My radical notion of literature and theater at the time, which age has since tempered a bit but not fundamentally altered, insisted that the only words worth speaking were those that absolutely needed to be written. All else was useless chatter. I should explain that I had then just recently returned from a year in Vienna and Eastern Europe, on a fellowship from the Thomas J.
Watson Foundation, digging up the unhappy history that had sent my parents running for their lives from their native Vienna, and interviewing survivors of the concentration camps. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D. A crisis of conscience and artistic faith compelled me to inquire of my respondents if they knew of any poems written, songs sung, or stories told in the camps, on the virtual threshold of death.
Was all art, I wondered, a superfluous pursuit, mere costume jewelry conceived to camouflage the unsightly truth? Most of the survivors I talked to said they were too busy caging food and staving off attack to waste a breath on poetry.
But someone referred me to the late Aleksander Kuliwiewicz , then living in Krakow, Poland, who, as an underground camp troubadour at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, had memorized hundreds of poems and songs entrusted to him for safe-keeping, and devoted the rest of his life to the reanimation of their disembodied voices. I have long believed that there are two distinct types of writer in the German language literary tradition.
Ernst Toller definitely belongs to the latter literary contingent. The play recounts the unthinkable, the fate of a man returned home from the War with his genitals blown off. As a love offering and means of support for his wife Grete, the desperate unemployed protagonist, Eugene Hinkemann, accepts a job as a carnival strongman biting off the heads of live mice and rats. Learning of his injury, his supposed friend, Paul Grosshahn, promptly puts the moves on Grete, who first resists, then succumbs to his sexual advances.
