30 October 2024

Erwin Piscator had first achieved fame as a communist director in 1920s Berlin before being forced to flee, first by Hitler and then by Stalin, and subsequently trained Hollywood stars in 1940s New York. Once back in Germany, he envisioned a kind of Bekenntnistheater, or ‘confessional theatre’, for the recently founded Federal Republic, stating that the production of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise represented ‘modern-day Germany confessing itself’.

‘Innocence in the face of guilt’

Following the end of the Second World War, many West German theatres staged Lessing’s Nathan the Wise in what was akin to an act of reparation. Piscator had a different idea. In an unpublished diary entry, Piscator noted that when an old childhood friend from Marburg asked him why he had picked Nathan, he gave a forthright answer: ‘Because you – the Germans – killed so many Jews.’

Piscator’s uncompromising response can be put down to what he experienced after returning to West Germany. The chapter of his autobiography – a work he never completed – that would cover the years after his return was to be entitled ‘The Cold Shoulder’. The word ‘disappointment’ crops up again and again in the diary that was meant to form the basis for his memoirs. At one point he states explicitly, ‘This is the great disappointment of my return. The German people don’t seem inclined to acknowledge their faults.’ Elsewhere there is a note of sarcasm as he observes: ‘There are no war criminals. There is also no one guilty of the death of the Jews!’

The conversation with his childhood friend from Marburg is a telling example of Piscator’s disappointment. She was reluctant to hear anything about the Jewish genocide. She asked incredulously, ‘What are you saying? What have we done?’ In his diary Piscator recounts how he repeated himself, not just once but twice, putting the number of Jews killed by the Nazis at six million. His friend remained sceptical: ‘We’re supposed to have done that?’ But then ‘she looked at me with great, round eyes’ and burst into tears. Piscator was bewildered by his friend’s ignorance – ‘Is it possible that she didn’t know, that she knew nothing, nothing at all until today, in 1952?’ He was also moved, in equal measure, by her tears. In his diary Piscator supplements the dialogue with the following comment, appended in brackets: ‘(I could have kissed her, like a young girl, this innocence in the face of guilt.) … It was the moment I had been waiting for with every German since my return – and which I encountered here for the first, and so far, only time.’

In staging Lessing’s Nathan, Piscator sought to shake the Marburg audience, just as he had shaken his friend by informing her that millions of Jews had been killed. He wanted them to respond too with ‘innocence in the face of guilt’: Nathan would give them an immediate sense of the Holocaust by allowing them to comprehend, at least for a moment, what was beyond comprehension – grasping it with the naivety of a child, ‘like a young girl’.

Piscator was convinced that Marburg was the right location for a production of Nathan staged in this manner: ‘Nowhere was my soul touched by the experience of Nathan as it was here, in the city where I had grown up, which was known for being virulently anti-Semitic’, he notes in his diary. ‘Some 40 metres from the theatre is the square – now a public garden – where the synagogue once stood until the order came to burn it down.’ This park (today’s Garden of Remembrance), which he went past every day on his way to the Philippshaus – the improvised venue for Marburg’s theatre – served as a personal memorial site for Piscator; his younger brother Paul had been involved in wrecking the city’s synagogue during the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938 and had been sentenced after the war to a year in prison as one of the arsonists.

‘In the middle of the auditorium’

Piscator decided to radically alter the stage area in the large hall of the Philippshaus by opening it up to the audience, thereby allowing them to relate more closely to Nathan. Rather than staging the play with the audience clearly separated from the action by a pit and a curtain, Piscator erected an acting area in the middle of the hall with seating all around it. As he wrote in May 1952, ‘I want to engage my Marburgers as much as possible, so I am staging Nasan [as he pronounced ‘Nathan’ in an English accent] in the middle of the auditorium.’ Piscator’s ungainly anglicised rendering of Lessing’s title was not simply a teasing play on the original: he took the idea of putting the stage in the middle of the hall from the legendary Glenn Hughes Penthouse Theatre in Seattle, Washington, and this kind of design, known as ‘theatre-in-the-round’, had become a talking point in the 1940s. Piscator was happy to adopt it. In an essay published a few years after the Marburg production, he asked, ‘What could be a more obvious move than to stage Lessing’s Nathan in the middle of the audience, thereby captivating their hearts and minds too? He believed that nobody in the audience should be able to distance themself from the events on stage.

Eliminating a separate stage area posed certain dramaturgical challenges: the actors had to enter and exit the central stage via three walkways that intersected the audience seating in a Y pattern. This meant that the audience was also sitting on the stage, as it were. Rigorously deconstructing the traditional division between stage and auditorium also allowed Piscator ‘to criticise resurgent reactionary attitudes and anti-Semitism’, as he phrased it in various letters he wrote during rehearsals. Physical proximity would prevent the audience from misreading the action on stage as an illusion, whereas Piscator viewed it as ‘a higher level of reality’.

‘7, 70, 700, 7,000, 70,000, 700,000 times 7’

The production’s stage design, just like the elimination of a distinct acting space, furthered Piscator’s goal of setting Lessing’s Nathan in the Marburg of 1952. He attached canopies to the ceiling, on which not only the three rings from Nathan’s famous parable were visible but also a Star of David, a Cross, and a Crescent Moon. The canopies also served as screens onto which Piscator could project the comments he would make on the action, explicitly drawing parallels between the drama unfolding on stage and events from Germany’s recent past.

This practice is illustrated by an example that is frequently cited in Piscator’s notes – because to him it was more than just that: in one scene Nathan tells the friar about a pogrom in Gath (located in what is now Israel), and at the exact moment when Nathan mentions that the dead include ‘my wife and seven hopeful sons’, the numbers ‘7, 70, 700, 7,000, 70,000, 700,000 times 7’ are projected in sequence onto the ‘screens’. The pogrom that Nathan’s family fell victim to thus becomes a reference to the Holocaust, in which, as Piscator writes, ‘5, 6, 7 million Nathans were killed’.

Piscator was insistent that his dramaturgical decisions were not technical ‘tricks’ travestying Lessing’s Nathan: ‘It is not a contrary reading of the play; indeed, Lessing requires it. His poetry is a form of instruction.’ Judging from the audience’s reaction, Piscator concluded that his staging of Nathan had achieved the desired effect ‘The impression it made was not superficial; it shook people to the core. It was modern-day Germany confessing itself.’ There is no way now of substantiating Piscator’s assessment, but his production was certainly a remarkable success: during its run in Marburg and the surrounding region, where there were some 20 guest performances, Nathan was seen by 17,000 people.

Title image: Poster advertising the Nathan production at the Marburger Schauspiel theatre. Image: Stadtarchiv Marburg (StadtA MR, S 11, 114)

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=198