Heinar Kipphardt

• Born: March 8, 1922
• Birthplace: Heidersdorf, Germany
• Died: November 18, 1982
• Place of death: Munich, West Germany (now in Germany)

Other Literary Forms

Heinar Kipphardt’s popularity as a playwright is equally matched by his reputation as a director and as a freelance writer of principally prose works. His only novel, März (1976), and most of his short stories are characteristically in the documentary vein, as are a large majority of his plays. The adaptation, in prose, of his previously produced play Der Hund des Generals and the dramatic adaptation, März, ein Künstlerleben, of his earlier novel, März, attest the ability of Kipphardt as a narrator.

Kipphardt wrote one volume of poetry, Angelsbrucker Notizen (1977), and edited several volumes of preponderantly historical-documentary and critical essays. Kipphardt’s adaptation of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz’s Die Soldaten (1776; The Soldiers, 1972) not only proves Kipphardt’s unique skill in dealing with legal and military subject matter but also shows Kipphardt, the psychiatrist, as a master of the psychological study.

Achievements

Heinar Kipphardt’s reputation rests on his contributions to the so-called documentary theater . This new genre, still within the perimeters of conventional modern drama, constituted yet another new development in the series of renouvellements that German literature, in general, and German theater, in particular, experienced in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in the aftermath of World War II and the Nazi era.

A proponent of Marxist philosophy, Kipphardt constructed his works to meet the demands of political theater. His plays are based on historical materials, combining a documentary texture with a psychological probing of figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Adolf Eichmann. Kipphardt’s extensive psychiatric training provided him with the necessary insight to develop his characters fully.

Kipphardt began his career as a playwright in East Berlin with Shakespeare dringend gesucht, a mildly satiric play about the problems of a play reader in an East German theater. Although the play was a critique of narrow-minded Communist attitudes, lampooning the East German taste for socialist realist theater of the worst kind, it won for him, in 1953, the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic. Kipphardt was, at that time, the chief dramatist and director at the Deutsches Theater, where he remained until 1959. His play Die Stühle des Herrn Szmil created such an uproar among East German censors (who subsequently banned it) that Kipphardt was forced to leave East Germany, in 1960, for Munich, where he became a freelance writer. As it turned out, he remained in West Germany for the remainder of his career.

In 1962, Kipphardt was awarded the Schiller Memorial Prize, and In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer won for him the Gerhart Hauptmann Prize in 1964. It was first staged at Erwin Piscator’s Free People’s Theater in West Berlin in 1964 and played throughout West Germany before its arrival in New York in 1968, where it became one of the successes of the season. It was eventually performed as well in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and East Berlin. Kipphardt received the Adolf Grimme Prize in 1965, the Television Prize from the German Academy of Representational Arts in 1975, the Film Prize of the Society of German Doctors and the Prix Italia in 1976, and the Bremer Literature Prize in 1977.

Kipphardt’s greatest contribution to world drama is perhaps his true-to-life portrayal of soldiers, criminals, scientists, and businessmen, who reappear after World War II, recalling their experiences with stenographic precision in the form of trials, interrogations, and reminiscences. The documentary, quasi-political character of Kipphardt’s dramatic œuvre in no way diminishes the audience’s unabashed reaction of horror, consternation, and, frequently, pity.

Biography

Heinar Kipphardt was born in Upper Silesia. His father, a dentist, was an opponent of the Nazis and spent five years in a concentration camp at Buchenwald. In 1942, Kipphardt was drafted out of medical school to serve on the Russian front in the Wehrmacht panzer division, from which he is said to have deserted. He finally earned his medical degree at Düsseldorf in 1950 and became a staff psychiatrist at the Charité Neurological Clinic in East Berlin, also joining the Deutsches Theater as literary adviser.

Throughout the 1950’s, Kipphardt alternated between treating mentally ill individuals at the clinic and satirizing a morally ill society onstage. When his play Die Stühle des Herrn Szmil, an adaptation of the novel Dvenadtsat stuliev (1928; The Twelve Chairs, 1961) by the Russian comic writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeni Petrov, was banned by the state censor in 1959, he departed for West Germany, eventually settling in Munich, where he began writing the kind of hard-hitting documentary theater practiced by Rolf Hochhuth in Der Stellvertreter (1963; The Deputy, 1963). Kipphardt wrote Der Hund des Generals, about the inability of Germans to acknowledge the shameful past, in this style before writing In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Whatever emotions the play evoked in German audiences, in the United States it was recognized as having a direct bearing on the Vietnam War, organized opposition to which was then beginning. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, wrote Catharine Hughes in her book Plays, Politics, and Polemics (1973), “was easily one of the most significant American theatrical events of the sixties, even if it did require a European to confront us with ourselves.”

Kipphardt’s next drama, the teleplay Joel Brand: Die Geschichte eines Geschäfts (1964), was a documentary drama about the Hungarian Jew who was forced by the Nazis to negotiate a business deal involving the exchange of one million Hungarian Jewish lives for ten thousand British trucks. The British refused, and the Jews were killed.

While he was the chief dramatist at the Munich Kammerspiele, Kipphardt wrote Die Nacht in der Chef geschlachtet wurde, a satire about bourgeois West Germans; Die Soldaten, an adaptation of a play by the late eighteenth century Sturm und Drang dramatist Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz; and a novel, teleplay, and stage play about a schizophrenic poet named Alexander März.

Kipphardt owed much to Piscator’s example and influence, as he himself admitted. He refused to accept the label of “documentary theater,” claiming that, though a digest of the three thousand pages of the Oppenheimer hearings in the United States, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a true drama in its own right about the loyalties and individual responsibilities of the scientist in the nuclear age.

Kipphardt died in Munich at the age of sixty, during preparations for the production of his last play, Brother Eichmann, which was produced in 1983.

Analysis

Heinar Kipphardt was one of the foremost practitioners of the documentary drama, a style of playwriting popular in the 1960’s in which pieces of recorded history (transcripts, tapes, and publications) are adapted creatively to illuminate issues of social and moral concern. The author’s aim by dramatizing an event is clearly not to eradicate every social evil but rather to present it in minute detail, thereby provoking and challenging the audience to judge, deplore, and commiserate, whichever would come first as a natural reaction. Bertolt Brecht’s epic and moralizing theater without any doubt left its indelible mark on Kipphardt’s dramas, not so much influencing their structure or subject matter as perhaps shaping them in a uniquely Brechtian atmosphere of alienation (Verfremdung). Kipphardt’s Die Stühle des Herrn Szmil or Die Nacht in der Chef geschlachtet wurde could in no way affect the audience as, for example, the French comédie larmoyante did. In the face of these dramas, the audience remains dumbfounded but at the same time works itself into a rage that goes far beyond disbelief or amusement. Again, it is not only the sociopolitical content in Kipphardt’s plays that strikes the audience as unconventional, but also, and more important, the deceptively bland manner in which his issues are presented.

Kipphardt’s rather early confrontation with the theater of Socialist Realism (so aptly ridiculed in Shakespeare dringend gesucht) could very well have marked him for the remainder of his career. The sheer colorless atmosphere omnipresent in Socialist Realist theater and its influence on Kipphardt could in part account for the development of his dry, oftentimes flat style. This early development of an individual Kipphardtian style also included the element of psychoanalysis. A psychiatrist by profession, Kipphardt, as noted above, exercised the art of healing at the Charité Clinic in East Berlin, as well as the art of moralizing onstage. He was chief dramatist and director of the Deutsches Theater for nine years (1950-1959), a period that finally ended in disillusionment and defection to the West.

In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Artistically, though, this period was a turning point for Kipphardt, who shortly thereafter created In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, his most significant documentary drama. Originally planned as a radio play but revised by Kipphardt for stage production, it soon appeared, with spectacular success, in theaters in Berlin (produced by Piscator) and Munich and throughout West Germany. Other European capitals soon saw productions of the play, whose true-life hero, J. Robert Oppenheimer, threatened to sue the playwright.

The play is based on the 1954 hearings of the Atomic Energy Commission, after which Oppenheimer was branded as a security risk. Kipphardt’s dramatization is clearly critical of American policies; at one point in the play, Oppenheimer, not eager to develop the hydrogen bomb, dramatically explains that the Soviet Union has only two targets of value, Moscow and Leningrad, while the United States has fifty.

In the course of the play, the commission’s counsel and several hostile witnesses fight fiercely against Oppenheimer. Edward Teller appears as a somewhat friendly, if occasionally grouchy, mediator between the extremes. Senator Joseph McCarthy broods demoniacally over the play, prompting the thought that no dramatist as yet has presented a full and convincing picture of McCarthy in all his evil aspects.

In relation to Kipphardt’s play, the actual Oppenheimer objected to what he described as “improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved,” particularly referring to Kipphardt’s representation of Niels Bohr, who had died two years before the play’s premiere, as being opposed to the creation of the bomb at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer (who himself died not long after the controversy, in 1967) also stated that, contrary to the play, he was not opposed to the making of the original bomb. In a letter to Kipphardt, he recalled the atmosphere of the time: “You may have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden, and Tokyo. I have not.”

The truth is that Kipphardt, while preserving the original trial structure in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, condensed the three-thousand-page report on the proceedings of the Security Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, recorded in 1954, while reducing the number of witnesses from forty to six. He rewrote the dialogue here and there, added Oppenheimer’s monologue at the end, and polished some of the courtroom skirmishes to make them more theatrically effective. His most substantial departure from the documentary record—and it is admittedly a significant distortion—occurs in his presentation of Oppenheimer’s views, fully justifying the scientist’s rebuke.

In general, however, the play simply follows the historical record. Oppenheimer is accused of having been a Communist sympathizer, of endangering the security of the atom bomb project through his private and professional connections with communists and former communists, and of exposing the United States to the machinations of its enemies by deliberately slowing up work on the hydrogen bomb. He is found guilty on the latter count and forfeits his right of access to top-security scientific work.

Despite some stirring dramatic moments, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer is rather flat and dull. The author is hamstrung by the anonymity to which his factual material condemns him. Kipphardt’s play laboriously rehearses a debate in terms that are invalid by virtue of the existence of Brecht’s Leben des Galilei (pr. 1943; Life of Galileo, 1947). Kipphardt’s play does not attack the crucial issue of the moral responsibility of the scientist until the very end. Indeed, how could it, when Oppenheimer’s task is not to define the position of the scientist but to defend himself against the charge that his qualms about the hydrogen bomb jeopardized the security of the state? Indeed, the play reveals more about the paranoid nature of American politics of the 1950’s than about science.

Brecht’s argument is obviously important to Kipphardt, but Kipphardt can turn to it only after Oppenheimer has been condemned and has seen the pernicious side of the scientist’s collusion with the state military apparatus. Even in his final monologue, Oppenheimer’s self-criticism lacks the forcefulness of Galileo’s. Where Brecht’s Galileo judges himself first and foremost as a human being—“A man who does what I have done cannot be tolerated in the company of scientists”—Oppenheimer wonders rather vaguely whether he has betrayed the “spirit of science”: “I begin to wonder whether we were not perhaps traitors to the spirit of science when we handed over the results of our research to the military, without considering the consequences.” To atone for his error, he decides to keep away from military work and take up “pure” research. For Galileo, the retreat of the scientist into the anonymity of research is but another form of betrayal.

Der Hund des Generals

An earlier play, Der Hund des Generals, although not based on a historical incident, is presented in documentary style. The action takes place in a courtroom. General Rampf has been brought before a commission for the investigation of war crimes and accused of sending three tanks into a hopeless battle during the Russian campaign merely because one of his men, Corporal Pfeiffer, shot his dog. The general is able to refute the charge by proving that what might have appeared to the soldiers as a brutal act of revenge did, in fact, coincide with a senseless order from General Headquarters to send them into combat. Although crazy, the general’s order was not motivated by the shooting of his dog. As far as the law is concerned, the general is innocent of the deaths of his men, though one of the judges argues that legal innocence does not exclude moral guilt. Whatever the truth of the matter, the general’s behavior at a particular point in time is uncannily symbolic of the frightful caprice and indifference to human life in war. The theme of Kipphardt’s play is the inhumanity of war, but toward the end, this theme is abandoned for the sake of theatrical effect. Kipphardt is determined that the general’s head shall roll. The tape recording of a Gestapo interrogation after the July, 1944, plot against Adolf Hitler is played. On it the general is heard denouncing the conspiracy, though in the trial he had insisted that he sympathized with it. If he lied on this point, then it must be assumed that his version of the affair with the dog is also false. The general is discredited, but the main theme of the play tends to get lost in the process.

Brother Eichmann

Kipphardt’s last play, Brother Eichmann, is similar in many respects to Der Hund des Generals. It too is presented in the form of a war-crimes trial, and the play consists for the most part of the testimony of the accused. Brother Eichmann’s central figure is Adolf Eichmann, whose trial in 1961 received a large amount of publicity despite the efforts of the Israeli government to keep the kidnaping and subsequent imprisonment of Eichmann a secret. Kipphardt’s Brother Eichmann succeeds in bringing Eichmann, the war criminal, as well as the private citizen before the audience in an atmosphere of authentic historical immediacy. Based on documents about the Third Reich obtained from a variety of sources, the play portrays Eichmann as the leader of an organization whose task it was to annihilate Jewry in Europe. Here is a man who had been elevated by the Third Reich to the dizzying heights of Olympus, where gods and criminals alike came to share a responsibility unparalleled in history. It is not at all surprising that Kipphardt chose as his motto for the play Blaise Pascal’s words: “Never does one commit a crime so perfectly and so well, as when one does it with a clear conscience.”

The singling out of Eichmann for the role of a leader can itself be viewed as a stroke of fate. He was a man whose character allowed his diabolical motivation to erase the last few vestiges of reason, just, as at his trial, the so-called scapegoat philosophy could leave no room for historical or psychological considerations. The trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and its dramatization also contributed, in an adverse manner, to world publicity that enhanced his demoniac image. Via an intricate security mechanism, the mass-murderer Eichmann was cut off from the rest of the world, including his witnesses and spectators: He was placed in a bulletproof glass cage equipped with a separate air supply system. No one was allowed to breathe the same air as the accused.

The enormity of Eichmann’s guilt cannot be explained or diminished by any argument. On the contrary, the more objectively this guilt is viewed in historical and chronological perspective, the more punishing and crushing its effect on the audience. The audience would like to stand in judgment over Eichmann, who embodies the “banality of evil,” in Hannah Arendt’s celebrated formulation. The audience, however, cannot enlighten itself, as would be customary in conventional theater, through the feeling of either contempt or humor.

This unusual reaction on the part of the audience stems from its inability to identify with what Eichmann did or the way he did it. His blind, insensitive functionalism has totally replaced his conscience. Whoever is able to “function” without asking about the consequences or the meaning of his or her actions will be spared the questions, “Who are you, what do you feel, what is your personal opinion?” Indeed, one of the reasons for his two-year incarceration and interrogation in Israel had to be the fact that Eichmann himself finally felt a great need to be asked about things about which he had never been asked before.

Brother Eichmann reminds the audience not only of its responsibility to relate past crimes with the crimes of the present, but also of its solemn duty to view personal questions on a morally sound basis learned from the lessons of history. Thus a small theater can become a large arena, a world tribunal, from which each spectator can pronounce the verdict and feel entirely justified in doing so. Eichmann’s life or death will not matter any more to those who have found peace within themselves.

Bibliography

Cuomo, Glenn R. “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung Through Analogy: Heinar Kipphardt’s Last Play Bruder Eichmann.” The Germanic Review 64, no. 2 (Spring, 1989): 58. An analysis of the character of Adolf Eichmann as portrayed by Kipphardt.

Freinberg, Anat. “The Appeal of the Executive: Adolf Eichmann on the Stage.” Monatshefte 78 (1986): 203-214. A look at Kipphardt’s Brother Eichmann.

Hofacker, Erich P., Jr. “Heinar Kipphardt.” In Twentieth Century German Dramatists, 1919-1992. Vol. 124 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin. Detroit, Mich.: The Gale Group, 1992. A concise overview of the life and works of Kipphardt.

Schumacher, Claude, ed. Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998. A collection of essays on dramatic works that deal with the Holocaust. Contains an analysis of Kipphardt’s plays on the subject.

Thomas, R. Hinton, and Keith Bullivant. Literature in Upheaval: West German Writers and the Challenge of the 1960’s. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974. An examination of the time in which Kipphardt lived and worked, along with some discussion of his role. Bibliography and index.