Körper, Kannibalen, Judenräte, Ästhetiken des Grotesken bei George Tabori und Robert Schindel by Johanna Öttl (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Körper, Kannibalen, Judenräte, Ästhetiken des Grotesken bei George Tabori und Robert Schindel by Johanna Öttl Timothy B. Malchow Johanna Öttl, Körper, Kannibalen, Judenräte, Ästhetiken des Grotesken bei George Tabori und Robert Schindel. Literaturgeschichte in Studien und Quellen 32. Vienna: Böhlau, 2022. 337 pp. This excellent book by Johanna Öttl, focuses on contextualized analyses of two plays exploring memory of the Shoah: Die Kannibalen by George Tabori (1914–2007) and Dunkelstein by Robert Schindel (b. 1944). The 1969 German premiere of Die Kannibalen in West Berlin launched Tabori's career in German-language theater; Schindel's Dunkelstein was published in 2010 and had its full-length premiere in Vienna in 2016. A generation separates the two playwrights, though each, from an assimilated Jewish family, lost his father to murder by Nazis in the Shoah. Öttl shows that each writer produced an innovative play at a transitional moment for Holocaust memory and its literary representation, employing a grotesque aesthetic that deviated from established genres to expose the constructedness of conventions for representing memory. The book consists of four chapters with a brief introduction and a helpful conclusion. The first chapter examines the contexts in which Die Kannibalen and Dunkelstein appeared, distinguishing between public memory discourses and memory-focused literary genres while tracing their interactions through numerous examples. After a postwar period characterized by distortions, silence, and the coexistence of anti- and philosemitism that dehistoricized and sentimentalized Jewish figures, the 1960s marked a transition. Growing interest in survivor testimony led to the perception of individual survivors' bodies as authoritative markers of authentic memory and to a new focus on their voices. In Die Kannibalen, the emphasis on complex, individual Jewish protagonists grew out of that development, breaking taboos by undermining the impersonal cliché of sacralized victimhood. Öttl shows that sentimentalizing [End Page 125] and dehistoricizing tendencies have continued into the new millennium in popular Shoah representations, although survivor literature and testimony had also become central in public memory by the 1980s. Given the meaning attributed to survivors' bodies and voices, a new form of memory is emerging as the last survivors die out, leaving only mediated representations of their bodies and voices as signs of authentic memory. Schindel's play thematizes this shift from communicative to cultural memory. In the second chapter, Öttl formulates her critical understanding of the grotesque aesthetics at work in Tabori and Schindel. She dismisses Wolfgang Kayser's canonical 1957 study of the grotesque for its emphasis on timeless tropes, arguing instead that an aesthetic becomes grotesque in context, in relation to generic forms that it juxtaposes in an alienating, multi-voiced narrative that might be comical. The dialogic nature of such narratives engenders reflection on how familiar literary genres construct modes of perception and thought (subject positions) and how genres interact with societal discourses that form conceptions of reality. Öttl builds on Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of the grotesque. Although Bakhtin is renowned for conceptualizing the carnivalesque in his Rabelais study, his work on the dialogic artwork, beginning with his Dostoyevsky study, proves more important for Öttl's understanding of grotesque aesthetics. Chapter 3 examines Die Kannibalen, demonstrating the novelty for its time of Tabori's prioritization of the subjective voices and corporeal sensations of individual Shoah survivors. Öttl engages in close reading of the play while relating it to Tabori's prior work, some of his later plays, scholarship on the author, and other Shoah literature, underscoring the significance of Die Kannibalen in its moment. Considering the play's aesthetic innovations as a piece of Shoah literature alongside its references to societal discourses, she shows that it breaks with conventional philosemitic representations of Shoah survivors while also engaging older antisemitic tropes like that of Jews as cannibals. Die Kannibalen introduces survivors as autonomous speakers while employing alienation and comical elements to undermine discursive conventions. Most importantly, it introduces survivors' bodies as primary bearers of memory. Schindel's Dunkelstein is the focus of Chapter 4. The play's fictional title character is based on the historical Benjamin Murmelstein, a rabbi who survived the Shoah as the Jewish council elder in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Öttl relates Schindel's play to other...