George Tabori

• Born: May 24, 1914
• Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
• Died: July 23, 2007
• Place of death: Berlin, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Although George Tabori gained the greater part of his fame in the United States as the writer of award-winning dramatic screenplays, he originally was lauded (particularly in European literary circles) as the writer of such critically acclaimed novels as Original Sin (1947). Tabori’s novels Beneath the Stone (1945) and The Caravan Passes (1951), for example, preceded his earliest drama, Flight into Egypt (1952), and deal almost exclusively with the philosophical contemplation of evil. On the other hand, later novels such as The Journey: A Confession (1958) and the memoirMy Mother’s Courage (1979) tend to focus on personal issues such as love and family in the face of inhumanity. Tabori’s plays were the primary focus of his career, although such works as Frohes Fest (1981), for which he both wrote the screenplay and directed the film, show his extensive range beyond the theatrical drama.

Achievements

Resembling in many ways his mentor, Bertolt Brecht, George Tabori spent decades developing his skills as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and essayist. Given his literary zeal, then, it is not surprising that he was honored for his contributions to the areas of theater, screen, and text by a number of wide-ranging awards. In 1969, Tabori won the Best Foreign Film award. In 1981, Frohes Fest, a film that he directed and for which he wrote the screenplay, received the International Filmfest Mannheim-Heidelberg Grand Prize. In 1992, he was awarded the George Büchner Prize for Literature, and, perhaps most remarkably, given his background as one of the last surviving witnesses to the Holocaust, was extended honorary Austrian citizenship. These awards, however, do not fully demonstrate the esteem in which Tabori is held by European audiences. Despite the tragedies of his own life, Tabori’s writings unflinchingly take on the most difficult of topics—death, hatred, and personal moral responsibility—with great integrity and honesty.

Biography

The son of journalist Kornel (Cornelius) Tabori and Elsa Ziffer, George Tabori was born May 24, 1914, in Budapest, Hungary, and raised in a Jewish, though secular, family. Coming of age during the nascence of the Nazi Party in Europe, Tabori completed high school in 1932 and then traveled to Berlin, where he worked in a hotel for two years. He returned afterward to Budapest but decided that his interest in writing and journalism would be more easily pursued in London.

Tabori spent the war years serving as a journalist and war correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British army, not realizing that his own life would be irrevocably altered by the rise of German leader Adolf Hitler. As Tabori would later describe in his moving memoir, My Mother’s Courage, his father, Kornel Tabori, was deported to Auschwitz, and his mother, Elsa Ziffer, only barely escaped the same fate. Although George Tabori was safe in London, he would be haunted ever after by his father’s 1944 murder—a scenario that would be played out endlessly in his tragedy The Cannibals.

After the war, Tabori emigrated to the United States, where he began writing novels and adapting plays for the Hollywood film industry. Although he was married twice in the United States (first to Hanna Freund, whom he divorced in 1954, and then to the actress Viveca Lindfors, whom he divorced in 1970) and had three children (John, Lena, and Kristoffer, both by his second marriage), he never truly felt at home in America. Therefore, it was no coincidence that when a German theater agent offered to stage The Cannibals, a play set in a concentration camp, in Europe, Tabori found the idea to be too compelling to ignore. Moving in 1968 to Germany, he pursued an extensive career in the theatre, finally culminating in the acquisition of his own drama company in Vienna. Tabori died in Berlin in 2007, at the age of 93. He was survived by his children and his fourth wife, actress Ursula Hopfner.

Analysis

As one of last survivors of a terrible, but distant era, George Tabori imbues all of his dramatic works with the underlying fear that the horrors of the past, however many years distant, simply lie sleeping beneath the surface of “civilized” society and may, once again, rise up to destroy humanity. Tabori implicitly asks: Who and what are determining how Jews should lead their lives? The Cannibals, Mein Kampf: A Farce, and My Mother’s Courage, all provide examples of how individuals can be reduced to mere symbols or stereotypes by the circumstances of their lives while still managing, through adherence to inner principles and agapic love, to retain their dignity. The true evil of the Holocaust seems to be that the choice between life and death can be reduced to a mere matter of expediency should one’s humanity cease to play a role in one’s perceptions of others. On the other hand, it is also the refusal of an individual to allow his or her dignity to be stripped from him or her that, paradoxically, allows that individual to remain human.

The Cannibals

In The Cannibals, a play Tabori dedicated to his father, the playwright examines the extent to which individuals can be forced to abandon even the most basic elements of morality. When Puffi, an inmate of a concentration camp, is accidentally killed, his fellow prisoners are ordered by the sadistic Capo to eat his body or be similarly killed. Stripped of their individuality by their shaved heads and identical clothing, the concentration camp inmates are denied any identity beyond that of their individual stereotypes; one is a gypsy, one is a homosexual, one is a Jew, and so forth—a condition that is intended to encourage distance and vicious competition between the inmates. However, even under such horrific conditions as starvation and sadistic coercion, most of the prisoners still refuse to yield their humanity—only two prisoners choose to eat their former companion. Even though this choice allows the two prisoners to survive the death camp and, eventually, become prosperous American citizens, the loss of their dignity haunts them far more intensely than the pain of loss suffered by the children and grandchildren of those inmates who refused to defile themselves.

The central character, “Uncle Tabori” (clearly a reference to Tabori’s father Kornel), is a voice for morality whose vivid recollection of a dream stirs most of the other prisoners to retain the dignity refused them by their German captors. Even when Uncle Tabori is stripped of his clothing (the last, tattered vestiges of “society” clinging to his wasted body) and led, naked, to his execution, the old man refuses to yield. Only the outer trapping of his humanity can be taken from him—not his inner soul. Following Jewish ritual, he tries to gather together a “minyan” of prisoners to jointly resist defilement. Even in death, he remains the noble leader of his group.

Mein Kampf: A Farce

In Mein Kampf, another of Tabori’s Holocaust plays, Herzl, a poor Austrian Jew, encounters a very young, impoverished Hitler in a flophouse in Vienna. Herzl, too compassionate to accept his new “friend’s” impending death without feeling guilt too intense to bear, finds himself confronted with a choice of saving Hitler, fully aware that if he does he will thus be responsible for the Holocaust. Herzl feels that, to remain human, he must have a respect for life that encompasses even the life of a madman like Hitler. He also hopes, in vain, that his act of kindness may motivate the young Hitler to pursue different avenues of greatness beyond those of the political sphere. The irony, that a single act of love can be the cause of great evil, is a quandary that never fully resolves in Tabori’s work. Kindness, love, and respect, although frequently demonstrated in Tabori’s plays, do not have reliably positive consequences for those who practice them—in fact, the practice of virtue seems to condemn the practitioner to certain death as often as it saves him or her. The sole purpose, Tabori seems to suggest, in practicing virtue, is to reinforce the nobler aspects of one’s character—not to expect any kind of external-world benefit.

My Mother’s Courage

In most of his plays, Tabori seems to suggest that it is comic resistance in the face of death that makes Jews “Jewish.” If Tabori has an answer to the Jewish question, then it is in his insistence on keeping Jewish humor alive and transcending the absurd with dignity. This transcendence is perhaps what makes My Mother’s Courage so unique. Of all Tabori’s plays, My Mother’s Courage is undoubtedly the most poetic and most optimistic, perhaps because it embodies all the elements that Tabori remembered existing in his real-life relationship with his mother. The play tells a personal, as well as universal, story about how it is the quirks and accidents of life that affect people far more than any real intent on their part.

My Mother’s Courage is Tabori’s eloquent depiction of how an ordinary Jewish housewife—his own mother, in fact—accidentally survives a deportation to Auschwitz by appealing to the quirky nature of an ordinarily vicious Nazi officer. She does not expect to be called heroic, although her solemn protection of a young, raped girl also caught up in the violence of a forced deportation might make her seem so, and she does not attribute her escape from death to anything but blind luck (the true account of Elsa Ziffer’s survival, in fact). Her son, Tabori the playwright and Tabori the character, wants the world to remember her story about her chance encounter with a German officer because of the sheer absurdity of it—it is not kindness but perverse luck that causes the Nazi officer to let Tabori’s mother live. Understanding that it is this very absurdity that rules life is what allows Jews to carry on in the midst of madness—that it is the humor inherent in the absurd that encourages survival.

With its obvious reference to Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (pr. 1941, pb. 1949; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941), Tabori portrays a mother who is honest and naïve—the exact opposite of Brecht’s tragic camp-follower. The mother and son in this play gain a measure of pleasure and dignity by maintaining their honesty and integrity in the face of certain death. As in Mein Kampf, the pursuit of virtue is a worthy goal unto itself. In this play, fortunately, such gentle idealism does not also end up costing lives. Perhaps it is this gentleness, in fact, that makes My Mother’s Courage the most popular of Tabori’s plays.

Bibliography

Feinberg, Anat. Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Feinberg provides readers the first English-language study of the dramatic works of Tabori. Feinberg states that Tabori, like his predecessor, Brecht, tries to embody “the ideal union” of playwright, director, theater manager, and actor. He also suggests that Tabori rejects sentimentality and philosemitism in his plays, preferring stark realism in both the depictions of scenes and the frailties of the characters. Feinberg does not address the autobiographical elements of Tabori’s works because he sees them as the most commonly addressed issues in his plays.

Garforth, Julian A. “George Tabori’s Bare Essentials: A Perspective on Beckett Staging in Germany.” Forum Modernes Theater (Tubingen) 9, no. 1 (1994): 59-75. A great deal has been written about Tabori’s admiration for the works of Brecht. Garforth focuses instead on another of Tabori’s inspirations, Samuel Beckett, and how the playwright has chosen to adapt absurdist motifs in general and Beckett’s themes in particular within his own works. Tabori’s The 25th Hour is presented as having classic absurdist traits—death counterbalanced with zany humor, farce, wit, and slapstick.

Gottfried, Martin. “Theatre: Merchant of Venice in Munich.” Saturday Review 6:3 (1979): 36. Gottfried describes Tabori’s “improvisations” on William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The rereading of this classic play for the modern stage, including references to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and brownshirts, particularly emphasizes the absurdly overdrawn hatred that Shakespeare has for his Jewish villain. Shylock’s character, according to Tabori’s vision, becomes a symbolic thread connecting ancient anti-Semitism with its modern counterpart.

Zipes, Jack. “George Tabori and the Jewish Question,” Theater 29, no. 2 (1999): 98-107. Zipes analyzes several of George Tabori’s dramas in the light not of their autobiographical or historical significance but of their universal depiction of the nature of identity. Zipes asserts that Tabori’s primary purpose in writing such works as The Cannibals is not to horrify or disgust audiences but to determine what it means to be Jewish today or what are the politics of identity, especially when one is not entirely sure of the implications of not knowing one’s own identity.