Starting from the representation of the hunger motif in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (It. 1947, Engl. 1959) and its variation in George Tabori’s “black mass” The Cannibals (Engl. 1968, Germ. 1969), ...the contribution aims to re-interpret the complex relationship of autobiographical, historical and fictional elements in the celebrated drama of the Jewish romancier and dramatist (1914-2007), who famously had “a mother tongue, Hungarian, a father tongue, English, and an uncle tongue, German”. The metadramatic structure, combined with the focus on emotional, active memory, is thus related to the intertextual medley of the play as a sign for Tabori’s search of a ‘third way’ in representing the Holocaust on the stage, moving away both from documentarian realism and sentimental celebration of the victims
L’anello che manca. E quello che non torna in Nathans Tod di Georg Tabori propose a modern rereading of Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise): Georg Tabori’s Nathans Death (Nathans Tod). ...The paper aims for a comparative analysis of the famous ring parable. Asked by the Sultan to decide which of the three religions owns the truth, Nathan narrates the fable of a magic ring that has been passed from generation to generation and finally lost, when a father with three sons makes two copies of the original one. The ring symbolises the tyranny of a unique truth that has to be overcome, in order to achieve tolerance. My interest focuses on two moments of Tabori’s rewriting of this fable. On the one hand, I analyse the way in which Tabori glosses over the ring parable in the dialogue between Nathan and Saladin thanks to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightement (Dialektik der Aufklärung) and to Arendt’s Man in Dark Times (Von der Menschlichkeit in finsteren Zeiten). In the economic and social paradigm of the modern Totalitarianism there is no more place for tolerance. On the other hand, I reflect on the new context in which Tabori places the ring fable narrated by Nathan just before his death in front of the bodies of his dead sons. I consider that choice to be a parody: The contrast between the original context of enunciation and the modern one is the way in which Lessing’s tolerance is finally checkmated.
George Tabori (1914-2007), playwriter, stage director and Georg Büchner Prize recipient in 1992, is considered to be one of the most emblematic figures of German theater from the 1980s and 1990s. ...Brought up in a bilingual Jewish family of Budapest, Tabori wrote however almost exclusively his work in English and therefore achieved his first breakthrough in America. Contrary to other protagonists of the German intercultural literature, Tabori, who fled the Nazi terror, didn’t (re)find his way back in German language even though he moved in the Federal Republic of Germany in the beginning of the 1970s. This paper aims to analyze the unusual linguistic position of this important author from the German theatre’s recent history. For this purpose, we propose to contextualise Tabori’s career among other comparable cases of multilingualism in the 20th century German literature. Elias Canetti (1905-1994) and Klaus Mann (1906-1949), two renowned writers whose literary works and biographies are also shaped by prolonged exiles in the English-speaking world as well as translingual writing, will serve in this respect as points of comparison.
A complex person (novelist, playwright, screenwriter, translator), George Tabori, pen name of György Tábori, born in Budapest in 1914, was little acclaimed in North America where he spent twenty ...years of his life and left a mark on the German culture of the 20
century. Due to his cathartic black humour, he overcame the tragic experience of the Holocaust that took away from him almost all his family. Known in post-war drama especially by means of his anti-Hitler farce
(1987) which he authored, directed and acted in, Tabori even took the East-German public by surprise with his special, yet less familiar perspective on history.
was the first play that had a Romanian staging, at Cluj; however,
(1991), a real international success
, became known to our public at the theatre Radu Stanca in Sibiu under the same title and as
at the National Theatre of Iasi (TNI). Our aim, in this paper, is to analyse the biblical events in the play from a postmodern perspective as homage to the author’s contribution to the philological sub-field of Bible and literature, already consecrated by N. Frye’s
and more recent studies.
Das künstlerische Schaffen George Taboris lässt sich nicht nur einer Kunstgattung oder einer Nationalliteratur zuordnen, doch gerade seine Interdisziplinarität und sein Kosmopolitismus leisteten im ...ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert einen wichtigen Beitrag zur europäischen Kultur. Im Beitrag wird sein Stück Mein Kampf aus einer interkulturellen Perspektive im Kontext der jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Österreich der Nachkriegszeit betrachtet. Die Uraufführung des Stücks, das gegen die Mythisierung Hitlers und die Viktimisierung der Juden anschreibt, fand in einer Zeit statt, in der der Opfer-Status des österreichischen Staates ins Wanken geriet und das Judentum in Wien neues Selbstbewusstsein erlangte.
Signs of difference Balme, Christopher
Orbis litterarum,
December 2021, 2021-12-00, 20211201, Volume:
76, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Shylock and Othello are the characters in the Shakespearean oeuvre with the clearest racial markers. However one interprets the ethnic characteristics of ‘the Moor’—as a light‐skinned Arab or as a ...darker ‘African’—he seems to be a character marked by clear racial distinctions vis‐à‐vis the other figures. Shylock also has an iconographic history of racial marking. In this paper I shall examine how both figures can be read as tokens of ethnic or racial anxiety. Shakespeare’s African play is one of the works seldom performed in the contemporary German repertoire system. The Merchant of Venice is more frequently performed but poses different problems in terms of visual representation. It will be argued that German director’s theatre, with its love of experimentation and above all bold metaphoric images, is uncomfortable with the metonymic representation implied by ethnic casting. The discussion draws on Othello and The Merchant of Venice in productions by Fritz Kortner, Peter Zadek, George Tabori and Luk Perceval. Whereas Kortner, Zadek and Tabori stage the alterity figures in a mode of hypertrophic blackness or Jewish stereotyping bordering on (or indeed transgressing) overt racism, Perceval’s Othello is white and the alterity conflict seems to be one of age and gender not race.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The present contribution outlines George Tabori s career as a playwright and a director in the time span between 1947 and 2007 in American and European theatre, emphasizing his position as a wise ...stranger in German post-war culture. Then, the intertextual and metaphorical presence of the Holy Scriptures in his plays The Cannibals (1969), Mein Kampf (1987), and especially The Goldberg Variations (1991) is examined with respect to the key issues of his production: anti-Semitism before, during and after the Holocaust and its representation on the contemporary stage
In 1978 Jewish-Hungarian director and playwright George Tabori created a performance with the elaborate title I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear: Improvisations on ...Shakespeare's Shylock. Based on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the piece, produced by the Munich Kammerspiele, was performed in a former boiler room in a cellar by a cast of twelve actors and a musician. Tabori framed his adaptation as therapeutic memory-work, as a personal and collective attempt to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust in post-war (West) Germany.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Die Buchreihe Theatron bietet besonders qualifizierten Abhandlungen aus den Bereichen Theaterwissenschaft und Dramenforschung ein interdisziplinäres Forum. Studien zu allen Sparten des Theaters - vom ...Bühnenbild bis zur Schauspielkunst, vom Regietheater bis zum Puppenspiel - finden ebenso Platz wie solche zur Dramentheorie und zu den dramatischen Gattungen aus den verschiedenen philologischen Disziplinen, des weiteren zum Musiktheater und Theatertanz. Die Vielfalt der im Phänomen Theater zusammentreffenden Künste verlangen diese Ausrichtung auf ein breites Spektrum von Forschungsansätzen und Fragestellungen.
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