Wiedergutmachung im Programm

Examines over 80 German-language plays dealing with Jews and the Holocaust. In West Germany the Holocaust theme appeared in the mid-1950s in plays allowing the audience to identify with an individual Jewish victim or with a "good" self-sacrificing German. The documentary drama of the 1960s (e.g. by Hochhuth, Peter Weiss) attempted to correct this distortion and confront Germans with the facts of mass murder and German guilt. After a lull in the 1970s, the TV series "Holocaust" reawakened public interest and generated a new wave of dramas. Despite criticism of Israel, the taboo on negative characterization of Jews still holds. Fassbinder's "Garbage, the City and Death" was a radical break. In East Germany, Jews appeared in anti-fascist dramas between 1945-60 as one of many groups persecuted by the Nazis. Austrian drama was influenced by West German drama and went through similar stages, but with a tendency to allegorize Jewish characters. In the 1970s-80s Jews disappeared from Austrian drama. In Switzerland, the theme of the Jew as victim appears in Max Frisch's "Andorra". But the only dramatist to deal with his own country's ambivalence toward Holocaust refugees was Thomas Hürlimann in "Grossvater und Halbbruder" (1981). (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)