Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Edited by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 208 pages + 4 images. $85.00 hardcover, $69.95 e-book.

In the history of Holocaust theater, the Hungarian-born playwright George Tabori (1914–2007) receives short shrift, at least compared to several of his better-known contemporaries. To be sure, audiences and critics were shocked and disgusted at the gruesome anthropophagy of Tabori’s The Cannibals (1968), a play in which Holocaust survivors and descendants of inmates ceremonially reenact an episode of cannibalism from the camps. Even so, the controversy was never as wide-ranging as the uproars triggered by Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy (1963) or Peter Weiss’s The Investigation (1965). Nor have other Holocaust-related plays by Tabori such as My Mother’s Courage (1979) or Mein Kampf (1987) ever achieved the same degree of renown in the canon of Holocaust theater. As Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz’s edited collection Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori shows, however, this is an unfortunate oversight, because Tabori’s plays engaged with the history, memory, and mediatization of the Holocaust in ways that are by turns creative, provocative, illuminating, experimental, improvisational, disturbing, and funny.

Kagel and Saltz’s credentials for publishing this volume are impeccable. Kagel is well-established as one of the world’s leading experts on George Tabori, while Saltz has published impactful work about modernist theater, performance theory, and digital media. Open Wounds emerged from the 2015 conference “George Tabori and the Theater of the Holocaust” at the University of Georgia, where Kagel and Saltz both teach. Open Wounds consists of Kagel’s introduction and ten additional essays divided into four sections. The first section, consisting solely of an essay by Anat Feinberg, the author of the seminal 1999 monograph on Tabori, combines personal reminiscences about Tabori with critical analysis to tease out the broader contours of Tabori’s dramaturgical practice. The other three sections, each containing three essays, address “Performance,” “Ethics and Aesthetics,” and “Holocaust Representation and Popular Culture.”

The volume’s first text, Kagel’s magisterial introduction, will be especially useful for readers because it elegantly surveys Tabori’s many facets and identities as a Hungarian, German, Jew, refugee, screenwriter, actor, and dramatist, among others. As Kagel historicizes Tabori’s life and work, he introduces important themes that subsequent essays develop, notably Tabori’s debts to Bertolt Brecht, a fellow exile whom he met in 1947. Although Tabori later departed from Brecht’s theatrical models, he credited Brecht as a formative influence. The Brechtian fingerprint is significant because it lets one productively entertain the counterfactual of how Brecht, who never dedicated a full-length play to examining the Holocaust, might have done so. As Kagel succinctly argues, “[i]n adapting Brecht’s non-mimetic techniques to the stage, Tabori extended Brecht’s influence into this realm” (3). Alongside Tabori’s relationship to Brecht, other key themes that Kagel introduces include Tabori’s refusal to buy into easy binaries of perpetrator versus victim, the trauma of his father Cornelius Tabori’s murder in Auschwitz, and his understanding of the theater as a space for confrontation and contest. Using the phrase that gives the book its title, Kagel writes that Tabori “never shied away from expressing uncomfortable political opinions, and his productions were always good for a scandal, highlighting open wounds in American and German society” (9).

As typically happens with edited volumes, the ten chapters vary in quality, but most are quite solid and tightly focused on Tabori. While a short review cannot do justice to all of them, several particularly strong essays merit note. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer examines the central role of violence and sacrificial rituals in Tabori’s work, specifically in The Cannibals and The Goldberg-Variations (1991). She concludes that “[t]hrough violence Tabori intends to elucidate the critical function of theater in the commemoration of the Holocaust on stage,” adding that, through ritual, “Tabori looks to assert the cathartic function of theater in a mythical ceremony that both mocks the sacred and retains some of its features” (54). Another excellent chapter, Peter Höyng’s analysis of Swiss director Urs Odermatt’s 2009 film adaptation of Tabori’s Mein Kampf, interprets the film as a “fruitful failure” that does not do justice to the play. Yet precisely because Odermatt “voids Tabori’s theatrical grammar” (155), his film “holds the key to better understanding Tabori’s theatrical whimsy” (155). Höyng then offers five maxims concerning Tabori’s rejection of master historical narratives and his embrace of counternarratives and traditions of Jewish humor. Höyng argues that these ideas undergird Mein Kampf and other Tabori plays, but that Odermatt’s adaptation frequently misses the point. Precisely through their failure, they highlight these main contours of Tabori’s work.

One of the most interesting and theoretically challenging chapters in Open Wounds is by Klaus van den Berg, who interprets Tabori through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s notion of Bildraum. Bildraum literally means image space, but in Benjamin’s theorization, it refers to a mode of cognition born of modernity’s shocks. Van den Berg argues that Benjamin’s concept overlaps with Tabori’s image of himself as a Spielmacher (play maker), a soccer term that suggests he did not so much direct actors as create Spielraum for them—room in which to play. This Spielraum/Bildraum becomes the setting for what van den Berg terms “performance illuminations,” flashes of understanding and revolutionary experience that conjoin “physical, psychological, and historical space” (69). This setting aims to establish “a visual passage between past and present and makes ideas legible on stage” (70). Van den Berg then applies this critical model to Tabori’s two productions of The Merchant of Venice, which he reads as responses to the Holocaust. We learn that, before Munich authorities vetoed the idea, Tabori even wanted his 1978 production of the play to be performed in Dachau in a staging whereby audience members and actors would be bussed together to the camp. These productions demonstrate how Tabori “advanced from modern director in the mimetic theater to a unique playmaker orchestrating the unfolding of memory and experience” (71).

Open Wounds has a few of the vices typical of edited scholarly collections, such as repetition of themes and minor inconsistencies. For instance, Tabori’s Kafka-inspired 1977 play Hungerkünstler, for which his cast prepared through a medically supervised fast for forty days, is translated in three different ways, as The Fasting Artists, The Hunger Artists, and The Hunger Artist. But these are not worth dwelling on because the book certainly has far more virtues. Foremost among them is its concision and clarity. In just 200 pages, the pieces of this scholarly mosaic construct a vivid picture of George Tabori’s many identities and the theoretical underpinnings of his theater. The introduction and ten essays, all scrupulously footnoted, typically number between 15 and 20 pages. This economy of prose makes them pedagogically useful for Holocaust studies, German studies, and theater courses, where George Tabori might yet receive the credit he is due.