Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz (review)

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Michael Bachmann Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Edited by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. Pp. vii + 200. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 9780472132843. Working tirelessly until his death at age 93, George Tabori (1914–2007) once claimed to be "the longest-serving theater-maker in the world," adding that he had no other home than the stage. This not only speaks to an obsession with theater but also reflects the traumatic history of the twentieth century: Tabori's father was murdered in Auschwitz; his mother narrowly escaped deportation. Born in Budapest to a family of Jewish descent, Tabori spent much of his adult life in Britain and the United States before moving to Germany in 1969. It was there that he had his greatest successes as a playwright and director, most notably with productions of his Holocaust plays The Cannibals (1968/69), My Mother's Courage (1979), Jubilee (1983), and Mein Kampf (1987). As Martin Kagel writes in the insightful introduction to Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori, a collection co-edited with David Z. Saltz, these plays and productions introduced a new model of Holocaust theater. It was distinct from "sentimental humanism," psychological realism, and documentary approaches. Instead, Tabori invested in transgressive humor, metatheatrical reflection, an unusual focus on the victim-perpetrator relationship, and "the authenticity of the theatrical performance" (14). This does not refer to a realistic mode of representing history but means an emphasis on the experiential dimension of performance, a disruption of representation through visceral moments of ritual, laughter, embarrassment, and shock. "Memory? No! Experience" is the apt title of Alice Le [End Page 505] Trionnaire-Bolterauer's chapter in the collection (50–64). For Tabori, "true memory" was only possible through reliving the past "with skin, nose, tongue, buttocks, feet, and belly," as he wrote in his Shylock Improvisations (1978). In the eighties and nineties, Tabori was a towering figure in German theater. Academic studies of his work, such as Anat Feinberg's seminal Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori (1999), brought his unique memory theater to the attention of an international audience. In her opening chapter for Open Wounds, Feinberg revisits some of the material from the earlier book. Like Kagel's introduction, her contribution serves an important function for the collection. Tabori's work is less well known today than it was twenty years ago: many readers will need the overview given by Feinberg and Kagel, especially since the book's primary focus, as per its subtitle, is on "the legacy of George Tabori." While it is easy to identify his influences—including Brecht, Beckett, Kafka, Open Theater, and Gestalt therapy—the question of Tabori's legacy is extremely complex. It would be difficult to list artists who have followed directly in his footsteps, and Open Wounds wisely makes no attempt to do so. It often seeks legacy, as Jack Davis writes in a chapter on post-dramatic theater, "not through a direct line of influence but through a set of transposed and transformed concerns," in his case about "animals, animality, and the victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust" (127). Others focus on the "legacy of the performative body" (Johanna Öttl), "pained laughter" in Holocaust musicals (Barbara Wallace Grossman), and the question of "ethical witnessing" (Rebecca Rovit). This approach to legacy via thematic and conceptual concerns can lead to excellent insights. Peter Höyng's chapter, for instance, argues convincingly why Urs Odermatt's 2009 film adaptation of Mein Kampf fails Tabori's legacy. It "voids" the theater-maker's dramaturgical principles by attempting to reconcile the play's provocative and farcical plot—which imagines a friendship between the young Hitler and his Jewish roommate Shlomo Herzl—with a "historically accurate narrative" (162), thereby losing the transgressive potential of Tabori's taboo-breaking humor. Other chapters move further away from Tabori. Freddie Rokem provides an original and thought-provoking analysis of theater that self-reflexively recycles its own history, including—but by no means focused on...