Introduction: Tabori, History, and the Holocaust

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE REMAINS a conundrum to some, an oxymoron to others. Can it at once give free rein to the imagination—as art presumably must do—and at the same time do historical justice to the genocide against the Jews? During the postwar period, when the Holocaust was as yet not well understood—and sometimes not even fully acknowledged—there was palpable anxiety about the role of art and its ability to represent what was to many unrepresentable. Art was frequently freighted with the responsibility of history (or historiography), at a time when there was widespread uncertainty about fixing the Holocaust within history. Like Bernhard Schlink's protagonist from Der Vorleser, the beleaguered Michael Berg, we were confronted with an impossible set of demands—above all to remember, and commemorate, what we can never really know or understand. It is not difficult to grasp, then, why no piece of Holocaust literature has ever been deemed wholly successful. George Tabori's The Cannibals (1968) is symptomatic of this dilemma.

The play attempts two apparently contradictory goals: the first, as many appreciative critics observe, is to “correct” or redirect a Holocaust discourse that was itself still in its infancy. By presenting a strikingly dissonant depiction of Jewish concentration-camp inmates—and thereby proudly breaking a taboo on the portrayal of victims—Tabori entered the field of Holocaust history, whether he intended to or not.