The Investigation (play)
Encyclopedia
The Investigation is a play by Peter Weiss
written in 1965 which depicts the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials
of 1963-1965. It premiered on October 19, 1965 on stages in fourteen West
and East German cities and at the Royal Shakespeare Company
in London
. It carries the subtitle "Oratorio in 11 Cantos". Weiss was an observer at the trials and developed the play partially from the reports of Bernd Naumann.
's Divine Comedy. The three-part theater project was supposed to include the three realms of Paradise
, Hell
, and Purgatory
. In an inversion of Dante's beliefs, The Investigation was supposed to correspond to the "Paradise" and yet be a place of despair for its victims. Inferno, written in 1964 but first published in 2003 as part of Weiss' estate, described the netherworld in its title. Due to the historical significance of the Auschwitz Trial, the Divine Comedy project was shelved, and the first third was published separately as The Investigation.
s". These are arranged by theme and depict the path of the victims from the ramp upon arrival at Auschwitz all the way to the furnaces, so that ever more gruesome aspects of the anonymous genocide are described. Weiss deliberately avoided embellishing elements. The stage is supposed to depict only a bald courtroom and every distraction from the witness reports are to be avoided.
In the cantos, the author lets the fact-rich statements of the anonymous witnesses stand against the named defendants and former SS
concentration camp guards. Unlike at the historical trial, only eighteen defendants stand before the court. The statements of several hundred witnesses at the actual trials are summarized in the play in the fictional but representative Witnesses 1-9. Two witnesses stand on the side of the defendants, the others are former prisoners, including two women. By anonymizing the witnesses, Weiss wanted to show that the names of the victims in Auschwitz eventually give way to just a number.
The witnesses explain the atrocities committed at the concentration camp to the audience. Weiss sets the statements of the perpetrators, witnesses, and judges against each other so that the contradictions in the statments of the perpetrators are revealed. The open ending of the play corresponds to the author's intention to focus on the social responsibility of the individual even in a dictatorship.
style and has no punctuation at all. The past is recapitulated factually and soberly, without emotion. The alienation effect
is used to achieve an intensified dramatic effect on the the viewer. The rhythm of the utterances of the figures works towards the same goal. As part of the goal of universalization, the word "Jew" is not used in the entire play.
The defendants use a number of strategies to exonerate themselves by minimizing, denying, or justifying their actions:
Few of the defendants acknowledge their guilt. Witnesses 1 and 2 are primarily apologetic. Weiss uses this to illustrate the complex of "second guilt," a concept which Ralph Giordano
brought up in his book The Second Guilt and the Burden of Being German. Giordano argued that in their failure to acknowledge and address the collective crimes of the Nazi era, contemporaries of the Third Reich after 1945 brought upon themselves a "second guilt," distinct from the guilt associated with the crimes themselves.
during the 1965/1966 season. Nevertheless, the script, which had been published in its entirety in the two months prior to the debut, among other places in the theater magazine "Theater heute," attracted multiple attacks. Theater critic Joachim Kaiser criticized the piece for robbing the audience of its freedom of interpretation. The legitimacy of the aesthetic technique chosen by Weiss was debated in the press, on the radio, and in three panel debates in October and November of 1965 in Stuttgart
, Munich
, and East Berlin
.
In the debate about a suitable staging concept, two productions in the multiple-stage debut stand out. Erwin Piscator
's West Berlin staging at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin used an identification approach where the witness box represented an extension of the auditorium. Piscator let the audience look out at the trial and the defendants from the perspective of the survivors. Peter Palitzsch's production at the Staatstheater Stuttgart
pursued an anti-identification conception with regular roll-switching by all the actors. The roles of the perpetrators and the victims were thereby depicted as basically the same. From 1965 to 1967 theaters in Amsterdam, Moscow, New York, Prague, Stockholm, and Warsaw added the play to their schedules.
The international productions of The Investigation display a great conceptual diversity, ranging from a representational play to scene reading to concert performances of the oratorios. After a twelve-year break, the play was brought back in 1979 in a provocative comedy-style production authorized by Weiss in the Moers
Castle Theater directed by Thomas Schulte-Michels. In 1998, conceptual artist Jochen Gerz staged the play interactively with 500 players on three Berlin stages. The Democratic Republic of Congo-based theater group Urwintore, which is made up of survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, have put on the play in several cities across Africa, Europe, and the United States.
Peter Weiss
Peter Ulrich Weiss was a German writer, painter, and artist of adopted Swedish nationality. He is particularly known for his plays Marat/Sade and The Investigation and his novel The Aesthetics of Resistance....
written in 1965 which depicts the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials
Frankfurt Auschwitz trials
The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, known in German as der Auschwitz-Prozess or der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, was a series of trials running from December 20, 1963 to August 10, 1965, charging 22 defendants under German penal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the...
of 1963-1965. It premiered on October 19, 1965 on stages in fourteen West
West Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
and East German cities and at the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. It carries the subtitle "Oratorio in 11 Cantos". Weiss was an observer at the trials and developed the play partially from the reports of Bernd Naumann.
The World-Theater Project
The Investigation was originally supposed to be part of a larger "World-Theater Project" which was to follow the structure of Dante AlighieriDante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
's Divine Comedy. The three-part theater project was supposed to include the three realms of Paradise
Paradise
Paradise is a place in which existence is positive, harmonious and timeless. It is conceptually a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization, and in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, but it is not necessarily a land of luxury and...
, Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
, and Purgatory
Purgatory
Purgatory is the condition or process of purification or temporary punishment in which, it is believed, the souls of those who die in a state of grace are made ready for Heaven...
. In an inversion of Dante's beliefs, The Investigation was supposed to correspond to the "Paradise" and yet be a place of despair for its victims. Inferno, written in 1964 but first published in 2003 as part of Weiss' estate, described the netherworld in its title. Due to the historical significance of the Auschwitz Trial, the Divine Comedy project was shelved, and the first third was published separately as The Investigation.
Content and Structure
The Investigation is divided into eleven "cantoCanto
The canto is a principal form of division in a long poem, especially the epic. The word comes from Italian, meaning "song" or singing. Famous examples of epic poetry which employ the canto division are Lord Byron's Don Juan, Valmiki's Ramayana , Dante's The Divine Comedy , and Ezra Pound's The...
s". These are arranged by theme and depict the path of the victims from the ramp upon arrival at Auschwitz all the way to the furnaces, so that ever more gruesome aspects of the anonymous genocide are described. Weiss deliberately avoided embellishing elements. The stage is supposed to depict only a bald courtroom and every distraction from the witness reports are to be avoided.
In the cantos, the author lets the fact-rich statements of the anonymous witnesses stand against the named defendants and former SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
concentration camp guards. Unlike at the historical trial, only eighteen defendants stand before the court. The statements of several hundred witnesses at the actual trials are summarized in the play in the fictional but representative Witnesses 1-9. Two witnesses stand on the side of the defendants, the others are former prisoners, including two women. By anonymizing the witnesses, Weiss wanted to show that the names of the victims in Auschwitz eventually give way to just a number.
The witnesses explain the atrocities committed at the concentration camp to the audience. Weiss sets the statements of the perpetrators, witnesses, and judges against each other so that the contradictions in the statments of the perpetrators are revealed. The open ending of the play corresponds to the author's intention to focus on the social responsibility of the individual even in a dictatorship.
Linguistic Style and Rhetoric of Exoneration
The play consists of clear, straightforward sentence structures and a strict parataxicalParataxis
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions...
style and has no punctuation at all. The past is recapitulated factually and soberly, without emotion. The alienation effect
Alienation effect
The distancing effect, commonly mistranslated as the alienation effect , is a performing arts concept coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht "which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a...
is used to achieve an intensified dramatic effect on the the viewer. The rhythm of the utterances of the figures works towards the same goal. As part of the goal of universalization, the word "Jew" is not used in the entire play.
The defendants use a number of strategies to exonerate themselves by minimizing, denying, or justifying their actions:
- discrediting the witnesses or prosecutors
- presenting a self-image as a victim
- relying on the former legal and value system and the superior ordersSuperior OrdersSuperior orders is a plea in a court of law that a soldier not be held guilty for actions which were ordered by a superior office...
defense, the general acceptance and similar actions of others - denial of guilt and downplaying of their own roles
- evasive answers, claiming lack of knowledge
- evidence of "successful rehabilitation" since 1945,
- pleading the statute of limitationsStatute of limitationsA statute of limitations is an enactment in a common law legal system that sets the maximum time after an event that legal proceedings based on that event may be initiated...
Few of the defendants acknowledge their guilt. Witnesses 1 and 2 are primarily apologetic. Weiss uses this to illustrate the complex of "second guilt," a concept which Ralph Giordano
Ralph Giordano (writer)
Ralph Giordano is a German writer and publicist.Giordano was born to a Sicilian father and a Jewish mother....
brought up in his book The Second Guilt and the Burden of Being German. Giordano argued that in their failure to acknowledge and address the collective crimes of the Nazi era, contemporaries of the Third Reich after 1945 brought upon themselves a "second guilt," distinct from the guilt associated with the crimes themselves.
Reception and Criticism
With twelve productions altogether, The Investigation was the most played contemporary piece in West GermanyWest Germany
West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....
during the 1965/1966 season. Nevertheless, the script, which had been published in its entirety in the two months prior to the debut, among other places in the theater magazine "Theater heute," attracted multiple attacks. Theater critic Joachim Kaiser criticized the piece for robbing the audience of its freedom of interpretation. The legitimacy of the aesthetic technique chosen by Weiss was debated in the press, on the radio, and in three panel debates in October and November of 1965 in Stuttgart
Stuttgart
Stuttgart is the capital of the state of Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. The sixth-largest city in Germany, Stuttgart has a population of 600,038 while the metropolitan area has a population of 5.3 million ....
, Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, and East Berlin
East Berlin
East Berlin was the name given to the eastern part of Berlin between 1949 and 1990. It consisted of the Soviet sector of Berlin that was established in 1945. The American, British and French sectors became West Berlin, a part strongly associated with West Germany but a free city...
.
In the debate about a suitable staging concept, two productions in the multiple-stage debut stand out. Erwin Piscator
Erwin Piscator
Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator was a German theatre director and producer and, with Bertolt Brecht, the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content of drama, rather than its emotional manipulation of the audience or on the production's formal...
's West Berlin staging at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin used an identification approach where the witness box represented an extension of the auditorium. Piscator let the audience look out at the trial and the defendants from the perspective of the survivors. Peter Palitzsch's production at the Staatstheater Stuttgart
Staatstheater Stuttgart
The Staatstheater Stuttgart ' is an opera house in Stuttgart, Germany. It is also known locally as the Grosses Haus, having been the larger of two theatres of the former Königliche Hoftheater....
pursued an anti-identification conception with regular roll-switching by all the actors. The roles of the perpetrators and the victims were thereby depicted as basically the same. From 1965 to 1967 theaters in Amsterdam, Moscow, New York, Prague, Stockholm, and Warsaw added the play to their schedules.
The international productions of The Investigation display a great conceptual diversity, ranging from a representational play to scene reading to concert performances of the oratorios. After a twelve-year break, the play was brought back in 1979 in a provocative comedy-style production authorized by Weiss in the Moers
Moers
Moers is a German city on the left bank of the Rhine. Moers belongs to the district of Wesel...
Castle Theater directed by Thomas Schulte-Michels. In 1998, conceptual artist Jochen Gerz staged the play interactively with 500 players on three Berlin stages. The Democratic Republic of Congo-based theater group Urwintore, which is made up of survivors of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, have put on the play in several cities across Africa, Europe, and the United States.
Further reading
- Cohen, Robert. "The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss's The Investigaiton and Its Critics." History and Memory, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall 1998), pp 43-67. Indiana University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25681027
- Schlunk, Jürgen. "Auschwitz and Its Function in Peter Weiss's Search for Identity." German Studies Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb. 1987), pp. 11-30. German Studies Association. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1430441