Tags: crime trials

Fortress [Festung]

A postmodernist representation of post-war Germany’s inability to deal with the Holocaust honestly in media and social communication. The play is structured as a pastiche of scenes that are not held together by a specific plot line and in two parts, the second being a dramatized talk show. There seem to be references to the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution became German policy, death camps, and post-war Germany’s reactions to the Shoah and its perpetrators.

The Investigation [Die Ermittlung]

Weiss uses transcripts from the Frankfurt trials of Auschwitz SS guards to create his docudrama. However, the play is not an actual documentary and some of his decisions in shaping the material have been highly controversial. Weiss structures the testimony into verse, never gives the survivors testifying names just numbers (as they were given in the camp), and never mentions Jews. Weiss uses the play to argue that the Holocaust occurred because of capitalism and suggests that the oppressed could as easily become oppressors.