Tags: professor

Good

Good is a two-act play that dramatizes how John Halder, a seemingly progressive and “good” professor, whose best friend is the Jewish psychiatrist Maurice, is convinced to become a member of the Nazi party, and is also eventually able to rationalize all of the horrors of Nazi Germany, including the Final Solution (the official Third Reich policy to annihilate the worldwide Jewish population), which results in the deportation of his best friend.

Heldenplatz

Bernhard, in three scenes, deals with the reverberations of a professor committing suicide by jumping from his apartment in Heldenplatz: the same square into which, 50 years earlier, Nazis marched to mark their takeover of Austria. Bernhard implies that Vienna is still haunted by its past. The professor’s housekeeper and brothers describe the continuing anti-Semitism in Vienna. In the final scene, at a family dinner the professor’s wife hears “Sieg Heil” coming from outside her window in the square.

Old Wicked Songs

A two character play set in the Vienna rehearsal studio between the spring and summer of 1986, when Austria is forced to confront its Holocaust past, due to the revelation of president Kurt Waldheim's alleged Nazi past. Twenty-five-year-old Jewish piano student Stephen Hoffmann, a former child prodigy who has not performed for a year, studies with Professor Josef Mashkan, whose outwardly anti-Semitic remarks drive the student away. After a visit to Dachau and a sexual encounter with a Jewish woman, he returns. Ultimately, Hoffmann saves his teacher from an attempted suicide and discovers that he is actually a concentration camp survivor.

Room for Doubt

A highly respected Professor of German Literature at a prominent American university is confronted by his past, which conceals a terrifying secret he has hidden for decades. Accused of murder as a Nazi official in the Warsaw Ghetto by the son of one of his victims, he is forced to reveal a secret that would change his life, his son’s, and, most of all, his accusers.

The Flight into Egypt

In the play’s first act, set in Lacznic Poland in 1939, a Jewish family is visited by an art professor who, though seemingly a gentile, is really a Jew passing in order to avoid the growing anti-Semitism of the academic world and to be able to leave for a professorship in New York. His visits lead to the family being attacked and only their daughter, with whom the art professor is in love, survives a horrific attack. Act 2 describes how the daughter, who is a gifted artist, is protected and hidden during the war in the basement apartment of a working class man. The benevolent common man and the art professor, who wants to assuage his guilt by returning to Poland after the war and convincing the young woman to leave for New York with him, are presented in sharp contrast.