The Theater Text Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen, by Peter Weiss (1965)
Based on material from the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial and written while it was still in progress, Peter Weiss’s theater text Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen (The Investigation. Oratorio in 11 Cantos) was first performed on October 19, 1965, in 15 simultaneous stage productions and scenic readings in various West and East German theaters.
Peter Weiss himself had repeatedly attended the trial as an observer, and he drew material from Bernd Naumann’s regular reports from the courtroom that appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as well as from other press coverage and extensive research of the literature on Auschwitz. Weiss had managed to emigrate from the Czechoslovak Republic to Sweden via Switzerland in January 1939, while friends who stayed behind in Prague were later killed at Auschwitz. He felt that he was an escapee who had also been destined for that place, and thus laden with an obligation, a responsibility, to remind people what had happened. “This debt could not be canceled, but it took on another form if one accepted responsibility on the artistic and moral levels.”[1]
Although Die Ermittlung follows the witness statements in the Auschwitz trial in some parts even in the phrasing, it is not bound to a theater tradition that places a kind of forensic investigation on the stage to arrive at a narrative establishment of the truth, ending in the solving of a case, as in Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug), nor would it be adequately described as documentary theater dealing with the Auschwitz trial. The 11 cantos in the form of testimonies–based on the topography of Auschwitz–describe the path from the ramp through various (killing) stations of the camp to the gas chambers in the concluding “Canto of the Fire Ovens.” All the places in the camp complex that are called to mind by the witnesses are located in the Auschwitz I main camp or in Birkenau (Auschwitz II).[2] The surrounding camps, including the Buna/Monowitz concentration camp, are invoked only as a backdrop where firms such as Krupp, Siemens, or I.G. Farben exploit prisoners as slave laborers; they do not appear as settings upon which the witnesses comment. They develop presence, however, just in the first cantos as one of the reasons for the camp’s existence. This is especially striking as Die Ermittlung to a large extent hides the sociocultural and ideological conditions in which Auschwitz originated, and there is no talk of anti-Semitism. Instead, the victims are referred to only as “the persecuted,” never, for example, as Jews and Jewesses or Sinti and Roma, racially persecuted groups. That could create the impression that they were primarily people who were persecuted for political reasons, who, moreover, would have been interchangeable in their positions as perpetrators and victims, as some lines of the piece suggest.[3] It is astonishing how eagerly this interpretation, only hinted at in the piece, was seized upon in the theater criticism of the day, for example, in the writing of Günther Rühle and Ernst Wendt, while simultaneously also avoiding any reference to Jews, for example. On the other hand, the contrast between perpetrators and victims, appearing in the form of speech acts, contributes structurally to the composition of Die Ermittlung.
Peter Weiss, in his shaping of the Auschwitz trial material with regard to social theory, adheres to an analysis of National Socialism as the ultimate form of capitalist supremacy, an idea dominant in Marxist theory since the 1930s. This lopsided emphasis on the politico-economic aspects of National Socialism results in a certain blindness to the historical distinctiveness of Auschwitz, particularly to the Nazis’ racial ideology and anti-Semitism.[4]
Only the material of the testimonies is drawn from the Auschwitz trial; about the course of the trial, the charges, or the sentencing, Die Ermittlung tells us nothing. The speaking voices are those of a judge, a prosecutor, a defense lawyer, 18 defendants, and 9 witnesses. Neither the members of the jury at the Auschwitz trial nor the public are represented on stage. While the witnesses, of whom two are witnesses for the defense, appear as representatives of the more than 300 witnesses in the trial, and over the course of the cantos each witness states several positions of the testimony, derived from various biographies, the defendants bear the names of 18 actual defendants in the Auschwitz trial. Their behavior, however, is so stereotyped—most notably, they are linked by their collective laughter at what is brought forward in the trial, frequently at the end of a canto—that they seem to be a group, “which knows it is in complete sympathy with the existing circumstances in the Federal Republic and gives assurances of an accounting with the past that really was no accounting at all.”[5]
The legal assessment of the quality of the testimonies, documents, or evidence plays no role in Die Ermittlung. Instead, the different forms of testimony are recast in a uniform, artless blank verse that shows no linguistic differences between the individual speech acts. “In Weiss’s work there is also no stumbling, no hesitating, no weeping, no shouting, no struggling for words. The witnesses who appear here are silent at most; at any rate, they all stick to the facts and keep it quite precise.”[6] What was brought forward in court in different statements and at different times in the trial is arranged thematically in separate cantos. Everything becomes oral testimony, and the witness statement on stage appears to be a concentrate of the varied forms of testimony at the trial. For example, a letter from I.G. Farben management about their good teamwork with the SS when building the plant at Auschwitz and deploying forced laborers appears in the following form:
Prosecuting Attorney:
The court has in its record
a letter which mentions
the happy and prosperous friendship
existing between your firm
and the camp administration
Among other things
the letter goes on to say
At dinner
we made further use of the occasion
to draw up measures
advantageous to the Buna Works
that relate to the merger
of the truly outstanding
operations of the camp[7]
Clearly recognizable is the transformation into a relatively matter-of-fact, uniform language devoid of punctuation marks; new sentences are distinguished only by a capital letter at the start of the line. The uniformity of the language indicates that this is not a documentation of the trial, but an oratorio, which was intended to form the Paradiso portion in Peter Weiss’s plan for a Divine Comedy dealing with this era,[8] thus the place where the decisive philosophical questions about human behavior are posed, albeit a Paradiso without transcendence and hope of redemption. In fact, the possibility of discerning some part of what cannot be represented[9] seems to exist only in the questioning of the witnesses’ memories. Only from the perspective of the survivors, of survival, can something be learned about the events in Auschwitz and about those murdered there. In its form of memory construction, which is also a commemoration of the dead, Die Ermittlung, in Burkhardt Lindner’s words, established a tie “to the tradition of memoria development, [a discipline of rhetoric] in which events are stored in the memory as past happenings. And this memoria development refers not to the trial, at least not primarily, but to Auschwitz itself.”[10]
(MN; transl. KL)