Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori (Studies in Theatre History and Culture) - Hardcover

Feinberg, Anat

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877456860 ISBN 13: 9780877456865

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1999

Synopsis

In this work, the author offers the first English-language study of the controversial dramatist George Tabori. A Jewish-Hungarian playwright and novelist, Tabori is a unique figure in post-war German theatre -one of the few theatre people since Bertolt Brecht to embody "the ideal union" of playwright, director, theatre manager, and actor. Revered as a "theatre guru", Tabori's career, first in the United Sates and later in Germany, is fraught with controversy. "There are taboos that must be broken or they will continue to choke us", he wrote upon the 1969 German premier of "Cannibals", a shockingly grotesque play about the inmates of a concentration camp who, in desperation, prepare to eat one of their mates in order to survive. This deliberately provocative debut marked the direction Tabori's work would take in the years to come. In his so-called Holocaust plays ("Jubilee", My Mother's Courage", "Mein Kampf" etc.) he confronted national socialism and the systematic murder of European Jewry in a revolutionary way. In all of his work Tabori consciously resists the historical distortions of sentimental pity or sanctimonious judgement and hypocritical philo-semitism, which is in many cases the reverse or anti-Semitism. Making use of invaluable archival material, the author's biographical account is followed by a study of Tabori's experimental theatre work. As did prominent avant-gardists such as Grotowski or Chaikin, Tabori sought to open up new vistas in an otherwise mainstream theatre system. She pays special attention to Tabori's theatrical innovations, most movingly found in his Holocaust plays. There she shows the ways in which Tabori's theatre becomes a locus of remembrance (Gedachtnisort) and a unique, engaging memory-work (Erinnerungsarbeit).

About this title

About the Author

Feinberg is a novelist and professor of Hebrew and Jewish literature at the University for Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, Germany.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877456860
• ISBN 13: 9780877456865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384