocative, though often misunderstood.6 For Arendt, the problem with the trial was not that it was too theatrical, as many have supposed, but rather that it failed to follow the demands of dramatic form. She writes that even though the setting and political context may have seemed prime for a show trial, “the play aspect of the trial … collapsed.” This, she claims, is because the trial did not follow the structure of a play: “A trial resembles a play in that both begin and end with the doer, not with the victim. A show trial needs even more urgently than an ordinary trial a limited and well-defined outline of what was done and how it was done.”7

Where Arendt and Sontag differ is not so much in how they perceive the trial, but in how they understand theater. This may seem like a trivial difference, but it is not. The theater, both as a metaphorical model and as a set of historical institutions and practices, is at the center of Arendt’s understanding of politics and the public realm. Politics and trials alike will inevitably incorporate theatrical techniques and offer moments of drama. The real question is more precise: Which theatrical techniques are best suited to politics?

EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM AS EPIC THEATER

Sontag describes the Eichmann trial as theater in the mode of Greek tragedy. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy induces pity, fear, and finally catharsis in its spectators, who leave the theater cleansed of their emotions and newly committed to their community (which, in Athens, was the polis). Arendt agrees with Sontag that the trial was meant to evoke pity, fear, and catharsis, but she criticizes Sontag’s assessment in two ways. First, she argues that the trial did not achieve its aim to be a tragic drama. Second, and more significantly, she demonstrates that the attempt to stage the trial as tragic drama was itself misguided, not because it brought theater into the courtroom but because it brought in the wrong type of theater.8

Tragedy is about the actions of a tragic hero. This hero experiences a reversal of fortune that stirs pity and terror in the audience, who fear that the hero’s fate could also be their own. With this reversal of fortune comes the possibility of discovery and self-knowledge. If the Eichmann trial was to be a tragic drama, who was its hero? Arendt argues that the lead prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, attempted to stage the trial as—in Hausner’s own words—“the tragedy of Jewry as a whole.” But casting millions of people, living and dead, as a tragic hero contradicts the rules of tragedy. Arendt writes, “In the center of a trial can only be the one who did—in this respect, he is like the hero in the play—and if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.”9 This does not mean, however, that Arendt believed the trial should have cast Eichmann as its protagonist. Casting Eichmann as a tragic hero would have been obscene for obvious political and ethical reasons. But it would also have been impossible. His inability and unwillingness to think for himself—which, for Arendt was at the core of his criminality—meant that he could never have gone through the process of recognition that defines tragedy.10

Arendt rejects the elements of the trial that she likens to Greek tragedy: an emphasis on fate, the introduction of pity into the public realm, and the goal of catharsis. Her strongest objection to the trial is that it presented the story of the Holocaust as a tragedy bound to an inexorable historical narrative that was redeemed only by the foundation of Israel. The trial, she argues, sought to prove not only Eichmann’s guilt but also the constant hostility of the rest of the world to Jews and therefore the need for the Diaspora to immigrate to Israel and for Israel itself to become a military power. To demonstrate this constant danger and hostility, the trial presented the Holocaust as the climax of millennia of anti-Semitism. This, for Arendt, is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it undermined the Nazis’ culpability: If it was fate, how could Eichmann be held accountable? Second, it cast the death of millions of Jews as a necessary step in Israel’s creation. Third, it instrumentalized the suffering of Holocaust victims to promote Ben-Gurion’s nationalist policies. Fourth, and most controversially, Arendt believes that an acceptance of tragic fate and inevitable persecution contributed to the devastation of the Holocaust. She writes that only a belief in this persecution as tragic fate can explain the willingness of the German Jewish community to negotiate with Nazi authorities during the early years of the regime. At the same time, it was only by convincing the German population that World War II was the “battle of destiny” that the Nazis induced ordinary Germans to believe that their only choice was to “annihilate their enemies or be annihilated.”11

For Arendt, pity and catharsis support this “bad history and cheap rhetoric” by overwhelming people with emotions that make it impossible for them to think critically about the history that the trial presented and its relation to contemporary politics.12 Arendt is generally skeptical about pity and compassion in the public realm. In On Revolution, written at the same time as Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt describes pity as an excess of compassion, “the passion of compassion.”13 Arendt credits Brecht with discovering a fact that “cannot be found in any history book of modern times …, namely, that all revolutionaries of the last centuries from Robespierre to Lenin, acted out of the passion of compassion.”14 It was this pity, Arendt argues, that led Maximilien Robespierre and the men of the French Revolution astray as they focused on assuaging the suffering of the poor instead of establishing the political conditions for freedom.15 In Jerusalem, pity for Eichmann’s victims threatened to overwhelm the spectators’ capacity to think critically about how men like Eichmann were able to perpetrate such crimes.

Arendt did not see the possibility of any sort of healing catharsis for survivors at the Eichmann trial but rather the danger that Nazi criminality would be forgotten and obscured in all the commotion. She warns about the impact that the Eichmann trial might have in Germany, where Nazi perpetrators still occupied positions of power. The “normal reaction to this state of affairs,” Arendt writes, is “indignation.” But indignation can be inconvenient when power brokers have Nazi pasts, and so instead, the postwar generation used opportunities such as “all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub” and the Eichmann trial to “escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality.” In Arendt’s analysis, pity leads to apolitical catharsis, “hysterical outbreaks of guilt feelings” that purge German youth of their rightful indignation. Such catharsis only serves to maintain the status quo and allow perpetrators to emerge unscathed.16

Although Arendt rejects the attempt at an Aristotelian dramaturgy of fate, pity, and catharsis that she sees in the trial, she does not reject theater or theatricality in the trial or the public realm per se. Arendt’s account of the Eichmann trial gestures toward the promise of a new sort of dramaturgy, the epic dramaturgy of Brecht, whose poem “O Germany” serves as the epigraph of Eichmann in Jerusalem. This dramaturgy is oriented not toward pity and catharsis but toward judgment and action.17

To Arendt, Brecht was “beyond a doubt the greatest living German poet and possibly the greatest living European playwright.”18 When Arendt was living in Berlin on and off between 1929 and 1933, Brecht became friends with her husband, Günther Anders. Anders met Brecht after producing a radio segment that was broadcast around 1930 called “Bertolt Brecht as Thinker.” Anders’s presentation of Brecht in the segment bears a remarkable similarity to the essays on Brecht that Walter Benjamin, who was Anders’s second cousin, would write over the following years.19 In 1933, Arendt, Anders, Benjamin, and Brecht all fled to Paris, where they were part of the same circle of German refugees.20 After Arendt and Anders separated, Arendt and Brecht’s strongest connection was through their close mutual friend Benjamin. In 1934, Arendt attended Benjamin’s famous lecture on Brecht, “The Author as Producer,” in Paris.21 The conversations between Benjamin, Brecht, and Arendt lasted for decades, long after Benjamin’s and then Brecht’s deaths, through Arendt’s writing and editorial work. After the war, Arendt sought Brecht’s help in assembling a collected volume of Benjamin’s essays and proposed publishing Benjamin’s “Conversations with Brecht.”22 She included Benjamin’s “What Is Epic Theatre” in Illuminations and wrote two essays of her own about Brecht’s poetry and plays, “Beyond Personal Frustration: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht” and “What Is Permitted to Jove … Reflections on the Poet Bertolt Brecht and His Relation to Politics.”23

Brecht and Arendt developed similar conceptions of theater within a particular historical context (the rise of Nazism and Stalinism) in relation to a particular historical tradition (the German tradition of theater as a national institution) as part of a particular theater scene (one that challenged the dominance of realist literary theater) and social milieu (anti-Fascist artists and intellectuals who fled Germany in the 1930s). It is no surprise, then, that their understandings of theater were similar. What is surprising, though, is that while scholarly work on Brecht always contextualizes his theories of theater historically, work on Arendt generally does not.24 Without this historical contextualization, her understanding and use of theater can be misunderstood—as is the case with the scholarship on Eichmann in Jerusalem that sees the book as a rejection of all theatricality in the court and does not understand that Arendt is criticizing one mode of dramaturgy while elevating another. What interests me here is not tracking Brecht’s influence on Arendt, or Arendt’s influence on Brecht, but rather investigating the way that each of them responded to Fascism by linking philosophy with theater. For Arendt, the result was a theatrical philosophy, for Brecht, a philosophical theater. Combining theater and philosophy was, for Brecht and for Arendt, a way to preserve humanity in dark times.

The term “dark times” is one that Brecht uses in his poem “To Those Born After,” which begins, “Really, I live in dark times!”25 “Dark times” describes not only the experience of a generation who lived through two world wars but also an epistemic condition: dark times are times when it is impossible to be wise.26 “I would like to be wise, too,” the poem goes, but then describes the wisdom of the “old books”:

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Show Trials and Political Theater
• 1. Hannah Arendt: Judging in Dark Times
• 2. Bertolt Brecht: Poetic Justice
• 3. Erwin Piscator: Theater After Auschwitz
• 4. Trials in Nuremberg
• Conclusion. Archives, Law, and Theater Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index