from History and Memory Volume 10, Number 2

The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss's The Investigation and Its Critics*

Robert Cohen

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In the mid-1990s a critic referred to The Investigation (Die Ermittlung, 1965), Peter Weiss's play about Auschwitz and Nazi mass extermination, as one of those rare literary works able to overcome the "confusion, silence, and despair" produced by the "naked testimony" of witnesses at Holocaust trials. Lawrence Langer, whose words are quoted here, should know. He himself had for a few days attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial which lasted from the end of 1963 through the summer of 1965 and on which The Investigation is based. In his article Langer holds that "Weiss lowers the barriers of the unimaginable" and "gradually narrows the space separating the imagination from the camp." The play, in Langer's congenial interpretation, crosses a border which prevailing views on representations of the Holocaust consider to be nearly impassable: it allows the imagination to be "drawn into the landscape of Auschwitz," it transforms the "literal truth" of the witnesses' testimonies into the "imagined truth of Auschwitz."1

Langer did not always see it that way. In The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (1975), a foundational text in the academic study of the representation of the Holocaust in literature, Langer denied the very qualities of The Investigation that he was to praise twenty years later. Langer's erstwhile judgment started a trend. Over more than a decade other books which came to constitute the emerging discourse on the ethics and aesthetics of the Holocaust in literature followed Langer's example in rejecting Weiss's play ever more radically, among them Alvin H. Rosenfeld's A Double Dying, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi's By Words Alone and James E. Young's Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust.2 The attacks of these critics on The Investigation and its author are startling in their ferocity. In their view Weiss's play was a distortion and exploitation of the Holocaust for ideological reasons; it was artless, lifeless and mechanical and, most disturbingly, it wasn't even about the Jews. It had to be excluded from the canon of the new discourse.

1. Discourse politics

The concerted effort by these critics to deny The Investigation any status in the emerging academic field raises issues about the process of institutionalization of the study of Holocaust literature and its attendant canon formation, and specifically about the politics of inclusion and exclusion. These politics are most apparent in the discussions, uniquely central to the literature of Auschwitz, of facticity and authenticity, and of legitimacy: who is allowed to speak for the victims? the perpetrators? Who defines the victims and perpetrators? The politics of discourse also inform the debate over which master narratives, "Freudian, Marxist, formalist, structuralist, or linguistic"--Rosenfeld rejects all of these (19)--are appropriate for representations of the Holocaust. Rosenfeld's position suggests that not only the deaths of millions should be considered senseless but also attempts at finding explanations; particularly if those explanations would remove Auschwitz from the pure realm of religious, metaphysical, or mythological discourse, and insert it into a continuity of secular, man-made events. If the Holocaust is explained in rational terms, it seems, its enormity is somehow diminished. Discourse politics also play themselves out as a subtext in the four critics' discussions of the aesthetics of Holocaust literature, the forms, language, narrative and dramatic techniques and the conceptions of literary and dramatic figures considered acceptable in representations of the Holocaust.

Those who would define the new discourse tended to erect almost insurmountable walls around it. A closer look at the language of Rosenfeld's opening paragraph shows this gesture at work. In the first few lines alone the Holocaust is referred to as an "inexplicable and almost incomprehensible tragedy," as "not just death but total destruction," as not just murder, but "annihilation on so massive and indiscriminate a scale" (3). This is a discourse of disempowerment, a discourse designed to intimidate and control.3 The Holocaust is constructed as a realm so incommensurate and inaccessible that only a chosen few may enter.4 There is a chasm separating this position from the view presented by a key witness in The Investigation: "We must drop the lofty view / that the camp world / is incomprehensible to us."5

In mapping out the new academic field the four critics investigated works from numerous countries and in many languages. There is, however, a striking absence at the center of their discourse. The specific Germanness of the extermination of the Jews, refocused in 1996 by Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners, did not provoke a substantive interest in how German literature deals with the Nazi past and the Holocaust. In the books of Langer, Rosenfeld, Ezrahi and Young there are only limited references to German texts and they are overwhelmingly to the canonized poetry of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, and to Rolf Hochhuth's 1963 play The Deputy. Key participants in the postwar German literary discourse on the Holocaust, such as philosopher Günther Anders or playwrights Max Frisch and Heinar Kipphardt, are ignored entirely; others like Jean Améry or Alfred Andersch draw minimal attention.6 Another segment which is overlooked is Holocaust literature from the German Democratic Republic. Stephan Hermlin, Bruno Apitz, Fred Wander and Jurek Becker are some of the more prominent GDR authors of Holocaust novels and testimonials. Apitz, Wander and Becker are Holocaust survivors (Hermlin survived in Switzerland); Wander, Becker and Hermlin are Jewish. For what reason were they excluded from the Canon?7 Then there is the near total absence of Adorno, without whose reflections on the status of post-Auschwitz ethics and aesthetics any understanding of German-language literary texts on the Holocaust must remain limited.8

It is obvious that survey books such as those by Langer, Rosenfeld, Ezrahi and Young cannot cover every aspect relating to their topic. But these omissions occur in a sphere which has a "special pertinence" to this discourse, as Berel Lang has stated in the introduction to his own book on Writing and the Holocaust which commits the very same omission.9 There is a void in the books of the four critics into which not only German literature on Auschwitz largely disappears but also the specific aesthetic, ideological and historical dimensions which form the backdrop of works such as The Investigation.

2. Aesthetics

The Investigation subverts the notion of literature as a sphere distinct from other institutions in society. It insistently blurs the boundaries between reality and its representation, between documents and their interpretation, between authentic persons and stage characters. Interpretive strategies of Weiss's play need to confront this radical collapsing of traditional aesthetic categories.

The Investigation is based almost to the letter on documentations of the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, foremost on newspaper articles by Bernd Naumann published during the trial and later as a book.10 The play's near identity with its sources is the basis for its aesthetic deprecation by the four critics. The Investigation is perceived as little more than a "condensed version of the proceedings of the trials" (Ezrahi, 36), as "singularly undramatic" (Langer, 31), as doing little more than "endlessly cataloguing atrocity" (Rosenfeld, 156). Its figures are judged to be "without notable distinction of individual character" (ibid., 155), its language "toneless and undifferentiated" (ibid., 158). It is "sanitized" of all emotions, it offers no "catharsis or resolution of any sort" (Ezrahi, 38), and thus appears to be less than the journalistic documents from which it is constructed. These criticisms seem to be driven by a normative impulse. Their assumptions are that dramatic representations of the Holocaust should use individually drawn, fully rounded characters who invite audience-identification, naturalistic dialogue, a recognizable dramatic structure with a beginning, middle and end, a story-line presumably built around issues of personal guilt, fate, punishment and redemption, and resolution. In short, they should use the kind of mimetic representation of the world found in Hochhuth's The Deputy to which Rosenfeld devotes one of the most extensive interpretive passages in his book (132-52). Lawrence Langer, on the other hand, has since joined those critics who have long argued that The Deputy, its undeniable impact on the Auschwitz debate notwithstanding, is a play whose naturalism and aesthetic conventionality fall far short of an adequate representation of the Holocaust.11 To those, however, to whom Hochhuth's Schillerian dramaturgy with its linear progression toward resolution, its pathos and its grand gestures emits all the traditional, pre-Brechtian, even premodernist signals of high art, Weiss's avant-gardist minimalism can easily appear as inferior, if not as belonging outside the sphere of art.

The apparent minimalism of The Investigation, as well as its fragmented, non-dramatic, epic structure reflect the sum total of Weiss's aesthetic existence: his twenty years as a painter and filmmaker whose masters ranged from Brueghel to Buñuel and the surrealists, and his subsequent ascent as a writer involved in a lifelong dialogue not only with Brecht but also with Kafka, and especially with Dante.12 Most of Weiss's works after Marat/Sade, from plays such as Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and Hölderlin to his two stage adaptations of Kafka's The Trial and his magnum opus, the one-thousand-page novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands,13 owe their structural and aesthetic concepts to the Divine Comedy. None more so than The Investigation (though not in any simplistic sense of equating Auschwitz with "hell," for in Weiss's appropriation of Dante's poem, paradoxically enough, Auschwitz was to be located in the Paradiso). The most obvious reference to Dante is the division of The Investigation into "Gesänge." The German word means songs but is also the translation of Dante's "Cantos."14 From the number of Cantos--thirty-three--to the conception of the figure of Lili Tofler in Canto five, the numerous traces the Divine Comedy has left in The Investigation have been documented repeatedly.15

Far from being a condensed version of the trial transcripts, The Investigation, in its obsession with the destruction of the human body, is a surrealist text. It is organized according to a topography of atrocity whose aesthetic is hallucinatory and oneiric rather than factual. This obsession is what sets The Investigation apart from other literary texts about Auschwitz. It is also what Rosenfeld objects to as an "endless cataloguing," as a retracing of the fate of the victims in "gruesome and revolting detail" (155). Rosenfeld's reading produces a subtle shift of focus from the atrocities of Nazi mass extermination to the implied transgressions of the playwright who should have had the good taste to spare his readers or spectators the "revolting details." But it is precisely the play's unrelenting recitation of atrocities which forces the reader/spectator to confront the essence of the Nazi state. The Investigation leaves us no choice but to try and understand a sphere inaccessible to most of us. Weiss's narration of physical suffering crosses into a territory where no linguistic code is readily available. Like other writers of Holocaust literature he repeatedly reflected on the necessity as well as the impossibility of entering this terrain.16 But unlike many other writers Weiss had prepared for this task throughout his life. His paintings and films, as well as his literary texts before The Investigation, from the agony of the "doctor" in The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman to the torture of Damiens in Marat/Sade, are an exploration of suffering in its most physical form, of the pain--and sometimes the lust--which can be inflicted on the human body. Weiss's kinship with Brueghel, Kafka and Dante, as well as with Buñuel and Henry Miller, was an elective affinity. Weiss evolved a surrealist aesthetic of shock which confronts readers and spectators with the realization that, in the words of the Marquis de Sade, "this is a world of bodies."17 It is this realization which all thinking after Auschwitz has been forced to acknowledge. Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz metaphysics, the sphere of the mind, is reduced to the pondering of its material other, "the somatic ... stratum," the "wretched physical existence," refers to just this world of bodies.18 It is the most difficult reality for the intellectual who survived Auschwitz to accept, as Jean Améry repeats almost compulsively in At the Mind's Limits.19 Being reduced by torture to a mere physical presence, a body, is the trauma which for Améry superseded all others. It is for the representation of this primal sphere that Weiss's aesthetic reductionalism--which to the four critics appears as a lack of artistic intervention--proves uniquely suited.

Lack of artistry was also the verdict on the language of The Investigation which supposedly shows Weiss relying "uncritically on the Nazis' own bureaucratic rhetoric" (Young, 79). To say that Nazi jargon indeed plays a key part in Weiss's play is a tautology. In a work where there is no attempt to reproduce Auschwitz on stage and where Auschwitz is never even mentioned, the site of the Holocaust becomes not Auschwitz but language; specifically the Nazi jargon. In his critique of Heidegger's language and its contiguity to Nazi jargon Adorno defined the effect of jargon as causing "the true object of the suffering ... to disappear."20 Weiss's insistent use of jargon--as though nearly every line needed to be read in quotation marks--makes the disappearing reality of the Holocaust and the suffering it produced reappear. The play's use of grotesque bureaucratic idiom, for Rosenfeld little more than a "code of raw data" (158), is all the more revealing since even the victims' language is deformed by it. Elie Wiesel refers to this phenomenon: "We speak in code, we survivors, and this code cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered" by anyone who is not a survivor.21 Wiesel's last point notwithstanding, deciphering the Nazi code is precisely what the language of Weiss's play accomplishes. In Lawrence Langer's revised assessment of The Investigation, "the language of the victims finally sheds a terrifying light on the ordeals they succumbed to."22

There are no fully rounded characters in The Investigation. The "judge," the "prosecuting attorney," and the "counsel for the defense" are composites, as are the nine "witnesses" who represent the victims. They remain, as Weiss's critics point out, anonymous figures without discernible individuality (Rosenfeld, 155, 157). These composites are the equivalent, in the literary sphere, of that which Adorno has expressed in the language of philosophy, "that in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen."23 Even the perpetrators, though they bear the actual names of the defendants at the Frankfurt trial, are meant to be mere stand-ins who represent many others like themselves.

Weiss outlines this concept in the summary "Note" which precedes the play. The four critics' rejection of the way the characters are constructed is based on this "Note," rather than on an analysis of the figures themselves. Consequently, the critics remain unaware of how the play overrides the author's stated concept in one of the most subtly unsettling moments of The Investigation. At its exact center, in Cantos five and six, two individual fates are related: the death of a young woman named Lili Tofler; and the deeds of one SS Corporal Stark, a nineteen-year-old Nazi who had not yet finished high school. Lili Tofler is the only individually drawn victim, and Stark is the most psychologically differentiated character, the perpetrator the play tries hardest to understand. The contiguity of these two lives in this place hints at something the mind refuses to acknowledge: that given different circumstances, these two young people might have been friends, even lovers. Weiss's avant-gardist aesthetic is able to restore their individuality to these figures without suggesting a facile familiarity.

According to Ezrahi, "the stage is bare, emotion has been eliminated" (38; similarly Rosenfeld, 158). For proof, reference is made once again to the introductory "Note" where Weiss relates his need to eliminate the emotionalism of the actual confrontation between the witnesses and the defendants. This kind of emotionalism is indeed gone from the play. The play's language is even, laconic and monotonous, its unemphatic tone signaled by the absence of punctuation. It is a language designed to create distance between the reader/spectator and the events. But all of the play's distancing devices notwithstanding, The Investigation stretches one's capacity for experiencing emotion to the limit and at times overwhelms it. Readers and spectators may find themselves trying to anesthetize their feelings in order to work through the text. That, however, is very different from denying the emotional impact of the play. Ezrahi ascribes what she perceives as a lack of emotion to Weiss's concept of restricting the expressions of emotion of the stage figures (37-38). The critic's assumption seems to be that in the theater emotion can only be created by actors acting--and experiencing?--emotions and that the sphere of emotions is separate from and opposed to the sphere of the rational. In The Investigation emotions are produced, not through conventional psychological devices as in Hochhuth's The Deputy, but rather through a blend of Brechtian and surrealist aesthetics. To expect a "catharsis" (Ezrahi, 38) from such an aesthetic is to disregard its fundamental assumptions. It also implies that Holocaust literature should convey the reassuring notion that the human spirit triumphed even in the concentrationary universe.

3. Documentary theater

According to Lawrence Langer The Investigation tries to convey "the authentic reality" of Auschwitz (31). In this endeavor it rarely rises above "mere factual truth" since it uses "only the language of history" (ibid.)--a metaphor which hides what it seeks to conceptualize: that history has no language and that the language of history is the language of the men and women who relate it--an institutionalized discourse with all that that implies. That The Investigation should be considered as historiography rather than literature is the result of several misconceptions. The play belongs to the genre of German postwar Documentary Theater (DT) of the 1960s among whose proponents may be counted Hochhuth, Kipphardt, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Alexander Kluge, Tankred Dorst, Dieter Forte, and others.24 While this genre does make extensive use of historical documents and records, its concepts cannot be inferred from its name. It does not try to repeat or reproduce reality. It lays no claim to objectivity, as Young (65ff.) and Rosenfeld (154ff.) persistently maintain. (What would constitute an objective representation of Auschwitz, anyway?) Its topics are not presented as "natural and unmediated fact" (Young, 68). Its mode of representation may include caricature, songs, the use of a choir, mime and parody.25 The DT needs to be critiqued as a theatrical practice within a specific historical and cultural context. It is a descendant of the revolutionary Proletcult and Agitprop movements of the Soviet Union of the 1920s and their Weimar versions propagated by Erwin Piscator, among others. After his return from exile Piscator was instrumental in its revival in the 1960s, most notably with his stagings of both The Deputy and The Investigation.

The DT uses facts, documents and authentic figures as raw material in the same way other types of drama use imagined events and characters. The concept of the preexisting material as the matter of artistic creation was propagated by artists and theoreticians of the left in the Soviet Union and Germany from the 1920s. It signaled a rejection of the bourgeois notion of the creative process as intuitive, even mystical, which had evolved by the turn of the century. Brecht, Benjamin, Eisler, Bloch, Heartfield, Eisenstein, Tretyakov, Mayakovski were some of the proponents of the new "materialist" aesthetic. It is not easy to determine why this concept reemerged in the theater of the FRG of the 1960s. In the early postwar years wholly imagined plays about the war and the Holocaust, such as those by Max Frisch, from Now They Sing Again (Nun singen sie wieder, 1946) to Andorra (1961), dominated the theater scene. It was only in the 1960s that the recourse to preexisting documents became the dramatists' preferred strategy for communicating with a public unable and unwilling to face its recent past. The mode of perception of this public was largely shaped by the no-nonsense reality of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and by unlimited access to facts and data provided by the media, especially by the emerging omnipresence of television. It was a public ready for artistic communication in the language of facts. For this aesthetic strategy to work, however, the facts in question had to be readily available. In the case of the Holocaust they were amply provided by media coverage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and especially of the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt. It is the combination of both previous knowledge and the linguistic signals and gestures of the plays which suggests to the reader/viewer that what is being represented is generally factual. At the same time there is no doubt that these works belong to the realm of literature, and art. For the theatergoers the institutional context of a play like The Investigation is the same as if they were seeing a play by Tennessee Williams, while for the readers the title page of the book clearly announces "a new play by Peter Weiss--author of Marat/Sade." The fusion of these two modes of discourse, the impossibility for the reader or spectator to distinguish between the historical record and its literary representation, is the defining element of the DT.

As both Bernd Naumann and Hermann Langbein explain in the introductions to their respective documentations of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, they reduced, edited and organized the immense records they themselves had created (no official court records of the proceedings exist26). This process does not differ in substance from Weiss's own shaping of the material. Neither does there appear to be a substantive difference in the degree of intervention in the material, though that would be difficult to measure. Rather, the difference between these two types of textual representations of historical events is determined by the cultural institutions to which they belong and which their formal practices ultimately reflect. Naumann and Langbein followed the accepted journalistic rules of their day as regards the adherence to facts, the disclosing of sources, the identifying of dates, places, individuals, as well as authorial interventions (Langbein uses italics). The Investigation on the other hand is formed in accordance with what in the most general sense might be called the paradigms of artistic creation.

Still, one needs to keep in mind that the author of a documentary drama, unlike the author of a fictional play, is not free to manipulate the raw material any way he or she likes precisely because the documents are readily available. Many of the published plays of the DT, including The Investigation, contain bibliographies as well as introductory notes or afterwords which refer to their source material.27 While emphatically insisting on the factuality of their plays, however, Weiss and others often used appendices to indicate the type and extent of their intervention in the material, thereby openly renouncing all pretense at objectivity. The distinction between factuality and objectivity is crucial, for as its lineage would indicate the DT takes sides, it is designed to intervene in the political reality of the day.28 In none of this is there any gesture of masking or concealing; the DT is far from trying to hide its "seams of construction," as Young claims (68).

4. Identity

The critics, with the exception of Langer, were scandalized by the fact that in The Investigation the word "Jew" is never mentioned. Among the issues this raised for Ezrahi and Young was Weiss's own identity. According to Ezrahi "Weiss insists that, although he himself is half Jewish, he has never thought of himself as a Jew" (39). There is a suggestion here that in some way Weiss is denying his Jewishness. Young in a similar vein refers to unnamed critics who "have hinted darkly" that a repression of "Weiss's own half-Jewishness"is behind his not using the word Jew (72). The phrase performs a rhetorical substitution whereby darkness refers not so much to the unnamed critics as to Weiss himself for ignoring his Jewishness. Why wouldn't he? His father was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism, his mother was a Protestant, he himself was brought up a Protestant. According to Jewish law he wasn't a Jew anyway. According to the Nazis he wasn't an "Aryan." The Nazi obsession with defining Jewish identity eschewed any possibility of multiple, shifting and overlapping identities. By reducing their victims to their Jewishness the Nazis stripped them of their humanity, which, as for anyone else, resided in a variety of identities: professional, familial, political, national, economic, cultural, sexual, etc. How many victims of Jewish ancestry were murdered by the Nazis as Jews, even though they had never thought of themselves as such?

According to Ezrahi, "Weiss clearly considers himself at least as much a German as a Jew" (39). This ignores the basic facts about Weiss's life. Weiss never was a German citizen. He was raised in Germany holding the Czech citizenship of his father. Whatever fragile sense of a German identity he may have developed was taken from him at age eighteen, along with his language and his future. His life for the following twenty years, in his own perception, was a series of catastrophes. He survived the war in Sweden and eventually became a Swedish citizen. His writing was an endless struggle to retain and regain the use of the German language. All his interviews from around the time The Investigation came out show his alienation from and deep distrust of German society and his fear of a continuity from the Nazi years to the FRG. There is no hint of his considering himself German. Though he several times thought about moving back to Germany, where he had friends both in the East and in the West, and even though he felt himself to be an outsider in Sweden, he continued to live there.

Weiss's disclaimer, in the interview Ezrahi refers to, notwithstanding, he often reflected on his Jewish side, not only in essays and interviews, but also in his autobiographical novels Leavetaking (Abschied von den Eltern, 1961) and Vanishing Point (Fluchtpunkt, 1962). He was, in fact, obsessed with it, for according to his own narrative of his life it had prevented him from joining the perpetrators, as his half brothers and many of his childhood friends had done.29 In Vanishing Point the narrator, who is substantially identical with Weiss, remembers how, at the end of the war, film footage of the concentration camps led him to identify with the Jewish victims. The camps become for him "the places for which I had been destined," and he is tormented by guilt for "not having been one of those who had had the number of devaluation branded on their flesh."30 The profound sense of what Adorno has called "the drastic guilt of him who was spared"31 never left Peter Weiss. It eventually found expression in The Investigation, as well as in an essay Weiss wrote during the conceptual stage of the play, after he had visited Auschwitz. "I was not unloaded from the train," this text reads in part, "I was not driven with truncheons into this place. I come twenty years too late," and: "I look into these places, which I myself eluded." The title of this short prose text, which should have its place in any anthology of Holocaust literature, definitively performs Weiss's identification with the Jewish victims: "My Place."32 As was the case for many survivors, Weiss's Jewishness was defined by Auschwitz. He was the "Jew without positive determinants, the Catastrophe Jew," in the words of one who had actually survived Auschwitz, Jean Améry.33

Referring to Weiss as a survivor is, of course, a transgression, as Weiss's critics would be the first to point out. Nelly Sachs seems to be another matter. Rosenfeld counts her among the "survivors" (110). Why is she granted this status? Because she "was forced to flee from Nazi Germany" and "found a haven in Sweden"--(Ezrahi, 138)? So did Weiss. Rosenfeld refers to Beckett, whose work he praises as reflecting the world after Auschwitz, as "not a direct survivor of the death camps" (7), the inference being that Beckett (who participated in the French resistance) may in some indirect way be considered a survivor of the concentrationary universe. The problem of terminology is very real, for it determines the status of the writer within the literary discourse on the Holocaust. This in turn has implications for the degree of authenticity ascribed to a text. Rosenfeld's categories include "the victims, the survivors, the survivors-who-become-victims" (a reference to Celan), as well as the "kinds-of-survivors, those who were never there but know more than the outlines of the place" (19)--presumably people like Beckett. For Ezrahi the distinction is between survivors and "those who had been remote from the events themselves" (22), for Young between "survivors," "non-victims," and "other writers" (68). Though they may be necessary for the construction of certain arguments, the difficulty of creating workable cognitive categories is obvious. Any classification of writers of Holocaust literature, however, that includes Sachs among the victims but excludes Weiss discredits itself.

The politics of identity surrounding the discourse on Holocaust literature come into their own over the issue of The Investigation's apparent refusal to identify the victims as Jewish. The authority from which some of the four critics have taken their cue appears to have been Eli Wiesel himself. "A prominent European playwright wrote a play about the Auschwitz trials and managed not to mention the word 'Jew' therein," Wiesel wrote in 1977.34 The statement is made in a paragraph where Wiesel expresses outrage over Holocaust deniers. While it would seem difficult to surpass the denunciatory gesture this context produces, Young manages to do just that by calling The Investigation "Judenrein" (72). The term, of course, refers to the Nazis' characterization of a landscape after the extermination of the Jews. Young thus associates Weiss with those who would have sent him to Auschwitz. This rhetoric of self-righteousness has already provoked an expression of revulsion.35 It is an extreme example of a kind of moral displacement Holocaust literature may produce. Writers as well as critics who participate in this discourse find themselves driven at times by an overwhelming desire to contribute to a bringing to justice of the perpetrators, if not in fact then at least rhetorically. Peter Weiss himself was well aware of this need, but also of the impossibility of having literature perform such a gesture (The Investigation ends before the sentences are rendered). Critics such as Young--and nearer to the present and in a different sphere Daniel Goldhagen--let themselves be transported by their outrage to a moral ground so high that events appear as either black or white, and people as either perpetrators or victims (or Jews or non-Jews). They let the awesome "injustice" of the Holocaust distort their narrative to the point where it victimizes the victims.

The rhetoric of Weiss's critics suggests that by not using the word "Jew" he not only played down or hid the fact that overwhelming numbers of victims were Jewish, but even tried to deny it. But Weiss also did not use the word "German," or Auschwitz. The four critics do not discuss this. Maybe they did not notice? That would not be surprising for from the authentic names of the defendants and the mentioning of the likes of Dr. Mengele to the minute descriptions of every aspect of the physical layout of the camp and of the procedures of mass extermination there can be no doubt that The Investigation is about Auschwitz. Neither can there be any doubt that, with very few exceptions, the victims in the play are Jews. One may, in fact, doubt whether many readers/spectators of The Investigation would have noticed the absence of the word "Jew" if Weiss himself had not brought it up in interview after interview. Also, the four critics do not pay much attention to the near total absence of references to any other nationalities or ethnic groups, from Czechs, Poles, French, Dutch, Ukrainians, Hungarians, etc., to Gypsies (Naumann makes numerous references to all these groups).

The absence of the word "Jew" needs to be seen within this context. Weiss deliberately draws attention to the fact that no Jewish or other national or ethnic identity is ascribed to the victims. For example, in Naumann's report Lili Tofler is identified as both a Slovak and a Jew. When asked about this by the judge in the play, however, the female 5th witness answers that she had no knowledge of Lili's background.36 This exchange is obviously not driven by a desire on the author's part to conceal Lili's Jewish (or Slovak) origins, for if that had been his aim he simply could have dropped it. By including it the play makes the point that the national or ethnic background of Lili Tofler, who stands for countless unknown victims of genocide, does not matter. The strategy at work here was expounded on repeatedly by Weiss, for example in the interview with Oliver Clausen referred to by Rosenfeld, Ezrahi and Young. It is a strategy designed to produce a universal meaning not limited to the specifics of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. The Investigation, in accordance with the concepts of the DT, was intended to intervene in its own time, specifically in the genocidal events in Vietnam and South Africa.37 In this aim it paralleled Adorno's post-Kantian categorical imperative: that mankind should "arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen."38

However, if one accepts this imperative and the universal aim it suggests for the play, there still remains Ezrahi's valid argument that the kind of universalizing The Investigation performs detracts from the specifics of the Holocaust and from "historical accountability" (40). I share this unease--not because the play leaves any doubt about the identity of the vast majority of victims; rather, because Weiss's concept of removing references to the victims' nationality or ethnic background in order to increase the universal meaning of the play is based on a fallacy. Adherence to historical, geographical, ethnic, etc. specifics tends to strengthen a work's universality. Even if Weiss's play had contained numerous references to the Jewishness of the victims, only the most narrow reading would have interpreted it as being exclusively about the genocide of the Jews.

For Young the scandal of not identifying the Jewish victims is surpassed only by the fact that The Investigation repeatedly refers to Soviet victims. Weiss allegedly "merges kinds of victims," namely "Jews" and "socialists"; he mixes "Jewish and military 'crimes'," leading Young to conclude that "political and racial killings are thus co-valued here."39 They shouldn't be? One should distinguish between the genocide of the Jews and the millions of murdered Soviet civilians, men, women and children? To the extent that Young refers to the Nazis' own distinction between political and racial victims, his argument carries little conviction. For the German forces in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the distinction between Slavs, Soviet citizens, partisan resistance fighters, communists and Jews tended toward disappearance. Communism was a "Jewish Bolshevik system," Jews were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks were Jews. All were equally considered as "subhumans" (Untermenschen) and the stated goal of the Nazis was to "rid the German people of the Asiatic-Jewish danger once and for all."40

The books by Christopher Browning and Goldhagen have destabilized some fundamental assumptions about the Holocaust. The focus is shifting away from the gas chambers as the predominant means and the extermination camps as the main site of the Holocaust. This shift is driven by the realization that up to fifty per cent of Jewish victims may have been killed in the more "traditional" manner of mass shootings, starvation and burning in countless sites all over eastern Europe.41 That, of course, is how the Soviet civilians were destroyed. The questions raised by The Investigation about the distinction between the genocide of the Jews and of Soviet civilians have gained a new legitimacy. Yet in searching for comparisons to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, scholars often refer to events from the near annihilation of Native Americans to Rwanda, while the genocide which most obviously resembles the Jewish Holocaust in intention, execution and numbers of victims--the extermination of eight million Soviet civilians (the total number of Soviet victims of Nazism is closer to twenty million)42--is rarely given more than lip service.

While it may at times be useful to distinguish between different motives behind the Nazi mass extermination of civilians, the insistence, by Young and others, on the difference between annihilation for political and for racial reasons creates an impression that certain deaths should be valued more highly than others. There is a suggestion of a hierarchy of victims, wherein Jews implicitly rank at the top (and Soviet citizens at the bottom). This is the result of a conceptualization of the Holocaust based on race exclusively, on a notion of race so theoretically abstract and "pure" that any victims other than Jews are excluded. The question of the status of racism within the Nazi system is far from resolved. Elimination based on race did not at all times supersede all other considerations. The first wave of atrocities was directed at German citizens most of whom would have fit the Nazi definition of "Aryan" but who were presumed to be socialists and communists. The annihilation of whole populations identified as communist is just as defining an aspect of Nazism as the extermination of the Jews. Nor is there any indication that German Nazis and non-Nazis alike were any less zealous or less effective in the extermination of men, women and children for so-called political reasons than they were in the extermination of Jews.43

5. Ideology

According to Young, Weiss tried to make Auschwitz appear not as the result of "antisemitic terror" but of "monopoly capitalism gone mad" (72). Aside from the fact that the formula "antisemitic terror" explains very little and should be a starting point for an analysis of the Holocaust rather than its result, and aside from the implication that "monopoly capitalism" is normally rational rather than "mad," there is a problem with Young's methodology. Nowhere in the play itself is capitalism shown either directly or indirectly to be the cause for Auschwitz, though it is implicated in it. Young's critique of what he perceives as the play's ideology is based on other writings by Weiss. The work Young mostly refers to is Weiss's essay "The Material and the Models." It was written in 1968, three years after The Investigation and after the more typically documentary plays Song [Canto] of the Lusitanian Bogey and Viet Nam Discourse. Its political context is the struggle for emancipation in the "Third World" which the latter two plays are concerned with. It repeatedly refers to places like Indonesia, Indochina, Angola, Mozambique, the South African Republic, Cuba and Vietnam. There is in the whole text only one indirect reference to the Holocaust.44 Other than this text Young's (and Rosenfeld's) ideological criticism of The Investigation is based on views expressed in various interviews by the historical subject Peter Weiss. While the author's views and intentions may shed light on his work, they belong to a separate sphere. They are no substitute for a hermeneutics of the work itself. The play cannot be reduced to an illustration of Weiss's theories and intentions.

The Investigation's perceived ideological bias seems to be, at least for Rosenfeld and Young, its most unacceptable transgression. Under the no-holds-barred chapter heading "Exploiting Atrocity" Rosenfeld indicts Weiss for "misappropriating" and "misusing" the suffering of others; Weiss "shapes" and on occasion "misshapes" facts in order to serve "a specific ideological vision of history" (154). The latter is cold-war code for Marxism and communism. Young refers more directly to Weiss's "Marxist credo" (78) in his stated goal of exploring the playwright's "Marxist grasp of events" (65). How and when the dramatist came by such a Marxist grasp and what it might consist of is not explored. Notwithstanding the fact that up to 1964 Weiss had given no indication that he was about to become a Marxist, that he did not join the Swedish (Euro-)Communist Party until 1968 and that there is very little evidence of his ever having acquired any extensive theoretical knowledge of Marxism, he had nothing near a "Marxist grasp" of Auschwitz. Young's assumption stands the chronology on its head. It was not Weiss's Marxism that produced The Investigation but rather Weiss's work on the Auschwitz material that intensified his interest in Marxism. In the play he seems to have used some basic Marxist concepts in a similar way he used Dante's poem: as a kind of grid around which to shape the material aesthetically as much as conceptually. This aspect is far from clear and deserves further exploration. Weiss's turn toward Marxism also needs to be looked at within its historical context. There was in the early and mid-1960s a general trend among restive intellectuals toward a transformation of the Adenauer era of political restoration and cultural stagnation. At the core of this project was the reconstruction of Marxism as a theory which might provide some understanding of Auschwitz and of the Nazi period without being itself tainted by it.

For Rosenfeld (157) and Ezrahi (38) The Investigation reduces fascism to a form of capitalism. Young suggests that Weiss manipulated the details "in such a way that they become comprehensible as evidence against capitalism" (72) and that in the play "representatives of the capitalist system are on trial" rather than the likes of Kaduk, Boger, Stark and the other defendants (77). Marxists, it appears, blame capitalism not only for fascism but even for Auschwitz, though Young names no sources to substantiate this opinion.45 In their single-minded attempt to reduce The Investigation to a critique of capitalism, Young and Rosenfeld appear to want to reject any link between capitalism and Nazi mass extermination. Raul Hilberg saw it differently. I. G. Farben, the German industrial giant of the prewar and war years, "was a major factor in the destructive machine." Appropriately enough, it named its installation at Auschwitz "I. G. Auschwitz."46 According to Joseph Borkin this installation was so vast that it "used more electricity than the entire city of Berlin." Without I. G. Farben "Hitler could never have embarked on the war or come so close to victory."47 And that is without even mentioning Siemens, Krupp and other large German corporations which helped bring to power, cooperated with and profited from the Nazi regime. (Borkin also refers to the well-known fact that economically "I. G. Auschwitz was a miserable failure."48) At any rate, the (re)discovery in 1996 of large amounts of Nazi gold, as well as of moneys belonging to Jewish victims, in the banks of Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and the United States points to the fact that the extent of capitalist involvement in the Nazi enterprise is still not fully known.

Aside from half a dozen passing references throughout the play, part II of the Canto of Lily Tofler is the site of The Investigation's exploration of the industrial-capitalist exploitation of camp inmates. No one, including the four critics, has questioned its factuality. This scene is unrelenting in its exposure of the close cooperation between German industry and Auschwitz. Still, one should not lose sight of the fact that of the thirty-three segments of the play this topic takes up exactly one. Nor should one overlook the fact that the most disturbing references in the play to capitalism are not in anything that is said but in the language itself, this jargon of commodification, of keeping stocks, of assets, write-offs, inventories, work hours, timetables, of facts and figures, of debit and credit, of production quota and surplus, all of which suggests a vast industrial-type complex and its administration. The play confronts readers and viewers with the unbridgeable gap between this familiar and seemingly benevolent jargon of the world of production and its product: millions of corpses.

Less than a year after the war the price of shares of I. G. Farben was "skyrocketing." In the 1970s the three major successor companies to I. G. Farben, Hoechst, BASF and Bayer, "were among the thirty largest industrial companies in the world" and each of them was "bigger than I. G. at its zenith."49 The investigation of that kind of continuity in The Investigation was not the result of some hidden ideological agenda on the part of Peter Weiss. The Auschwitz trial itself, like all trials, collapsed the boundaries between past and present, between deeds and their consequences. The continuities from the Nazi state to West German society of the Adenauer years were a constant subtext in Frankfurt. The trial revealed what had been an open secret all along: that values and attitudes prevalent under Nazism had not suddenly disappeared in 1945, any more than had those who held them. On the one hand, this produced insistent calls for a statute of limitations for war crimes; but it also led to the formation of opposition movements throughout the 1960s. Twenty years after the end of the war, these movements finally forced the debate on Germany's Nazi past into the public discourse. Weiss's play was a key element in this development.

*

Is there a literary representation of the Holocaust that does not serve an ideology? Is there a critique of such a representation that does not serve an ideology? (One's own?) Is communism an ideology and anticommunism not? Is there any way of emplotting the Holocaust that does not instrumentalize it? Zionism and Israel have at various times used Auschwitz for various ends: to reject the diaspora and to encourage immigration and state building. Right-wing Israeli governments of the 1980s have used it to rally guilt-ridden Europeans against the Palestinian intifada. It has been used for religious ends as a narrative of Jewish suffering and of Jews as the chosen people.50 It has been invoked as an alibi for leftist denunciations of Zionism. There is no ideologically "pure" narrative of the Holocaust untainted by the historical context and the subjectivity of the remembering subject. This is not to advocate a Hayden-White-like belief that truth ultimately lies with whoever can "make their story stick."51 What needs to be determined in each instance is whether ideological instrumentalization promotes the empowerment of those who may become victims of oppression and annihilation, whether it promotes analysis and understanding of Auschwitz for the specific goal of preventing a recurrence, in short: whether it serves an emancipatory purpose. That might be the one thing that critics engaged in a dispute as all-involving as ours can agree on.

Notes

* Many thanks to Helmut Peitsch, Ulrich Baer and Bernd Hüppauf for their generous comments.

1. Lawrence L. Langer, "The Literature of Auschwitz," in idem, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York, 1995), 97, 89, 97, 98.

2. Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, 1975); Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington, 1980); Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago, 1980); James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington, 1988). (References to these four books appear parenthetically in the text.)

3. On the "rules of exclusion" (original emphasis) which accompany the production of discourse, see Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," trans. Rupert Swyer, in idem, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 216.

4. In his critique of this gesture in Rosenfeld and Ezrahi, David Roskies states: "In seeking to express their sense of moral outrage, the critics have set the Holocaust apart from the world." David G. Roskies, "The Holocaust according to the Literary Critics," Prooftexts 1, nos. 1-3 (1981): 215.

5. Peter Weiss, The Investigation, trans. Jon Swan and Ulu Grosbard (New York, 1966), 108.

6. There is a short, insightful passage on Améry in Langer, The Holocaust, 70-72.

7. Ezrahi has begun to rectify this lacuna with her perceptive reading of Becker's Jacob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar). Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, "Representing Auschwitz," History & Memory 7, no. 2 (1996): 139-41.

8. Again Langer is the exception with a highly visible discussion of some of Adorno's theorems in the opening pages of his book (The Holocaust, 1-3). The references to Adorno by Ezrahi and Young are minimal, while Rosenfeld's short passage about Adorno's vehement rejection of Celan is misinformed (A Double Dying, 13-14). See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London, 1984), 443, 444. On the centrality of Auschwitz for Adorno's thinking, see Detlev Claussen, "Nach Auschwitz: Ein Essay über die Aktualität Adornos," in Dan Diner, ed., Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt/Main, 1988), 54-68; and Peter Stein, "'Darum mag falsch gewesen sein, nach Auschwitz liesse kein Gedicht mehr sich schreiben.' (Adorno) Widerruf eines Verdikts? Ein Zitat und seine Verk˝rzung," Weimarer Beiträge 42, no. 4 (1996): 485-508.

9. Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (New York, 1988), 13.

10. Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others before the Court at Frankfurt. With an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Jean Steinberg (New York, 1966). See also the even more voluminous and detailed documentation by Hermann Langbein, himself a Holocaust survivor and witness at the Frankfurt trial, Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Eine Dokumentation, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1965).

11. Langer, "The Literature of Auschwitz," 95.

12. On Weiss (1916-1982) as a painter and filmmaker, see Robert Cohen, "Der Maler und Filmemacher: Versuch über die Erfolglosigkeit," in idem, Peter Weiss in seiner Zeit: Leben und Werk (Stuttgart, 1992), 29-53; on Weiss and Brecht, see idem, "Annäherung und Distanz: Zu Weiss' Rezeption von Brechts literarischem Werk," in idem, Versuche über Weiss' "Ästhetik des Widerstands" (Bern, 1989), 155-80; on the influence of Kafka and Dante on Weiss, see idem, Understanding Peter Weiss, trans. Martha Humphreys (Columbia, SC, 1993).

13. It is currently being translated as The Aesthetics of Resistance by Joachim Neugroschel and will be published by Maisonneuve Press.

14. This second meaning is lost in the Swan/Grosbard translation which renders "Gesang" as "song." The lesser-known translation by Gross uses "canto." Peter Weiss, The Investigation: Oratorio in 11 Cantos, trans. Alexander Gross (London, 1996). Overall both translations are unsatisfactory. I have prepared a revised English translation for publication in 1998 in the German Library series by Continuum, New York.

15. Arrigo V. Subiotto, "Dante and the Holocaust: The Cases of Primo Levi and Peter Weiss," New Comparison 11 (Spring 1991): 70-89; and Hamida Bosmajian, "Peter Weiss's 'The Investigation': Report about a Locale Called Auschwitz," in idem, Metaphors of Evil: Contemporary German Literature and the Shadow of Nazism (Iowa City, 1979), 171ff.

16. Peter Weiss, Notizbücher 1960-1971, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1982), 211, 226.

17. Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade [1963], trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York, 1981), 92. (The play is generally referred to as Marat/Sade.)

18. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1987), 365-66.

19. Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, 1980), 28, 33, 38.

20. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL, 1973), 48.

21. Eli Wiesel, "The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration," in idem et al., Dimensions of the Holocaust, 2d ed. (Evanston, IL, 1990), 7.

22. Langer, "The Literature of Auschwitz," 97 (emphasis added).

23. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362. My repeated references to Adorno should not obscure the political-ideological differences between Weiss and Adorno. In the centrality of Auschwitz for their thinking, however, and in the way they conceptualized its consequences in the realm of ethics and aesthetics, there is a striking proximity.

24. See Klaus Harro Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters (Tübingen, 1976); and Brian Barton, Das Dokumentartheater (Stuttgart, 1987). See also Jack D. Zipes, "Documentary Drama in Germany: Mending the Circuit," The Germanic Review 42, no. 1 (1967): 49-62; and Laureen Nussbaum, "The German Documentary Theatre of the Sixties," German Studies Review 4, no. 2 (1981): 237-55.

25. Peter Weiss, "The Material and the Models: Notes towards a Definition of Documentary Theatre," trans. Heinz Bernard, Theatre quarterly 1, no. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1971): 43.

26. Gerd Weinreich, Peter Weiss: Die Ermittlung (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), 39.

27. Like Weiss's following plays, The Investigation originally contained a list of sources. It was later dropped. See Peter Weiss, Die Ermittlung: Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (Frankfurt/Main, 1965), 211.

28. Weiss, "The Material and the Models," 41, 43. Weiss also addressed these issues in many interviews; see esp. Rainer Gerlach and Matthias Richter, eds., Peter Weiss in Gespräch (Frankfurt/Main, 1986). See also Walter Wager, ed., "Peter Weiss," in idem, The Playwrights Speak (New York, 1967), 189-212; and the centrally important interview from 1965, published in 1994, "Kann sich die Bühne eine Auschwitz-Dokumentation leisten? Peter Weiss im Gespräch mit Hans Mayer (Oktober 1965)," Peter Weiss Jahrbuch 4 (1995): 8-30. See also Oliver Clausen, "Weiss/Propagandist and Weiss/Playwright," New York Times Magazine, 2 Oct. 1966, 28-29, 124-34; and Paul Gray, "A Living World: An Interview with Peter Weiss," Tulane Drama Review 11, no.1 (1966): 106-14.

29. Peter Weiss, "Leavetaking," in idem, Exile, trans. E. B. Garside, Alastair Hamilton and Christopher Levenson (New York, 1968), 44. For discussions of Weiss's Jewishness, see Jochen Vogt, "'Ich tötete und ich wurde getötet': Zugehörigkeitsprobleme bei Peter Weiss," in Jost Hermand and Gert Mattenklott, eds., Jüdische Intelligenz in Deutschland (Berlin, 1988), 126-38; and Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, "Jüdisches Bewusstsein im Werk von Peter Weiss," in Michael Hofmann, ed., Literatur, Ästhetik, Geschichte: Neue Zugänge zu Peter Weiss (St. Ingberg, 1992), 49-64; and Ingo Breuer, "Der Jude Marat: Identifikationsprobleme bei Peter Weiss," in Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, ed., Peter Weiss: Neue Fragen an alte Texte (Opladen, 1994), 64-76.

30. Peter Weiss, "Vanishing Point," in idem, Exile, 194, 196.

31. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 363.

32. Peter Weiss, "My Place" [1964], trans. Karen Jackiw, Chicago Review 29, no. 3 (1978): 145, 148. See also the translation by Christopher Middleton, in idem, ed., German Writing Today (Harmondsworth, 1967), 20-28.

33. Améry, At the Mind's Limits, 94.

34. Wiesel, "The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration," 19.

35. Jean-Michel Chaumont, "Der Stellenwert der 'Ermittlung' im Gedächtnis von Auschwitz," in Heidelberger-Leonard, ed., Peter Weiss, 79.

36. Naumann, Auschwitz, 122, 130; Investigation, 135.

37. Clausen, "Weiss/Propagandist and Weiss/Playwright," 132.

38. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.

39. All quotes in Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 73-75. In Young's reading the play even performs a veiled substitution wherein socialist victims replace the Jews. Such a reading has no basis in the text.

40. Reinhard Kühnl, Der deutsche Faschismus in Quellen und Dokumenten, 6th ed. (Cologne, 1987), 376, 378.

41. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), 521 n. 81 and 523 n. 4; see also Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992).

42. Michael Schneider, Das "Unternehmen Barbarossa": Die verdrängte Erblast von 1941 und die Folgen für das deutsch-sowjetische Verhältnis (Frankfurt/Main, 1989), 21.

43. This is one of the points to emerge from the exhibition "Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944" (War of Annihilation: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941 to 1944) organized by Jan Philipp Reemtsma and the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung and shown widely in Germany in 1996 and 1997. See Rudolf Augstein, "Anschlag auf die 'Ehre' des deutschen Soldaten?" Der Spiegel, 3 Mar. 1997, 92-99. See also the interview with Reemtsma, "Auf spezifische Weise ratlos und verstört," Freitag, 21. Mar. 1997, 3.

44. Weiss, "The Material and the Models," 42. There are several earlier essays by Weiss which are more pertinent to the play's "ideology": "Vorübung zum dreiteilingen Drama divina commedia," in idem, Rapporte, 2d ed. (Frankfurt/Main, 1981), 125-41; "Gespräch über Dante," in ibid., 142-69; "Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Sprache," in ibid., 170-87; "10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in der geteilten Welt," in idem, Rapporte 2 (Frankfurt/Main, 1971), 14-23; and "Antwort auf eine Kritik zur Stockholmer Aufführung der 'Ermittlung'," in ibid., 45-50.

45. Books on Marxist (as well as non-Marxist) conceptualizations of fascism in a German context include Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismustheorien (Darmstadt, 1972); and Reinhard Kühnl, Faschismustheorien (Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1986). See also Georg Lukács's important essay "Schicksalswende" of 1944, in idem, Schicksalswende (Berlin, 1948), 333-56, where the Holocaust is explained in terms of Germany's history and nationhood, rather than in the narrow economic and anticapitalist terms Young imputes to Marxism.

46. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1967), 590, 594.

47. Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben (London, 1978), 127, 157.

48. Ibid., 127.

49. Ibid., 158, 163.

50. For references to these kinds of emplotments of the Holocaust, see the statement by Saul Friedländer in Lang, ed. Writing and the Holocaust, 287-88; and the statements by historians Gulie Ne'eman Arad and Moshe Zuckermann quoted in Jörg Magenau, "Gedenken macht frei: Der 27. Januar als 'Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus'--Ein Symposium über die Shoa-Rezeption in der dritten Generation in der Berliner LiteraturWerkstatt," Freitag, 31 Jan. 1997, 11.

51. Hayden White, "Getting out of History: Jameson's Redemption of Narrative," in idem, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 167. For a critical discussion of White's theorems, see various articles in Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

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