[In the following essay, Berghahn regards The Investigation as “one of the best representations of the Holocaust for the stage” and chronicles the critical controversy surrounding the play.]

A living man has come and what happened here hides itself from him.¹

PREFACE

My reflections on Peter Weiss are tinged with the subjective memories of how I received the message of the Holocaust. As was typical for my generation, I heard nothing about it in high school. The Holocaust was the best kept secret of postwar Germany until the German translation of The Diary of Anne Frank was published in 1955. I saw the theater production in 1956 and read the book afterwards, but the full extent of the Holocaust was still shrouded in mystery. This changed at the beginning of the sixties, when I read Hannah Arendt's report Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961), when I saw Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy (1963), and when I followed the heated debate about Pope Pius XII's indifference toward the suffering of the Jews. Finally, Peter Weiss's documentary drama The Investigation opened my eyes to the full extent of the Holocaust. In 1978 I saw the television production Holocaust, first in the United States and then a year later in Germany, and I was surprised at its impact on the German audience, as if it were the first revelation of the Nazis' extermination campaign against the Jews. Much later Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List renewed interest in the Holocaust for yet another generation, but at the same time it clouded the issue of German guilt by presenting a good German as savior of the Jews.

I want to demonstrate with this abbreviated chronology of Holocaust reception in Germany the simple fact that there were at least four distinctive phases of public discussion. All are connected with artistic representations, which suggests how important literature and film have been in coming to terms with the Nazi past.² For me, they are an essential part of my own life experience as a German, perhaps even part of my own identity formation. Thus, my perspective on Weiss's Investigation is embedded in historical as well as personal experience, and thus, my observations echo Martin Walser's “Our Auschwitz.”³

My critical reading of Weiss's Investigation has a threefold purpose. First, I wish to counter the claims of many Germans that they knew nothing about the Holocaust until they saw its “most recent” representation, be it the television series Holocaust in 1979 or the film Schindler's List in 1992. From my perspective Weiss's Investigation was a belated turning point in Germany's coming to terms with its Nazi past. Second, I will demonstrate—against all aesthetic, moral, and political criticism of Weiss's documentary drama—that The Investigation is one of the best representations of the Holocaust for the stage. Third, I will explore the limits of representing the Holocaust in Weiss's documentary drama and the clash of ideologies of the author and his critics that led to its negative reception in Germany and the United States.

I

Peter Weiss's Investigation marks a turning point in the literary as well as political sphere of the Federal Republic of Germany. The year 1965, when it was performed concurrently on fifteen stages in Germany (not to forget the television production, which reached an even wider audience),⁴ was also the year that witnessed the conclusion of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and that ended the debate on the Statute of Limitations for Nazi crimes in West Germany. There is a reciprocal relationship between these events. Weiss's documentary drama confronted an expanded audience with crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis in Germany's name; at the same time the debate surrounding the play amplified the political discussion about Germany's responsibility for these atrocities. Literature no longer seemed to be merely the “conscience of the nation,” as critics in the fifties and early sixties widely considered it to be, but rather it had become an “instrument of political opinion formation and of influencing the public sphere,” just as Weiss hoped.⁵ The German euphemism Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) became an educational project for a nation which up to this point had collectively repressed its guilt for what had happened between 1933 and 1945.

Historical markers, such as the one I have just erected, are always too simplistic for explaining the complexities of history. There are, of course, always incubation periods which precede turning points. In our case it is no different. I would venture to say that the transition time lasted from 1961 to 1965. 1961 was not only the year when the Soviets dropped the Iron Curtain by building the Berlin Wall, heating up the Cold War, and leading to stronger anti-communist sentiments in the West; it was also the beginning of the end of the Adenauer Era. With the elections of 1961 the intellectual climate of the Federal Republic was slowly beginning to change. For the first time intellectuals discussed the possibility of a political alternative to Adenauer's government. Martin Walser asked twenty colleagues: Do We Need A New Government?⁶ Their meager answers aimed at Gewissensbildung (conscience raising), but they had as yet nothing to offer that could contribute to political opinion formation. Yes, they were all troubled by Adenauer's authoritarian government; and they had every right to worry, as the Spiegel-affair demonstrated one year later. Moreover, disturbing signs of continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic came into public view. Adenauer's personal secretary of the chancellory, Heinrich Globke, had been a commentator of the 1935 racial Nuremberg Laws, a fact that everyone knew, but no one bothered to notice. In 1962 the highest judge of the Federal Republic was exposed as member of the Nazi judicial system, and the President of the Republic had to dismiss him. That same year 143 high judges and prosecutors were forced into early retirement for similar reasons, a special law allowing them to retire with full pensions.⁷ Slowly the repressed past was returning with a vengeance, nowhere more obviously than in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) and in the Frankfurt trial against Mulka et. al. (1963-65), for they demonstrated that not a small clique of criminals around Hitler had seduced the German people, but that ordinary Germans willingly participated in the slaughter of millions of Jews and other “enemies” of the Third Reich. The “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt called it, became visible as never before.⁸

Between 1961 and 1965, the theater more than any other political or educational institution confronted the German public with its repressed past. For a short time the theater became once again a moral institution that amplified what the trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt had exposed through the judicial process. Plays like Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy and Peter Weiss's The Investigation, both so-called documentary dramas, provoked public debates which the trials themselves had never been able to stimulate. In both cases, literature reflected and amplified reality so that it influenced public opinion.

To be sure, there were earlier theatrical attempts of coming to terms with the Nazi past, but they either appeased and pleased the audience or they merely provoked tearful pity that dissipated outside the theater. Cases in point are Carl Zuckmayer's The Devil's General (1946) and Frances Goodrich's and Albert Hackett's Broadway production based on The Diary of Anne Frank (1956). Zuckmayer returned triumphantly from his American exile with a play that portrays a German air force general, Harras, as a tragic hero opposing Hitler, the devil incarnate. By demonizing Hitler and the Third Reich and by presenting a noble general who opposed their policies, the audience could easily identify with the hero and forget about their own involvement in the Nazi past. This was an easy way out for a German audience of the late forties and guaranteed the play's success.

The staging of Anne Frank's diary was a different matter altogether. Here the audience experienced such strong emotional identification with the confinement and observations of young Anne that—according to Adorno—one German lady lamented: “But really, this girl should have been spared.”⁹ Catharsis resulted from an individual's feeling of pity for the killing of this one nice Jewish girl without understanding the enormity of the genocide. The collectively repressed guilt of the German people for atrocities against the Jews became comprehensible only on an individual level in a gesture of empathy. The silent rejection of German complicity in the murder of the Jews was reflected in the stunned silence at the end of the play. Something dawned on the German audience about the Holocaust, but it found an outlet only in individual pity without breaking through the denial of their responsibility. To recognize the totality of the Holocaust and to demonstrate the German involvement in these crimes against humanity, more was needed than empathy for just one Jewish victim.

A new form of representation was required, one which connected the repressed past with the present. As Martin Walser demanded from his fellow playwrights: “Today a German author has to present exclusively characters who either conceal or express the years from 1933 to 1945. […] Every sentence by a German author which says nothing about this historical reality conceals something.”¹⁰ In his own theatrical attempts he undeniably demonstrated this continuity, but he failed for a different reason: by using rather traditional dramaturgy. Der schwarze Schwan (1964) employs the form of a family tragedy, while Eiche und Angora (1965) is a dramatic parable. They are well constructed plays, critiquing the denial of the recent past and they are even emotionally provocative, and yet they are unable to recall the horror of the Third Reich adequately. Not even the parable form, propagated and used so successfully by Brecht in Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui, was capable of such expression, since it distanced the events and made them historically ambivalent.

The best example of a famous play that nevertheless faltered in capturing the essence of the Holocaust was Max Frisch's Andorra (1961). By employing two modes of representation, the play invites the audience to identify with Andri, the Jew, while maintaining the recent past at a safe distance—which holds true both for Swiss and German audiences. The Swiss could say that they were threatened by outside forces, the Blacks, clearly recognizable as Fascists, but that they were not responsible for Auschwitz; the Germans on the other hand could identify with the Jewish victim without reflecting on their own responsibility for Auschwitz, since the parable form abstracts from place and history. It displaces the recent past to a fictitious place called Andorra. The strange mixture of identification and distancing is repeated on a more existential level in the character of Andri. As long as the audience can identify in the first part of the play with Andri as the Jewish outsider of Andorra, it feels empathy with the victim of anti-Semitism; in the second half, however, when the townspeople learn that Andri is not a Jew but one of them, the play's emphasis shifts to more universal concerns. Since Andri insists on his “Jewish” identity and is killed in the end as a Jew, his “Jewishness” becomes a matter of existential choice, and the issue of racial anti-Semitism is far removed from the historical events of the Holocaust. The parable form and its technique of estrangement gradually transforms the play into a model for a general rationalization of identity formation as social construct and of anti-Semitism as just another form of prejudice. The far more complex questions—why did the Holocaust happen in Germany? how was it organized and executed?—get lost in the ahistorical parable form. And yet, the final scene marshals all the elements of repressed guilt: The citizens of Andorra pretend that they have seen and heard nothing; they refuse any knowledge about Andri's fate; and Barblin goes mad in mourning for her murdered brother. Perhaps her insanity is Frisch's final word on the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust.

Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy is the most unusual example, since it mixes traditional dramaturgy with documentary commentary and succeeded in provoking a public debate without precedence in the Federal Republic. The rather conventional historical drama à la Schiller would not have provoked such an uproar, had not the subject matter and documentation implicated Pope Pius XII: Why did the Pope keep silent about the genocide of the Jews, which he had known about?¹¹ The dramatic conflict centers around this question and how the central character, Pater Riccardo, deals with it. This Catholic priest is torn between his helplessness vis-à-vis the SS officers, who organize the deportation of Roman Jews and the acquiescence of Pope Pius XII to Nazi policy. Since he cannot influence the papal authorities to intervene or to protest against this barbarism, he takes it upon himself to act as the deputy of Christ. He accompanies the Roman Jews to Auschwitz, where he is murdered with them. The audience is asked to identify with the hero's inner turmoil and to confront their own responsibility for the deportation of Jews during the Third Reich. However, the Jews are only marginal figures in this historical drama in which all the fear and pity of the classical tragedy are heaped onto the hero Riccardo. Jews appear in only two scenes which ask the audience to identify with their suffering. Act III shows the capture of a prominent Jewish family in Rome, and in the last act they are “mere” victims. This is the most problematic scene, for it aims to represent Auschwitz on stage. Although powerful scenes, they demonstrate the limits of representation of the Holocaust. Hochhuth simplifies the complex history of the Final Solution by presenting it as a classical tragedy in which the struggle of an idealistic priest against the evil of the Third Reich becomes an issue of one individual's moral responsibility and in which Auschwitz, the symbol of the industrialized extermination of Jews, becomes the cathartic locus of the tragedy.¹² In spite of these flaws, Hochhuth's Deputy provoked more public debate than either The Diary of Anne Frank or Andorra. Nevertheless, it failed both to explain the roots of anti-Semitism, which in a Roman Catholic setting could have been age-old anti-Judaism, and to represent Auschwitz on stage.

II

This short historical overview may suffice as a backdrop to one of the most convincing representations of the Holocaust, Peter Weiss's The Investigation. Weiss realized from his visit to Auschwitz in 1964 that no visitor could comprehend or imagine what had happened there twenty years earlier. For him, Auschwitz was a place of pilgrimage; it had no connection to the present. The traces of railroad tracks, barracks, rubble, and barbed wire stared at him in silence, and as a museum Auschwitz was merely another horrible place, about which it was too late to do anything. The only connection he could find was the knowledge that “it is a place for which I was destined but which I managed to avoid,” and he continued: “I have had no experience of this place, I have no relation to it, except that my name was on the lists of people, who were supposed to be sent there for ever.”¹³ He had to pay a price, however, for his estrangement from the place and his luck of escaping it: He felt guilty, like most survivors who mourn the loss of loved ones murdered there. Perhaps it was precisely this tension between his experience of estrangement and his personal identification with its victims that catalyzed an artistic response. While watching the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, he contemplated another artistic possibility, one he considered “dry and emotionless,” documentary theater.

As far as I know, this is one of the few places where Weiss reflects on the limits of representing Auschwitz. What has by now become a commonplace in discussing the Holocaust—that it is impossible to comprehend this catastrophe, or to represent it artistically—seems not to have been a major obstacle for Weiss.¹⁴ He knew, of course, that the bureaucratically organized destruction of life scorns any moral judgment, that the mechanized extermination of life numbs the faculty of reason, and that Auschwitz is beyond human imagination, yet he tried to rationalize the horror nevertheless. Auschwitz may be incomprehensible, but for Weiss it was not beyond representation. He strongly believed that documentary theater and rational analysis could counter any mystification of Auschwitz and could also contribute to our understanding of the present. “We must drop the lofty view / that the camp world / is incomprehensible to us.”¹⁵ This provocative statement by the Third Witness stands as Weiss's answer to our doubts about the limits of representing the Holocaust.

When Weiss addresses this issue in a short dramaturgical introduction to his play, he states categorically that “any representation of the camp on stage would be impossible.” (118) However, this has less to do with the impossibility of representing the Holocaust than with the limits of the theater. Of course, Auschwitz, the concentration camp, cannot be reproduced on stage and any attempt to identify with the victims would be futile. The same holds true for any theatrical reenactment of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, for it would only fictionalize reality, or as Weiss states again in his introduction: “In the production of this play, no attempt should be made to reconstruct the courtroom before which the proceedings of the camp trial took place” (Ibid). What he does, however, is to investigate, document, and report what happened in the concentration camp, how and why it happened. His Investigation confronts the audience with facts, numbers and names, with testimony of medical experiments, with torture and murder, with methods of exploitation and of extermination. Weiss leads us through eleven stages of Hell on earth, from the ramp through the camp to the fire ovens. He demonstrates emotionlessly what took place in Auschwitz, analyzes it rationally, and confronts the German audience with “their Auschwitz.”

And yet, Weiss knew all too well that facts do not speak for themselves and that documentary drama is not a mere reproduction of reality, of which it is often accused.¹⁶ He had learned from Brecht that neither facticity nor photorealism says anything about the depicted reality. They do not make it speak, or as Brecht stated: “One has indeed to construct something, something artificial, something formed.”¹⁷ It is, therefore, not sufficient merely to document the barbarism of Auschwitz or to let the facts tell the “whole truth” about it, since these are always already insufficient. Some form of art is indeed necessary, but not the kind of dramatic form which relies on plot and character, illusion and identification in order to transform Auschwitz into an emotional experience. Rather, a distancing technique is needed that makes the underlying social causes of reality transparent.

Weiss's first artistic device is the oratorio form. It is well known that Dante's Divina Commedia, which he was studying at the time, inspired the structural arrangement of The Investigation, using as his model the Inferno. Following this example, he divided the material into eleven cantos with three sections each. The proportional arrangement of the dramatis personae (three jurists, nine witnesses, eighteen defendants) employs the Christian symbolism of the holy trinity, standing in stark contrast to the subject matter, the extermination of European Jewry. The play's subtle irony is revealed in the way Weiss plays with this Christian typology and stages the oratorio as a passion play of Jewish suffering. Accordingly the oratorio form, which forgoes traditional scenic devices, costumes, and props, is usually presented as a solemn reading (with a minimum of props), underscoring the estrangement effect of the play.¹⁸

Montage is the second device Weiss uses.¹⁹ The documentary drama, which is rather undramatic, static, and bare of action, is a collage of quotes, or as Weiss called it: Konzentrat (a condensation of evidence). It has by now become a commonplace that documentary drama relies on fact, reports, and quotes, which often lead to the erroneous conclusion that it only reproduces or doubles reality, meaning that the documentary theater is a tautology. Less understood is its montage technique, which distorts, distances, and estranges reality. The documentary material is neither invented nor fictitious and, even more importantly, it is not mediated by a narrator or integrated into the dramatic form. Rather it uses ready-made, found material (reports and quotes) that is then collated into a new pattern, to be analyzed and criticized. In short, the montage distorts existing reality in order to make it recognizable. Cuts, ruptures, and montage, Weiss explained in his “Notes on the Documentary Theater,” isolate details of the chaotic material of reality: “By confronting contradictory details, it makes us aware of existing conflicts.”²⁰ The audience is encouraged to be an observer and critic of these contradictions.

The Investigation, Weiss insists, contains no more than a condensation of evidence presented at the trial (118).²¹ The documentary material is based—sometimes verbatim—on Bernd Neumann's trial reports for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and on his own protocols. He compressed, rearranged, and collated it, allocating the quotes to specific players who represent a judge, a prosecutor, defense attorneys, defendants, and witnesses. He retained the names of the eighteen defendants, which is “significant” since they are “distinct figures” who actively participated in the atrocities. At the same time they “stand merely as symbols of a system that implicated in its guilt many others who never appeared in court” (119). The more than four hundred witnesses who had lost their names in the camp are represented by nine “anonymous voices” who testify to the victims' experiences. Consequently there is no courtroom drama, no plot development, and no emotional confrontation, only questions and answers, interrogation and dialogue, report and memory. Auschwitz is triply distanced: what happened in Auschwitz that cannot be represented; what was revealed during the Auschwitz trial by the survivors and was reported by Bernd Neumann; and what was filtered through Weiss's own imagination while watching the trial. As Andreas Huyssen has aptly observed: “Auschwitz is represented through language only.”²² In the survivors' reports it is the language of memory, in the defendants' replies it is the language of denial.²³ Weiss reconstructs the past through the survivors' memory, while attitudes toward the Holocaust are articulated by the defendants. It is precisely this tension between past and present which makes The Investigation such a powerful and convincing play.

Yet Weiss seeks not only memory and mourning but also understanding and criticism of a system which produced such well organized and mechanized murder. More than a mere reconstruction of the past through memory—as another prejudice against documentary theater would make us believe—is presented on stage through interrogations and reports. While documentary dramas exist that reproduce the past as realistically as possible and make it emotionally digestible,²⁴ Weiss's Investigation confronts the audience of 1965 with present attitudes toward the Holocaust for which they themselves should accept responsibility and/or show remorse. Auschwitz is brought to the fore through language and memory and it is made accessible through the reactions of witnesses and defendants. By making use of alienation effects, the documentary theater reflects on the past from present perspective, it historizes contradictions of society, and makes them recognizable—setting them up for criticism. “The strength of the documentary theater,” as Weiss understood it, is precisely the fact, “that it reconstructs out of the fragments of reality a usable model for explaining present social conditions.”²⁵The Investigation is neither a surrogate for the Auschwitz trial, which is long forgotten, nor just another historical Holocaust drama, but a well-made play, which makes use of the dialectic of past and present in order to construct a model. “The Investigation is, therefore, not solely a play about Auschwitz, not even as a precedence, but about our Auschwitz, namely how present conditions are reflected in relation to Auschwitz.”²⁶ What happened in the concentration and extermination camps becomes a provocation for the living and for the society they live in.

Peter Weiss did not exclude himself from this provocation, which cut into his own flesh. When he visited Auschwitz, he realized that he had been destined for this place—and by sheer luck avoided it; when he attended the Auschwitz trial another possibility dawned on him, that he could have been one of the perpetrators himself. He remembered how enthusiastically he had participated in the paramilitary and often sadistic activities of the youth movement before 1933 and how close he had been to becoming a part of this murderous system. “The horror of both possibilities never again left him,” as Robert Cohen observed.²⁷ In the play Weiss demands nothing less than the same painful recognition on the part of the audience. The Third Witness rejects any mystification of Auschwitz as something inconceivable, and he then draws the provocative conclusion that prisoners and guards could have easily exchanged their places:

If they had not been designated prisoners
they could equally well have been guards
We must drop the lofty view
that the camp world
is incomprehensible for us
We all knew the society
that produced a government
capable of creating such camps
The order that prevailed there
was an order whose basic nature
we were familiar with.

(191)

The prevailing order or the “system”, as Weiss called it in the introductory note, is, of course, capitalism, which for him not only explains Nazi barbarity but a familiar continuity between the present and the past. This unbroken continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic is addressed in the play both by the still suffering survivors and the First and Second Witness, who are transitional figures between victims and perpetrators. They stand for many others, also implicated in the atrocities, who were never brought to trial: civil servants, engineers, physicians, scientists, and other ordinary men and women, like “Papa Kaduk”, one of the most bestial capos who is now admired by his patients for his gentleness. These handymen of the murderous machine called Auschwitz were integrated into the “new” society of the Federal Republic, where they were prosperous or even occupying leading positions. Their testimonies were meant to trigger an alarming recognition of continuity: In Auschwitz they were railroad specialists, now they are Bundesbahn executives. They pretend that they only followed orders, did their duty, and knew nothing of what was going on inside the extermination camp:

PROSECUTOR:
You heard nothing
about people being exterminated
1ST Witness:
How could anybody believe a thing like that.

(121)

Or:

JUDGE:
What did you see of the camp
2ND Witness:
Nothing
JUDGE:
Did you see the chimneys
at the end of the platform
or the smoke and the glare
2ND Witness:
Yes
I saw smoke
JUDGE:
And what did you think
2ND Witness:
I thought
those must be bakeries
I had heard
they baked bread in there day and night
After all it was a big camp.

(123)

The real provocation was, however, that Weiss dragged on stage those former directors of German corporations, those who willingly participated in the systematic exploitation of prisoners and who were now receiving high pensions and living comfortably with their repressed past. By naming Krupp, Siemens, and IG Farben, which at that time “made profits / that annually amounted to billions” and which are now in “a new phase of expansion” (206), the theater became a tribunal for the underlying forces which had made Auschwitz possible and profited from it.²⁸ The spotlight focused on the capitalistic system as participant in and profiteer of the Holocaust—an implication that West-German industry had avoided for two decades and wished to pass over in silence. In the play these witnesses avoid responsibility, especially since they are not among the defendants, and they make the tired excuses that they had only done their patriotic duty: “We were all concerned with / only one thing / winning the war” (204). They emphatically reject any guilt and call these accusations defamations:

Today
when our nation has worked its way up
after a devastating war
to a leading position in the world
we ought to concern ourselves
with other things
These recriminations
should have fallen
under the Statute of Limitations
a long time ago.

(296)

With this statement and with the “loud approbation from the Defendants” the play ends. It is precisely against this prevailing sentiment of repression and denial that Weiss wrote The Investigation.

As could be expected, many critics reacted with polemics, even slander against Weiss's indictment of the capitalist system, as if the subject matter, the extermination of Jews, Poles, Russians, Gypsies, and other “enemies” of the Nazi state, were of minor importance. Since Weiss had meanwhile given up his “comfortable third position” between capitalism and socialism and had publicly opted instead for socialism,²⁹The Investigation was called a propaganda piece of communist agitation against the Federal Republic.³⁰ Another critic considered the implication of German corporations to be simply an expression of Weiss's “ideology,” as if it had nothing to do with the murder of two million Jews in Auschwitz, claiming as well that “this murderous machine had been a heavy economic burden for the Third Reich”.³¹ (As if Auschwitz had not been a death factory in itself; as if Auschwitz had been a hindrance in the war effort and not an important element of the total war.) These and other critics objected to nothing less than the political tendency of Weiss's play that offended the bourgeois civility of the theater by implicating major German corporations in the Holocaust and violated its good taste by being tendentious. In short: Weiss had contradicted the bourgeois concept of art, a concept based on autonomy.

This is indeed what he had intended to do, as Weiss affirms in his “Notes on the Documentary Theater.” What his critics called propaganda was for him a necessary element of documentary theater: partisanship. Many of the play's themes can no longer be treated “objectively,” Weiss insists, “they can only be presented as crimes.”³² What he demands is nothing less than a political theater, which confronts the audience with a repressed past and opens up the present for a critical re-evaluation. The Investigation is neither a piece of disinterested art nor a drama in the Aristotelian fashion, but “a form of tribunal”, operative art. And yet, Weiss also knew that it is still theater. The documentary theater is no surrogate for reality or political action, “it must be a product of art, if it wants to have any justification.”³³

This is precisely the point I want to stress. The political tendency is embedded in an aesthetic structure, as my observations about the montage technique, the alienation effects, and the model function of The Investigation have demonstrated. The montage of authentic material from the Auschwitz trial articulates Weiss's personal interest and political tendency; the alienation effects are suppose to break the numbing emotional experience of the trial as well as the perturbing reports of the witnesses; and the model character of the documented reality allows for a dialectical understanding of the Nazi period, which makes the present transparent in its disturbing continuity.

Yet, despite Weiss's intentions to understand Auschwitz and to criticize the prevailing attitudes toward the Holocaust, there still remains a residue that escapes any attempt to rationalize Auschwitz. As a result, the audience did not hear the underlying message of the play (or at least not until much later). Enduring the relentless reports and descriptions of unbearable suffering, they heard about the extent and brutal details of the Holocaust, which shocked them into silence. There was no applause at the end of the performance. The audience sat numb in their seats for a long while and then filed out quietly. This response is quite different from any catharsis or cleansing of emotions. The audience had been shocked into recognition.

But of what? Certainly not of their complicity in the Holocaust or their collective responsibility for it, although they must have had some feeling of shame for what had been done in Germany's name. Perhaps, they felt even some remorse. The silence, however, marked their recognition of the magnitude and monstrosity of the Holocaust. They had been confronted with detailed reports of survivors who described relentlessly the many forms of destruction of life: by torture and starvation, by shooting and injection, by gas and fire. It was precisely this confrontation with the unbearable horrors and cruelties of Auschwitz that shocked the audience into recognizing the Holocaust's enormity.

The general public could have known about all of this at least since the Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, but the full impact of the Holocaust did not sink in until Weiss staged the terror of Auschwitz. If they were not overwhelmed by this burden of the past, the audience became the judge of what they had just seen. Weiss's Investigation, transforming the theater into a tribunal, not only informed the public about one aspect of the Nazi past, which they had repressed or denied, it also stimulated a public debate about this past which went far beyond the theater's threshold. His play truly became an “instrument of political opinion formation,” as Weiss had demanded of the documentary theater, and it influenced in no small part the outcome of the parliamentary debate about the Statute of Limitations for Nazi crimes.

III

In spite of the play's tremendous success, the public debates it triggered, and its educational function, the critical reaction in the Federal Republic was anything but enthusiastic. I already mentioned two critics who faulted Weiss for his ideology and called his play mere communist propaganda. Blinded by their own ideology of anti-Communism and/or their aesthetics of autonomous art, they overlooked not only the fact that Weiss's criticism of the capitalistic system comprises only one aspect of the play (roughly one tenth of the text), but, even more importantly, they rejected his dialectical perspective connecting the present with the past. Willingly or not, the critics continued the German politics of denial, although they couched their criticism in aesthetic terms.

A more interesting critique is Ernst Wendt's suspicion that Weiss was fascinated by cruelty or, even more strongly, that “the intensity of his representation of cruelty changes into ‘pleasure’.”³⁴ Joachim Kaiser raises a similar point in his criticism of Weiss's “Theater-Auschwitz” by observing that the audience had no respite from the “enormity of horror” and the “magnitude of facts.”³⁵ This is indeed one effect of the play, and it could explain the audience's numbness and silence at the end. Weiss's oratorio is, however, not to be confused with Antonin Artaud's “Theater of Cruelty”, as both reviewers seem to suggest.³⁶ It is a superficial analogy at best and at worst a grave distortion of Weiss's representation of Auschwitz. There are major differences between what an author imagines as cruelty and what happened in Auschwitz, between figments of the imagination and brutal reality. When the Living Theater staged Death in the Gas Chambers (1965), they were certainly able to produce raw emotions on stage and horror and fear in the audience, but they could not explain why it happened. They choreographed a dance of death and manipulated audience emotions to the extreme, but it was indeed nothing more than “Auschwitz-Theater,” which cannot compete with the reports of Weiss's witnesses. The dance of ecstasy and hysteria lacks any forms of distancing which would allow the audience to reflect on what it sees. This kind of raw emotional experience does not even lead to catharsis, which would entail some sort of emotional cleansing or moral response, and it certainly does not enhance the understanding of Auschwitz, as was the aim of Weiss's representation of cruelty. Weiss's “theater of cruelty,” if it can be called that, shocks the audience emotionally, and they leave the theater in silence, but it later also provokes reflections on what they heard and saw.

Aside from these misunderstandings, Kaiser's finer points are directed against the poetics of Weiss's documentary theater. It leaves the sphere of “Kunstwahrheit” (truth in art), which is, of course, the sphere of autonomous art; and it is only a surrogate for truly coming to terms with the past, which could be understood as a direct attack on the documentary drama of the sixties as well as a more general critique of postwar German literature.³⁷ Wendt draws a much cruder conclusion when he states “that Weiss was obviously more interested in the representation of suffering than in unmasking the perpetrators and the tacit accomplices.”³⁸ By insisting on suffering and cruelty as the main effects of the play, Wendt obviously missed the most important point in Weiss's documentary drama: His insistence on the continuity between Auschwitz and present day German society, and consequently on the ongoing process of repression. These conclusions return us to the focal point of German denial in the disguise of aesthetics.

If the German reception of Weiss's Investigation can be characterized—with a few exceptions³⁹—as apologetic, regressive, and polemical, the American reaction was altogether different. If the Germans were painfully reminded of a past they would prefer to forget but could not escape, the American audience, fascinated and appalled by the monstrosity of the concentration camps ever since they were discovered in 1945, expected a mimetic representation of crime and punishment, collective guilt and remorse, catharsis or some kind of resolution.⁴⁰ Instead they saw a documentary drama in which Auschwitz and the murdered Jews were not even mentioned. In Germany, the documentary drama of the sixties was the most innovative theatrical genre, confronting Germans with the facts, names, and places of their racial war; for many American critics, like Lawrence Langer, the play was nothing more than an journalistic documentation “with a minimum of alterations from the testimony of witnesses at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt …,” and he concluded that “the result on the stage is singularly undramatic.”⁴¹ Many American intellectuals were introduced to the Holocaust by Alain Resnais's film masterpiece Night and Fog, which had also used documentary clips, but nothing so factual, so brutal, and so “artless” as Peter Weiss's Investigation had confronted them.

Other, more sophisticated arguments developed over time in the United States, dealing with questions of identity and ideology.⁴² Eli Wiesel, the moral authority on all matters concerning the Holocaust, apodictically stated: “A prominent European playwright wrote a play about the Auschwitz trials and managed not to mention the word ‘Jew’ therein.”⁴³ One should add that Weiss also did not mention Auschwitz. While this omission is not so obvious, since text and context clearly delineate Auschwitz, the absence of the word “Jew” is indeed startling. But instead of asking why Weiss, himself a Jew, did not clearly identify the Jews, who made up the vast majority of Auschwitz victims, Wiesel denounces him as if he were a Holocaust denier. The simple truth would be, of course, that Weiss wanted to honor all Holocaust victims and that he refused to establish any hierarchy of victims. This explanation, well intended as it may be, will not do.

I forego the somewhat fruitless discussion about whether this omission had anything to do with Weiss's doubts about his own Jewish identity. Instead I summarize the obvious: He identified with the Jewish victims of the concentration camps, he felt guilty like many survivors who were spared, and he defined his own Jewishness by the Holocaust—a typical “Holocaust Jew,” as Jean Amery called all Jews who redefined their Jewishness after the trauma of the Holocaust.⁴⁴

Weiss's omission of the word “Jew” is a different matter altogether. In interviews he insisted that he deliberately erased the national and ethnic identity of the victims in order to stress the play's universal message. Universality, a category usually employed in the traditional drama of illusion and identification, is a strange concept in documentary drama, which privileges authenticity and specificity. Its provocation is based on facts, places, and names, indeed it points out the perpetrators and the places of their crimes against humanity. And yet, the victims should have no names, no nationality, and no ethnic identity? It is a contradiction in terms for documentary theater to sacrifice the victims' particularity in the name of universal meaning.

Weiss must have noticed this contradiction, otherwise he would not have identified one victim by name or referred repeatedly to the Soviet victims. Lili Tofler, who also has no national or ethnic identity, could be understood as a synecdoche, representing the countless unknown Holocaust victims. But why are the Soviet victims singled out? Is it, as Weiss's American critics love to point out, that he is first and foremost a communist? or as his defenders have suggested that Weiss wanted to make the audience aware as well of the millions of Soviet civilians who were killed in this total war?⁴⁵ This has become a major point of contention and irritation for American critics.⁴⁶ It would not be, if Weiss had also mentioned the Jews, for then it would have become intelligible to the audience that this was a total war of extermination, especially in the East, for racial reasons. Many scholars have argued that one of the major differences between fascism and National Socialism was the racial plank in the Nazi's political platform. By not naming the Jewish victims, Weiss overlooked or downplayed this most important racial component of the Holocaust. It is the play's gravest fallacy, even if the audience did not notice it, because of the simplified message of universal suffering.⁴⁷

How could this happen to an author who had been so sensitive to the sufferings of the Jewish victims, identified with them, and felt so deeply the guilt of a survivor? This can only be explained by the political tendency of the play, which his American critics were eager to pinpoint as Weiss's “Marxist Credo”⁴⁸: his fixation on the capitalist system and its continuity in the Federal Republic. For Weiss, the concentration camp functioned as a model for the brutal exploitation and extermination of human beings by the Nazi state, which he understood as the most extreme consequence of the capitalist system. He had good reason to pursue this line of thinking, since I. G. Farben, Krupp, and Siemens exploited slave laborers in the vicinity of Auschwitz and since Auschwitz itself was a well organized death factory. It could well be, as Cohen has surmised, that “it was not Weiss's Marxism that produced The Investigation but rather his work on the Auschwitz material that intensified his interest in Marxism.”⁴⁹ To represent Auschwitz he was not satisfied with a mere description of the death camp or reports of the cruelties committed in this place, he was also searching for a convincing model that could explain the Holocaust's social complexity. He found it in the industries surrounding Auschwitz as the most obvious signifier of capitalism. By implicating the German corporations who profited from the exploitation of slave labor, he used a well known Marxist critique of capitalism, the so-called Dimitroff doctrine, which interprets fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. In interviews Weiss repeatedly stated that he wanted “to stigmatize capitalism, which lends itself to profit even from gas chambers.”⁵⁰

Before we hastily join Weiss's critics in blaming him for his turn toward doctrinaire Marxism and his rather simplistic ideological criticism of capitalism, let us not forget the time of which we are speaking. It was the time of the cold war and anti-communist propaganda, whose codes can still be detected in the language of Weiss's American critics.⁵¹ At the same time many intellectuals in the West were rediscovering and reconstructing Marxist theory in order to analyze capitalism and fascism—and also to understand Auschwitz. “We will not have come to terms with the past until the causes of what happened then are no longer active. Only because these causes live on does the spell of the past remain unbroken—up to this very day.”⁵² Adorno's 1959 lecture “What does it mean: Coming to terms with the past?” demonstrates even in its somewhat cryptic language that he too defined fascism's continuity in terms similar to Weiss; and he agreed with his friend Max Horkheimer that the essence of anti-Semitism and an understanding of Auschwitz can only be found in a critical analysis of the society that produces them.⁵³ If even Adorno and Horkheimer, not to mention other early theorists of fascism, proposed the equation that fascism equals capitalism in its most brutal form, one should be more careful before blaming Weiss for his ideological blinders. Historians established long ago the close cooperation between German corporations and the Nazis.⁵⁴ Recent events like the scandals surrounding the “forgotten” Swiss bank accounts of Holocaust victims, the disappearance of records of Nazi gold in Swiss, German, and American banks, or the just settled swindle of German and Italian insurance companies, remind us again to what extent international capital had been involved in the enterprise of the Third Reich.

Nevertheless, in his attempt to make Auschwitz comprehensible by using a one-dimensional Marxist critique of capitalism and by constructing the death camp as an allegory of history, Weiss left himself vulnerable to criticism. With his monocausal explanation of fascism combined with his failure to reflect on anti-Semitism and its history in Germany, he “came dangerously close to depriving the victims of their personal and collective history and identity as Jews, and he just about instrumentalizes Auschwitz in order to advance a questionable interpretation of fascism.”⁵⁵ Weiss's political rationalization of Auschwitz distracted from its artful representation through memory and language, which is after all the main effect of his oratorio.

For all that, I still insist that Weiss's Investigation was a turning point in the literary as well as in the political history of the Federal Republic of Germany. As operative literature his documentary drama provided an impulse for confronting the Nazi past and for coming to terms with it. In the following years the student movement amplified this critical confrontation with the Third Reich's legacy and contributed to educational efforts to disseminate knowledge about the Holocaust in universities and schools. After 1965, no one in Germany could pretend not to know about the Holocaust. In a certain sense Weiss's Investigation contributed to a new conscience or to what Adorno called a new categorical imperative: That mankind “should arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”⁵⁶

Notes

1. Quoted from Weiss, “Meine Ortschaft” (1965), trans. Christopher Middleton, German Writing Today (Baltimore 1967), p. 28.

2. I forego the more recent public debates, such as the historians' debate (1987), the controversies surrounding the German translation of Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners (1997), the Wehrmacht exhibition (1997-98), and the ongoing discussions about the Berlin Holocaust Monument, which all demonstrate the burden of the past that cannot be laid to rest.

3. For a similar perspective with different results see Alfons Söllner, “Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung in zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive.” In: Deutsche Nachkriegslliteratur und der Holocaust, Stephan Braese et al., eds. (Frankfurt a.M. 1998), p. 99-128. I chose the title of this essay with Martin Walser's “Unser Auschwitz” in mind in order to mark the stark contrast between his famous essay of 1965 and his “Sunday Sermon” about “looking away” from Auschwitz and “repressing” German guilt/shame in his acceptance speech of the German Publishers' Peace Prize at Paul's Church in Frankfurt am Main in October 1998. See Martin Walser, Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede (Frankfurt a.M. 1998).

4. In the same year it was also staged in London, New York, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Moscow, Warsaw, and Prague.

5. Peter Weiss, “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Drama” (1968). In: Rapporte 2 (Frankfurt a.M. 1971), p. 96.

6. Martin Walser, Die Alternative. Oder brauchen wir eine neue Regierung? (Hamburg 1965).

7. Werner Stein, Kulturfahrplan (Vienna 1974), p. 1310.

8. The reception of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, was quite different in Germany than in Israel and the United States. Many Jews were offended by her harsh criticism of assimilated Jews and especially of Leo Baeck, who did not resist the Nazis but went so far as to help them round up fellow Jews. For them, her book was and is a provocation, while we missed that completely. For my generation, it was an eye-opener, since it demonstrated for the first time how the extermination of the European Jewry was organized and executed with bureaucratic efficiency and technological know-how and how ordinary civil servants participated in this genocide.

9. Theodor W. Adorno, Eingriffe (Frankfurt a.M. 1963), p. 143.

10. Martin Walser, “Vom erwarteten Theater.” In: Walser, Erfahrungen und Leseerfahrungen (Frankfurt a.M. 1965), p. 64.

11. See Summa iniuria oder Durfte der Papst schweigen?, Fritz J. Raddatz, ed. (Hamburg 1963), which documents a selection of the over 3000 responses to the play.

12. Theodor W. Adorno criticized Hochhuth severely for these aesthetic blunders. See his “Offener Brief an Rolf Hochhuth.” In: Noten zur Literatur IV (Frankfurt a.M. 1974), p. 137-146.

13. Weiss, “Meine Ortschaft,” p. 20.

14. Let us recall that this fairly recent debate was triggered by the “linguistic turn” in historiography and by deconstruction in literary theory. See Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA and London 1992), especially Friedländer's introductory essay.

15. Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade, The Investigation, and The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman, Robert Cohen, ed. (New York 1998), p. 191. This edition is quoted in the text.

16. For critical positions in this debate on documentary theater (Baumgart, Harich, Kesting, Walser, Handke), see Klaus L. Berghahn, “Operative Ästhetik: Zur Theorie der dokumentarischen Literatur.” In: Deutsche Literatur in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965, Paul Michael Lützeler und Egon Schwarz, eds. (Frankfurt a.M. 1980), p. 277ff.

17. Bertolt Brecht, Der Dreigroschenprozeß, Brecht, Werke (Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin 1992), vol. XXI, p. 469.

18. Erika Salloch, Peter Weiss's “Die Ermittlung”: Zur Struktur des Dokumentartheaters (Frankfurt a.M. 1972), p. 47ff. She reads The Investigation from a rather positivistic approach as a “Gegenentwurf” of the Divina Commedia.

19. Montage and collage are familiar techniques in avant-garde art forms, yet in literature they are usually overlooked, and in Weiss's play they are not even recognized as such since the material seems to be so “realistic”.

20. Peter Weiss, “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater.” In: Rapporte II, p. 97.

21. A detailed comparison of Weiss's play with all documents of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, which would go beyond Salloch's study, is yet to be presented. It could demonstrate Weiss's collage technique as well as his use of the Third Witness as protagonist for his own political perspective.

22. Andreas Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification: ‘Holocaust’ and the West German Drama.” In: New German Critique 19 (1980), p. 131.

23. Claude Lanzmann uses a similar montage technique and estrangement in his documentary film Shoah, which is also solely based on language and memory. His film shows us the places of destruction, which are now quiet landscapes, museums or monuments; there he interviews survivors, whose memories bring back the past. Past and present intermingle, and the Holocaust becomes present in its absence. Whereas Lanzmann's film and his interrogations seem to be mainly interested in the “how” of the extermination program, leaving the answer as to the “why” up to the audience, Weiss also wants to know why it happened.

24. As for instance Rolf Schneider's Prozeß in Nürnberg (1967), which is “simple information,” as the author even admits in his preface and which seems to prove the critics of documentary drama right.

25. Peter Weiss, “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater,” p. 97.

26. Klaus Harro Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters (Tübingen 1976), p. 53. I am very much indebted to this book, which is still the best theoretical treatise on German documentary drama of the sixties.

27. Robert Cohen, “1964—On March 13, in the middle of rehearsals for the premiere of Marat/Sade, Peter Weiss attended the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial.” In: Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096-1996, Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes, eds. (New Haven 1987), p. 723.

28. Smaller firms as well, like Degesch (Cyclon B) and Töpfer und Söhne (crematoria), should not be forgotten.

29. Peter Weiss, “10 Arbeitspunkte eines Autors in einer geteilten Welt.” In: Rapporte 2 (Frankfurt a.M. 1971), p. 14-23.

30. Otto F. Best, Peter Weiss (Bern 1971), p. 141.

31. Marianne Kesting, “Völkermord und Ästhetik.” In: Neue Deutsche Hefte 113 (1967), p. 96.

32. Weiss, “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater,” p. 99.

33. Weiss, “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater,” p. 96.

34. Ernst Wendt, “Was wird ermittelt?” In: Theater heute 10 (1965): 18. Others used more existential terms to describe Weiss's “fascination with evil.” See Salloch, Peter Weiss's “Die Ermittlung,” p. 154f.

35. Joachim Kaiser, “Plädoyer gegen das Theater-Auschwitz.” In: Süddeutsche Zeitung (4 September 1965), and “Theater-Auschwitz.” In: Die Zeit (2 November 1965).

36. For a historical overview of the representation of cruelty on stage from the 17th century to Artaud and for a refutation of understanding Weiss's play as “Theater of Cruelty,” see Ernst Schumacher, “Die Ermittlung von Peter Weiss: Über die szenische Darstellbarkeit der Hölle auf Erden.” In: Über Peter Weiss, ed. Volker Canaris (Frankfurt a.M. 1970), p. 83-87.

37. Or as Jochen Vogt observed, “Denn was haben ihre Autoren, von Heinrich Böll bis Christa Wolf, anderes betrieben als Erinnerungs—und Trauerarbeit—stellvertretend für eine Gesellschaft, die solche Arbeit in ihrer großen Mehrheit und in ihren repräsentativen Institutionen abgelehnt hat.” Jochen Vogt, Peter Weiss (Hamburg 1987), p. 96.

38. Wendt, “Was wird ermittelt?” p. 18.

39. At least four reviewers should be mentioned: Ernst Schumacher (see note 37), Walter Jens, “Die Ermittlung in Westberlin.” In: Die Zeit (19 October 1965); Martin Esslin in Die Weltwoche (29 October 1965), and Gerhard Schoenberner, “Die Ermittlung von Peter Weiss: Requiem oder Lehrstück?” In: Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte 12 (1965).

40. A typical expression of this kind of expectation can be found in Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago 1980), p. 38.

41. Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven 1975), p. 31. Twenty years later he changed his mind and called Weiss's Investigation one of the best representations of the Holocaust; see his essay “The Literature of Auschwitz.” In: Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York 1995), p. 97f.

42. For a critical overview of recent literary criticism on The Investigation in the United States, see Robert Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss's The Investigation and Its Critics,” History and Memory 10.2 (1998), p. 43-67.

43. Eli Wiesel, “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,” In: Dimensions of the Holocaust, Wiesel et al., eds. (Evanston 1990), 19. In an even more denunciatory gesture James Young calls The Investigation “judenrein,” see James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington 1988), p. 72.

44. See Robert Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature,” p. 54f. For further discussion of Weiss's Jewish identity, see Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, “Jüdisches Bewußtsein im Werk von Peter Weiss.” In: Literatur, Ästhetik, Geschichte. Neue Zugänge zu Peter Weiss, Michael Hoffmann, ed. (St. Ingberg 1992), p. 49-64.

45. Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature,” p. 58f.

46. James Young is almost beside himself that Weiss “co-valued political and racial killings,” as if it were an issue of first and second-class victims (Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 75). For a detailed metacritic of Young's book see, Jean-Michel Chaumount, “Der Stellenwert der Ermittlung im Gedächtnis von Ausschwitz.” In: Peter Weiss: Neue Fragen an alte Texte, Irene Heidelberger-Leonard, ed. (Opladen 1994), p. 77-93.

47. As far as I know, only one West German critic noticed this omission but then drew no conclusion, stating that Weiss presented the crimes of the camp “by abstracting from the race ideology” of the Nazis. See Hilzinger, Die Dramaturgie des dokumentarischen Theaters, p. 89. Söllner overlooks (or avoids) this problem altogether and is satisfied with Weiss's view that the nameless witnesses are merely “Sprachrohre.” See Söllner, “Peter Weiss's Die Ermittlung in zeitgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” p. 118.

48. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 78.

49. Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature,” p. 60.

50. Interview with Stockholms Tidningen, quoted in Der Spiegel 43 (1965), p. 155.

51. See Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature,” p. 60.

52. Theodor W. Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?” In: Eingriffe (Frankfurt a.M. 1963), p. 146.

53. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Elemente des Antisemitismus,” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt a.M. 1971), p. 185-230. For Horkheimer, see his essay “Die Juden und Europa.” In: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung VII.1-2 (1939), in which he subsumes fascism and anti-Semitism under the broader concept of capitalist crisis: “He who does not wish to speak of capitalism should also be silent about fascism.”

54. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago 1967), p. 590 and 594, and Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben (New York 1978).

55. Huyssen, “The Politics of Identification,” p. 133.

56. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt a.M. 1966), p. 356.