THE CANNIBALS

Play by George Tabori, 1974

The inception of George Tabori's first Holocaust play, The Cannibals (1974), lay in his desire to cope with his father's murder at Auschwitz 25 years earlier. Tabori subverted certain conventions of traditional narrative form through Brechtian techniques, while at the same time he created a traditional hero based on his father, Cornelius.

The Cannibals is a reunion of sorts. Two survivors of Block 6, Auschwitz, along with ten men who are the sons of the other inmates who did not survive, are gathered together to reenact the events that preceded and precipitated the murder of their fathers. The two survivors are successful businessmen now. They inform the audience they are the only two survivors. The others enter, remove their everyday clothes, and put on camp uniforms. The actors are gradually revealed to be the sons playing their fathers. At various times during the play the sons stop the action to question the survivors about details of their fathers' appearance and behavior. Or they refer to their fathers in the third person. For example, when Uncle (Tabori's father) realizes that the others have killed Puffi, he chastises them: "See what you've done? You animals! (to audience ) He was shaking with indignation." The use of direct address to the audience and the deliberate "distancing" or interruption of audience identification with the character are techniques championed by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht , who had a profound effect on Tabori.

When one of the inmates is accidentally killed in a scuffle over a bread crust, someone suggests serving him up in a stew. Uncle considers this act to be against God's laws and convinces them to forego such an abomination, no matter how hungry they are. Later a Nazi guard arrives and forces them to either eat the stew or be sent to death immediately. Tabori took the literal fact that often prisoners could only survive at the expense of others and incorporated it into a stage metaphor that allows the audience to witness how the characters arrive at their choices. The death camp slogan "One man's death is another man's bread" becomes literally and horribly true onstage.

The play's plot involves the argument "to eat or not to eat." Uncle is the moral leader whose gesture of resistance, of not eating, is portrayed in a positive light. Along the way we learn that he also hid a knife that was to be used to resist during their deportation to Auschwitz. Some critics have argued that Uncle's passivity is critiqued in the play, but overall Uncle embodies a traditional hero. This portrayal is in sharp contrast to Tabori's My Mother's Courage, in which he dramatized his mother's escape from Auschwitz and deliberately deconstructed traditional notions of heroism.

Although the play's premise is serious, Tabori sometimes has been criticized because of his style, which includes black humor, song, and dance, along with hints of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka and other absurdist elements. The play is a staging of remembrance—the sons are trying to understand their fathers' pasts by embodying them. But Tabori insisted on "mixing the celestial and the excremental," as he put it. For example, at one point, while lamenting their starvation and trying to justify eating their comrade, the inmates burst into "Yes, We Have No Bananas."

Jewish and Christian symbolism also inform Tabori's Holocaust plays. In The Cannibals the ritual meal is referred to as a "black mass," with 12 diners, reminiscent of the 12 apostles at the Last Supper and the Twelve Tribes of Israel. In the end only two eat, along with the Nazi guard, who turns out to be not him, but his son, who also questions his father's behavior during the war.

The play premiered during the late 1960s, a time in Germany when the next generation was coming of age, filled with questions about the past their parents wanted to forget. The trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt (1963-65), the premieres of Rolf Hochhuth 's The Deputy (1963) and Peter Weiss 's The Investigation (1965), and the student revolts of 1968 all led to a breakdown of the silence surrounding the Nazi era. Thus, the time was ripe for this play, whose impetus was the struggle of the grown child (Tabori) to deal with the past. The character of the Nazi guard played by his son also articulated the frustrated accusations of the postwar generation in direct conflict with the often desperate defensiveness of those who survived. When Tabori came from New York to Berlin to produce what he called his "horror farce," he wrote in the program notes that sentimentality is an insult to the dead because "the event is beyond all tears." In Tabori's Holocaust plays the tragedy of the Holocaust did not preclude his use of comic irony to shock and confront his audience.

—Susan Russell