Customer Reviews

The Investigation

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One of the most powerful readings of my life. I'd never heard of Weiss though I knew about the holocaust. Thinking of the death of millions of jews, gypsies, communists, mentally retarded and other 'undesirables' is always hard. A Series of Cantos from the transcripts of trials of Nazis in Germany after WWII. Weiss focuses on inviduals from this mass of innocent victims producing a tale to chill the heart, make any human cry and fill up with rage at the same time. The monstrous nazis have no shame or sense of guilt. Those who have survived the butchery give their case to the derision of those in the dock. Prosiac in language, overwhelming in tragedy. The sadistic ... Nazis are exposed. The simple humanism of their victims is eloquent and the reading is unforgettable

I have not read this book yet but I did listen to the BBC radio version broadcast around the year 1967 I think. I would have been thirteen or fourteen years old at that time. I was at home, alone, and came upon it by chance, twiddling the dials looking for something interesting. The play caused me a concatenation of emotions: horror, revulsion, disbelief and, it must be said, a kind of fascination I regard it as one of the formative moments of my education as it lay before me, at a very impressionable age, the unimaginable possibilities of human cruelty. No details spared, the facts about what happened at Auschwitz are presented as evidence in a courtroom, giving it an immense understated power and resonance. Listeners/readers are left to paint their own picture and draw their own conclusions. My conclusions are quite beyond words at this time. But as the distance in time from these events lengthens beyond living memory, their reverberation only becomes louder it seems to me, not least because of subsequent state-sanctioned holocausts, for example in Mao's China or more recently in Congo, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda. "The Investigation" has been part of my own investigation into human violence. To quote Krishnamurti:
"This is really the maim issue - what can you as a human being, living in this country, do when you see the terrible disorder brought about by the army, the politicians and the priests, by individuals with their selfishness, their arrogance, their brutality and their violence. (...) And we have to be serious because the house is burning, not somebody else's house but our own house is on fire. We have to be very serious, not only to put the fire out, but also to bring about a different kind of house that cannot catch fire at any time, which means living a life of absolute inward order where there is no war, no fear. "

I've wanted to direct Peter Weiss's The Investigation since I first read it in translation in the mid-sixties. Weiss is better known for his brilliant Marat/Sade, a reinterpretation of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday as staged by the marquis de Sade with the inmates of the mental asylum at Charenton. It's an awesome play.

But The Investigation in its own way is as revolutionary as Marat/Sade. More germane to my concerns, it's fairly easily adaptable to Readers' Theater. The play is presented as a series of eleven "Songs." (They aren't sung songs, but rather prose -talked--songs. It's Brecht-Talk to call them "Songs".) Each song/scene details some aspect of the atrocities committed upon the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Most, perhaps all, of the text of the play is taken verbatim from the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials (November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946), which tried German war criminals. If the parts in the play were not double-cast, it would require twenty-eight actors (two of them women). The play is also too long: it would have to be shortened.

The dialogue is chilling, made even the more so by being presented in so low a key. There's almost no action: witnesses ascend and leave the witness stand, the prosecuting attorney and the defense counsel wrangle before the judge. Some functionaries who collaborated in maintaining the camp system are called as witnesses. All of them deny knowledge of what took place, even of what they could read in account books or see from the windows of their workrooms. The accused are monsters, whether on the stand testifying or simply acting the boor in their seats. The bulk of the witnesses are the former prisoners: a woman forced to work as secretary for a Nazi boss who likes to beat prisoners to death, a political partisan subjected to torture and himself beaten near to death, mothers separated from husbands and children, never to hear of them again.

It's great theater. I'm considering it for a local Readers' Theater and I think it would work: the characters can be doubled to keep the cast size in bounds, there's no set to worry about and there's enough overlap to permit cutting. That's essential, because the play is quite long at 313 pages in print but the message cannot be weakened.

I have two concerns. The first is the emotional charge the testimony delivers. It's far from cocktail theater. People may experience feelings they'd rather not feel on an afternoon or evening entertainment junket. The second is whether the play is dated now: will its moral urgency seem out of date when expended on an injustice now sixty-five years past

Not meant for anyone younger than 18. But definitely a play that every single person on the planet should experience. If nothing else, it will remind you of how dangerous the world can be if we don't take care of each other, and what will happen again if we continue to turn our backs on the horrors that still go on today.
As an actor who has had the opportunity to perform a production of 'The Investigation' I offer a word of warning. This play will upset you, anger you, and destroy you. Merely reading the words on the page is bad enough, performing them - trying to re-emulate what really happened turns you inside out. As my director said - 'You'll be glad you did this, you'll be even gladder when it's over'. What is contained within the pages of this play is the human condition at it's absolute worse. You read about the ones who survived - and what they had to do in order to survive, and you read about those who were just 'following orders'. And the question you ask yourself when you are finished reading this is not 'What would I have done?', but, 'Would I have survived?'