10. Un regard sur le cimetière juif dans les pièces de théâtre Jubilé (1983) et La Ballade de l’escalope viennoise (1996) de George Tabori

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“There are taboos that must be broken, or they will continue to choke us.” This is how, in 1981, the Hungarian-born Jewish playwright George Tabori introduced The Cannibals (1969), his farcical play set in Auschwitz in which a group of camp deportees gradually turn to cannibalism until they starve. Tabori’s father, Cornelius, a Jew and a “picky eater,” died in Auschwitz in 1941, while his mother, Elsa, managed an incredible escape thanks to a strange set of circumstances that the playwright later recounted in My Mother’s Courage (1979). Both Tabori’s father and mother spent time in Auschwitz and experienced the horror first hand. They saw it unfold before their eyes. Yet, paradoxically, his family’s brutal experiences did not step the playwright from approaching the issue of Jewish extermination with grotesque humor, as evident in The Cannibals, Jubilee, Mein Kampf (1987), and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel. The theme of remembrance runs through Tabori’s theatrical portfolio, but it seems to follow a path all its own that is anything but routine and ordinary. Instead, his work is one of “counter-remembrance,” as Norbert Otto Eke rightly defines it, focusing on the unconventional and provocative dimension underlying the author’s entire catalog. Anat Feinberg’s definition is also very emblematic. She presents Tabori’s theater as a “locus of remembrance.” Here, the word “remembrance” refers to the fact that the past and the Holocaust are the plays’ overriding themes. By “locus,” Feinberg means “place,” given that the Taborian stage most often functions as a meta-theatrical, re-interpretive space of the past. Rather than a place of dramatic action, it is a place of a meta-dramatic, ritualistic—or, indeed, counter-ritualistic—discourse on history. As a “locus of remembrance,” Tabori’s theatrical works also examine the places of remembrance and their symbology. By depicting these places within the physical place of the theater, his plays can in turn counter-interrogate these places, disassembling their seemingly timeless structural present to reveal the repressed, silent voices that once inhabited them. This is a difficult task because Jewish extermination, especially in the camps, was “invisible,” as Shoshana Felman points out. It was death without burial, devoid of evidence, places for commemoration, or cemeteries. However, what is striking about Tabori is that his interest in the theme, and by extension the places, of the burial of Jews exterminated by the Nazis, as can be seen in his plays Jubilee and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel, often ends up encompassing the victims who died outside of the camps as well, i.e. the Holocaust victims who were buried in Jewish cemeteries but were systematically targeted by new anti-Semitic persecutions, whether by Nazis immediately after burial or several years later by Neo-Nazis. In Jubilee, Tabori writes about “defiling the graves with slogans and swastikas” and even “opening,” “devastating,” and “desecrating” them. For the playwright, the Jewish cemetery, a liminal space between the two worlds of the living and the dead (notably, in Tabori’s Jubilee and The Ballad the Viennese Schnitzel, the dead at the time of the Holocaust), has become a problematic and sinister place. The “romantically abandoned” cemeteries described in Jubilee and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel are disturbing and frightening. They “choke” in the strongest sense of the word, to return to the Taborian expression of the beginning of the article. Far from being a place of respect for the dead and reconciliation, these cemeteries are anarchic, chaotic, and even nightmarish place. The dead are released from their graves, most of which have been constantly “defiled” over the years and sometimes even “opened,” haunting the spaces of the cemetery itself in the unlikely expectation of a permanent burial and of finally being able to rest in peace.In fact, the story of The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel concludes in a cemetery. A Jewish man named Morgenstein, who had found refuge far from Vienna during the war, returns for the first time, several years later, to the Jewish cemetery in the city where his entire family was buried. The spectacle is macabre. The tombs are “devastated” and left “open,” so that all Morgenstein has to do is look inside each of them to recognize members of his own family. Similarly, the entire story of Jubilee is set in a cemetery “along the Rhine”—a “Jewish Cemetery,” as a large sign on stage indicates. The play features a group of dead people who, like characters in Dante’s Inferno (the reference is from Tabori himself), relive their own history. No one has ever been able to mourn them, since all their relatives were also “exterminated” during the Holocaust. As result, upon waking up every night, they repeat the same actions, forever prisoners of their own memory.What does the Jewish cemetery mean to Tabori? What remains of this symbolic place in Jubilee and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel? What is he expressing through the use of the cemetery? This is the kind of questions I will try to answer in my article.Of course, this framing will not discount the fact that the theme of the Jewish cemetery, in the general economy of Taborian theater, and thus of Jubilee and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel in particular, can only function in parallel with that of the unburied death of other Jews, those who have “gone up—once and for all— in smoke,” in the Nazi camps. The rather summary burial of individuals during the Holocaust in Jewish cemeteries, which were themselves constantly desecrated by anti-Semitic groups, is contrasted with the disappearance “in smoke” of the corpses of the dead in the Nazi camps. For a Jew, this outcome was almost better. This is the bitterly humorous conclusion that Tabori seems to suggest through Jubilee and The Ballad of the Viennese Schnitzel—that it is better to “leave” once and for all, to be nothing, utterly nothing, than to risk wandering around eternally as a perpetual victim in a desecrated or destroyed cemetery.