This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori’s work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies.

Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori’s theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori’s postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays’ relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.

Martin Kagel is A. G. Steer Professor of German and Associate Dean in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia.

David Z. Saltz is Professor and Head in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia.

Contents
 
        Acknowledgements
 
        Introduction
               Martin Kagel
 
I. Tabori Redux
 
        “Macht kein Theater”: George Tabori Revisited
               Anat Feinberg
 
II. Performance
 
        Digesting Tabori: On the Reception of a Jewish Playwright in Italy
               Laura Forti
 
        Memory? No! Experience: Sacrificial Ritual in George Tabori’s Theatre
               Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer
 
        Performance Illuminations: George Tabori and the Bildraum of the Shoah
               Klaus van den Berg
 
III. Ethics and Aesthetics
 
        Parsing the Jewish Question: Ethical Witnessing, Tabori, and the Theatrical
        Representation of the Holocaust
               Rebecca Rovit
 
        From Tragedy to Farce: Tropes of Reappearance on the Stages of History
        and the Theatre
               Freddie Rokem
 
        Who’s Afraid of Kommissar Rex? Postdramatic Ecology and the Theatre
        of the Holocaust in René Pollesch’s Cappuccetto Rosso
               Jack Davis
 
IV. Holocaust Representation and Popular Culture
 
        On the Legacy of the Performative Body: George Tabori and Robert Schindel
               Johanna Öttl
 
        A Tale of Fruitful Failure: Urs Odermatt’s Film Adaptation of George Tabori’s
        Mein Kampf as a Guide to Five Maxims of Tabori’s Holocaust Theatre
               Peter Höyng
 
        “Painted Laughter”: Cabaret, The People in the Picture, and the Paradox
        of Holocaust Musicals
               Barbara Wallace Grossman
 
Contributors
 
Index