On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s: Hannah Arendt and Peter Weiss8 9 On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s: Hannah Arendt and Peter Weiss Benjamin Wihstutz Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Abstract: The article addresses the German documentary theater of the 1960s through the eyes of Hannah Arendt� Arendt’s essays on “Truth and Politics” and her theory on judgement share a common interest with playwrights like Peter Weiss, Rolf Hochhuth and Heiner Kipphardt in court trials, political history and witnessing. However, their perspectives also differ with regard to the impartiality of judgement and their understanding of factual truth. The article seeks to take a closer look at these differences and contradictions with a special focus on Die Ermittlung (1965) by Peter Weiss, the famous documentary play on the Auschwitz trials, and links them to the intersections of theatricality and judgement and to political questions of German memory culture� Keywords: Peter Weiss, Hannah Arendt, documentary theater, Auschwitz trials, German memory culture, justice on stage Throughout the history of European theater, legal and courtroom plays have often been influenced by real trials and have interpreted their historical truth and political meaning� But even if inspired by historical events, the courtroom scenes in Aeschylus, Shakespeare or Kleist - just to name a few of the most obvious examples - clearly remain fictional drama. The characters and their lines are, for the most part, invented and composed for scenes that take up their place within the dramatic plot of the play� This changes with German documentary theater of the 1960s� Authors like Peter Weiss, Rolf Hochhuth, and Heinar Kipphardt deliberately copied from court protocols, reports, and testimonies in order to reenact and document the trials� This lent them a claim to historical truth and spoke to a political motivation to enlighten the public with unwelcome facts� In this sense, German documentary theater stands out in the history of legal drama, as it is clearly invested in inquiring into historical truth 90 Benjamin Wihstutz on the one hand and in forming the audience’s judgment and political opinion on the other� However, truth and politics can be in a relation of contradiction, as Hannah Arendt pointed out at around the same time (see Arendt, “Truth”)� Arendt, too, was interested in court trials - in fact one of her most prominent texts is her own reporting of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem� Is this common interest just a coincidence, or do Weiss and Arendt, despite their different means of reporting on these trials, share similar views on historical truth and politics? Might we learn something about documentary theater from Arendt’s thoughts on judgment and factual truth? And to what extent can Arendt and Weiss help us differentiate between the theatricality of the court and that of the courtroom drama? The present essay seeks to answer some of these questions by relating Arendt and Weiss to each other with the aim of developing a new perspective on the political, historical, and judicial dimensions of documentary courtroom drama. The essay consists of five parts: The first part examines Arendt’s distinction between factual truth and political opinion and its striking contemporaneity� The second part elaborates on Peter Weiss’s conception of documentary theater and compares it to Arendt’s notion of truth and judgment� The third part examines Weiss’s motivation to write about Auschwitz in Die Ermittlung (1965) and relate it to today’s debates about memory culture� The fourth part looks back at Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial and takes it as a springboard to differentiate between different theatrical modes in the courtroom. And the fifth and last part of this essay compares two different premieres of Die Ermittlung that were staged simultaneously in Berlin and Stuttgart in 1965, to point out that it is not just the dramatic text that determines how the truth and politics of the courtroom are presented, but also the staging of the trial, even in a documentary play� 1� In February 1967, Hannah Arendt, at the time teaching at the University of Chicago and a member of the Committee of Social Thought, wrote an essay entitled “Truth and Politics” for The New Yorker magazine� In this essay, Arendt differentiates between rational and factual truth and concludes that it is factual rather than rational truth which is endangered by politics and political lies: Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character� It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys a rather precarious status in the eyes of governments that rest on consent and abhor coercion� Facts are beyond agreement and consent, and all talk about them - all exchanges of opinion based on correct information - will contribute nothing to their establishment� Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 91 compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies� (Arendt, “Truth” 241) It is no wonder that Arendt has reappeared in recent debates on politics and political theory� When she states that it “may be in the nature of the political realm to be at war with truth” (“Truth” 239) her thoughts seem strikingly contemporary� What today is typical of political discussions with deniers of climate change or ‘anti-vaxxers,’ of false claims about a “stolen election” (USA) or the corruption of opinion polls (Austria), was at the time based on Arendt’s own observations of political developments during the Cold War� Arendt’s ideas were especially influenced by the Stalinist show trials in the Soviet Union and Hungary on the one hand, and by Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witchhunts in the United States on the other� Moreover, her report on the Eichmann trial from 1961 famously triggered a heated debate on the history of the Shoah and “the banality of evil” (Arendt, Eichmann 287), which mirrors her distinction between truth and politics insofar as her critical view on the trial highlighted its political motivations over its factual truth� According to Michael Rothberg, the Eichmann trial also marks a key moment in the history of memory culture (Rothberg 176), since it manifests the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust, “separating it off from other histories of collective violence” (9). The question of how the Shoah is remembered and dealt with politically in Israel, Germany, and the United States remains a polarizing issue to this day� 1 What makes Arendt’s reflections and observations so contemporary today, however, is not a repetition of history, but her perspective as a philosopher, historian, and political thinker� One could say that it is in fact the ‘contemporariness’ of her philosophical writing itself that resonates with today’s polarized society and pandemic - a notion of contemporariness articulated by Giorgio Agamben� Long before Agamben fell into the trap of conspiracy theories during the Covid pandemic, 2 he defined contemporariness as “a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it” (Agamben, “What is the Contemporary? ” 41)� In this sense, “contemporary” is the opposite of “timely” - it is the “un-timely” (41)� Arendt kept some distance from her own political times and from being “timely” by observing and judging from a rather detached, sometimes strangely dissociated perspective, whether it be on the events of the Cold War or the Eichmann trial� She performed her role as a public intellectual mostly by acting as an onlooker and commentator on her times, not as a political actor� This distance of the “contemporary” lies at the core of Arendt’s understanding of impartial judgment, which is bound to a Kantian disinterestedness and the impartiality of a “world-spectator” (Arendt, Lectures 52): “The advantage the spectator has is 92 Benjamin Wihstutz that he sees the play as a whole, while each of the actors knows only his part or, if he should judge from the perspective of acting, only the part of the whole that concerns him. The actor is partial by definition” (68). Hence, Arendt continues, “withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game is a condition sine qua non for all judgment” (55)� It is this distance that made Arendt’s comments on the Eichmann trial and other historical events provocative and un-timely, and as such contemporary� 3 2� During the early 1960s, another German export attracted international attention: documentary plays by authors like Rolf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt, and Peter Weiss� What these playwrights shared with Arendt was their particular interest in court trials, testimony, and political history� The most successful works of documentary theater focused on recent political and judicial developments, like the role of the Vatican during the Third Reich in Der Stellvertreter (1963) by Rolf Hochhuth , the hearings of the United States atomic energy commission in Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer (1964), or the documentation of the Auschwitz trials in Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung (1965)� Considering the content of these plays with regard to truth and politics, one could say that one of the authors’ primary goals for this new form of theater was to confront the public with the ‘unwelcome facts’ that, according to Arendt, cannot be argued with� The term “documentary theater” ( Dokumentartheater ) was first introduced by Erwin Piscator in the playbill of Der Stellvertreter in February 1963 at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin, where the play premiered under his direction (see Esslin 139)� Piscator had become famous in Berlin during the 1920s by founding his successful Piscator-Bühne at Nollendorfplatz, where he had staged political plays and revues with extensive use of new media and technology like film projections and hydraulic lifts, and the inclusion of agit-prop elements� Piscator’s use of the term “documentary theater” was therefore meant to construct a mental bridge to his own documentaries produced during the 1920s (see Piscator)� Piscator had recently returned from exile to Germany in 1962, becoming the artistic director of the Freie Volksbühne theater in West Berlin, where he wanted to pick up and continue his political theater work that had been interrupted for more than two decades� But the term “documentary theater” was far from being generally agreed on among playwrights� Rolf Hochhuth later stated in an interview that documentary drama was a meaningless term� In his comment he indicated that there is no such thing as pure documentation in dramatic writing but that, on the contrary, the playwright has to study the relevant documents in order to dramatize them: On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 93 Ich bin sehr unglücklich über dieses Schlagwort, denn was soll das schon heißen, ich finde gar nichts. Reine Dokumentation, das ist nicht mehr als ein Haufen Akten. Man muß schon noch etwas dazutun, wenn ein Stück daraus werden soll� […] Jeder Dramatiker, der einmal historische Stücke geschrieben hat, mußte die Dokumente studieren� Deshalb hat das Schlagwort dokumentarisches Theater überhaupt keinen Sinn� (qtd� in Esslin 139) Despite these objections, the term was gratefully accepted among theater critics and audiences, and with Piscator setting the tone and tradition, documentary theater was also immediately seen as political theater� The great public and political attention it received clearly had to do with the normative and political bias of the plays� The plays were in fact not so much about merely documenting history but about the right representation of history or being “on the right side of history” (Sandel 52)� Their aim was to educate and enlighten the audience in a specifically political way. This political and educational purpose was often answered with criticism in the media and politics� Prominent theater reviewer Joachim Kaiser wrote an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in 1965 that criticized Die Ermittlung for stealing the spectator’s “interpretational sovereignty” ( Deutungshoheit ), and Robert Oppenheimer himself protested that Kipphardt had invented a final speech that he never delivered during the real hearings of the atomic commission (see “In der Sache J� Vilar”)� Peter Weiss’s fourteen “Notizen zum dokumentarischen Theater” from 1968 show these contradictions of documentation, fictionalization, and political bias in a clear and conceptual way� First of all, documentary theater, as Peter Weiss puts it, is a theater of factual reports, “ein Theater der Berichterstattung�” It may use all kinds of historical materials and sources: Protokolle, Akten, Briefe, statistische Tabellen, Börsenmeldungen, Abschlußberichte von Bankunternehmen und Industriegesellschaften, Regierungserklärungen, Ansprachen, Interviews, Äußerungen bekannter Persönlichkeiten, Zeitungs- und Rundfunkreportagen, Fotos, Journalfilme und andere Zeugnisse der Gegenwart bilden die Grundlage der Aufführung. Das dokumentarische Theater enthält sich jeder Erfindung, es übernimmt authentisches Material und gibt dies, im Inhalt unverändert, in der Form bearbeitet, von der Bühne aus wieder� (“Notizen” 91) By using these authentic documents, documentary theater, according to Weiss, seeks to clarify history by laying out facts in front of an audience that is thereby enabled to review and judge the case� In a preface to Die Ermittlung, Weiss states that the play is not meant to be a reconstruction of the tribunal but rather a distillate of the evidence, selected from hundreds of testimonies, “ein Konzentrat der Aussage” ( Ermittlung 9)� And he even adds that this distillate should 94 Benjamin Wihstutz contain nothing but facts: “Dieses Konzentrat soll nichts anderes enthalten als Fakten” (9)� Although this might sound like a historiographical or even forensic approach to factual truth, the second of Weiss’s fourteen propositions somewhat contradicts a fact-oriented perspective� Here, the author states that the purpose of documentary theater is to criticize historical lies and political falsifications of reality (see “Notizen” 92)� By doing so, documentary theater cannot be politically neutral: “Das dokumentarische Theater ist parteilich� Viele seiner Themen können zu nichts anderem als zu einer Verurteilung führen�” (“Notizen” 91)� The notion of Verurteilung is obviously not linked to the impartiality or distanced spectatorship of judgment ( das Urteilen ) in Arendt’s sense� Rather, condemnation seems to be the outcome of a documentation and representation of history that aims at influencing the audience in a political way. But demanding or assuming condemnation might also be far removed from an inspection of “nothing but facts�” One extreme example is the production of Weiss’s play Viet Nam Diskurs in 1968 at the Kammerspiele in Munich� Here, stage director Peter Stein notoriously transformed the judgment required of the audience during the final scene into monetary value, when money was collected from the audience in support for the Viet Cong (see Nussbaum 252). After the first night, however, the Intendant of the Munich Kammerspiele prohibited these donations in the theater, insisting that art should maintain a distance from actual politics� With reference to Arendt’s thoughts on truth and politics, one can conclude that the double goal of documentary theater - reporting and educating according to Weiss - might in fact be contradictory: on the one hand documentary theater is supposed to be a theater of facts, to stage the truth and nothing but the truth; on the other hand, it seems partial and political from the start, seeking “to effect change” (Nussbaum 239). Moreover, the material itself has to be transformed to be included in the play� According to Weiss, it is the transformation of historical documents into artistic material that enables the dramatic work to become the instrument of political thought and the forming of opinion (see “Notizen” 96). Documentary theater uses documents, official statements, testimonies, and reports, but at the same time adapts, alters, and condenses this material for a play that represents a specific political opinion. Therefore, Weiss states, dramaturgical strategies that influence the audience’s political opinion, such as condensing the facts to use a black-and-white technique that takes only one side into account, are specifically allowed in documentary theater (see “Notizen” 99)� To demand that the concentrate “contains nothing but facts” therefore seems to be a difficult, if not impossible task, since Weiss’s goal of shaping political opinion would violate any strict focus on facts - the categorical opposite of opinion according to Arendt� On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 95 The politically motivated selection and transformation of documents into artistic material as a distilled concentrate is without doubt one of the key elements of German documentary theater of the 1960s� It explains how more than a thousand pages of protocols of Robert Oppenheimer’s trial hearings could become a two-hour play by Heinar Kipphardt or how only nine of more than a hundred witnesses at the Auschwitz trial appear in the eleven Cantos of Die Ermittlung � Reduction and editing, but also altered and even fictionalized quotations are central dramaturgical principles that help make the content accessible as well as aesthetically and politically appealing� Political judgment guides this process of editing the documentary material from the start� Unlike Marshall McLuhan’s often cited phrase “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 7), which is only one year older than Die Ermittlung and highlights the social effects of media devices , Weiss’s principle for writing and composing documentary plays seems to be just the opposite: ‘The message is the medium’ - it is the political message that guides Weiss’s selection and distillation process, it is the message that helps to sort, arrange, and present the documentary material in a particular way� By narrating unwelcome facts in a certain politicized way, documentary plays seek to influence the audience’s perspective on factual truth and testimony, as well as on history and memory culture� 3� During the summer of 1964, Peter Weiss attended the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt as a spectator� Later he traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau to see the extermination camp with his own eyes� He was deeply troubled and felt at the same time connected to Auschwitz� The description of his visit, which he published in 1965, offers insights into the intensity of his experience but also into the difficulties he faced in sensing and reliving the horror of the camp. At precisely the moment when Weiss seems able to grasp such horror, the narrator’s viewpoint shifts from a firstto a third-person perspective: Ich gehe langsam durch dieses Grab. Empfinde nichts. […] Im Augenblick, in dem die Sonne versinkt, steigen die Bodennebel auf und schwelen um die niedrigen Baracken. Die Türen stehen offen. Irgendwo trete ich ein. Und dies ist jetzt so: Hier ist das Atmen, das Flüstern und Rascheln noch nicht ganz von der Stille verdeckt, […] in den schweren Schatten, sind die tausend Körper noch zu ahnen, […] hier ist die Außenwelt noch nicht ganz eingedrungen, hier ist noch zu erwarten, daß es sich regt da drinnen, daß ein Kopf sich hebt, eine Hand sich vorstreckt� Doch nach einer Weile tritt auch hier das Schweigen und die Erstarrung ein� Ein Lebender ist gekommen, und vor diesem Lebenden verschließt sich, was hier geschah� Der Lebende, der hier herkommt, aus einer andern Welt, besitzt nichts als seine Kenntnisse von Ziffern, von niedergeschriebenen Berichten, von Zeugenaussagen, sie sind Teil seines Lebens, er 96 Benjamin Wihstutz trägt daran, doch fassen kann er nur, was ihm selbst widerfährt� […] Jetzt steht er nur in einer untergegangenen Welt� Hier kann er nichts mehr tun� Eine Weile herrscht die äußerste Stille� Dann weiß er, es ist noch nicht zu Ende� (“Meine Ortschaft” 34, 42—43) The meaning of the last sentence remains strangely unclear� What is not yet at an end? Theater critic and Weiss biographer Henning Rischbieter writes: “Der Schlußsatz ist mehrdeutig� Die Torturen, der Massenmord sind noch nicht zu Ende? Oder die Bedrängnis durch das, was während des Zweiten Weltkrieges geschah? Auf jeden Fall: Auschwitz verpflichtet den Schriftsteller Weiss” (Rischbieter 66)� What becomes clear is that Weiss feels committed to this darkest place in German history, obliged to dedicate his theater work to the inconceivable truth of Auschwitz, at once affirming and contradicting Adorno’s famous dictum that “nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch” (Adorno 30). The switch from the firstperson to a third-person narrator is not a shift to an impartial or neutral point of view: although Rischbieter interprets it as “groß und fordernd, aber auch kalt objektiv” (66), the objective perspective on “he” also seems to hint at Weiss’s struggle to face the historical truth of Auschwitz as a German subject “I” who cannot escape his generation or responsibility, i�e�, a collective responsibility of the German people that allowed this horror to happen� 4 In light of recent debates and critical views on the memory culture of the Shoah in Germany, one might ask where Peter Weiss’s approach to creating a theater piece on Auschwitz fits in with today’s discourse on “multidirectional memory” (as defined by Rothberg) or with the criticism of a “theater of memory” ( Gedächtnistheater ; see Czollek 19—34)� By “Gedächtnistheater,” a term originally used by Michael Bodemann, Max Czollek refers to a specific way of remembering that promotes the identification of the German public with the Jewish victims and especially with the incommensurability of the Shoah� Gedächtnistheater avoids real confrontation with historical guilt by integrating and instrumentalizing the witnesses of the Shoah for German memory culture, and therefore detracts from the responsibility that Germans carry as a people of perpetrators� Although Weiss can certainly not be accused of a hypocritical Gedächtnistheater as it is analysed by Czollek with regard to political speeches and memorial ceremonies in Germany from the 1980s to the present, Die Ermittlung still played a prominent role in German memory culture as it helped absorb Auschwitz into the German literary canon� Auschwitz, paradoxically, has served as both a void and a place of identification for German intellectuals since the 1960s: it is the place where guilt can be transformed into a theater of memory, where remembrance is transformed into redemption, and the history of the perpetrators’ defeat may be transformed into a liberation of victims� 5 On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 97 From this perspective, it seems interesting that Weiss associates Auschwitz with the otherworldliness of Dante’s Divine Comedy , which is in many ways a contrary perspective of Arendt’s “banality of evil�” Die Ermittlung is a documentary court drama on Auschwitz, but at the same time it is an “Oratorio in eleven Cantos” of selected and dramatized testimonies� Michael Bachmann has pointed out that testimonial practice in theater can only succeed if it does not aim at an illusion of reality, but instead underlines the absence of the real witnesses (see Bachmann 67)� In a paragraph quoted by Bachmann, Claude Schumacher writes: The staging of a theatrical text requires the physical presence of the actor, that “other,” that “impostor” who was not in Auschwitz� How can the actor, who lives in the same world as us, who performs in the same space which we, the audience inhabit, how can that actor effectively convince us that he is a camp inmate, a Nazi officer or even a survivor from those days? (qtd� in Schumacher 4) By letting actors cite the testimonies of real witnesses on stage without any means of illusion or reconstruction, Peter Weiss aims at a documentary theater whose function is a testimonial practice without witnesses, a drama of testimonies without theatrical representation� If the concentration camp can “only be imagined as literature not as reality,” as Imre Kertesz writes (see Bachmann 57), Die Ermittlung is a piece of dramatic literature that should not be confused with mere documentation of reality� What the audience witnesses in Die Ermittlung is instead a verbal materialization of the incomparable horror of the Shoah that despite its absence of representation still allows the audience to side with the victims and thereby to become moral witnesses themselves� Their own historical guilt is no longer the focus, it can be transferred to the actors of the Nazi perpetrators on stage� The testimonies of the victims, however, may serve as tools of identification - an identification as “sensed victims” (“gefühlte Opfer”; Jureit/ Schneider 33)� When Arendt wrote her report on the banality of evil four years earlier in 1961, and published it later as a book in 1964, she was immediately criticized by historians and politicians alike for downplaying the cruelty of Adolf Eichmann and mocking his innocent air in court� As Yasco Horsman has pointed out, Arendt’s famous wording of the banality of evil was neither meant to be a thesis on the nature of evil nor “a psychological concept explaining Eichmann’s behavior” (Horsman 18)� The formulation rather expressed Arendt’s observation as a spectator of the simple thoughtlessness that drove Eichmann’s crimes as opposed to the anti-Semitic hatred many had expected and imagined (see Horsman 17)� The banality of evil was therefore an impression that Arendt had as a distanced spectator rather than as a political actor� In her postscript Arendt states: 98 Benjamin Wihstutz Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain’� Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all� And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post� He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing� ( Eichmann 287) The scandal of Arendt’s “banality of evil” was precisely that the Shoah in her view was not enabled by a handful of evil Nazi murderers but by a bureaucratic apparatus that allowed for systematic mass murder in the first place. For Arendt this meant, as a consequence, that Eichmann could have been anyone involved in this system, anyone who “never realized what he was doing” ( Eichmann 287) by just doing his job� By describing the Auschwitz trials in detail with testimonies of torture and murder, above all the torture scenes of the “death swing” used by overseer Wilhelm Boger (see Scene 3 of Die Ermittlung ), Peter Weiss seems to aim at correcting this bureaucratic and indifferent image of people like Eichmann that Arendt drew in her reports of the trial in Jerusalem� 6 Although most of the defendants in Die Ermittlung also cannot admit guilt or any wrongdoing, Weiss portrays so much personalized evil in this play, and this evil is often rendered so explicit and real, that it is certainly far from being banal or merely bureaucratic� It is an evil that remains performative even in the testimonies of the court - placing the reality of horror images via literary means before the audience’s inner eyes as the witnesses speak� By using their testimonies as dramatic material, Weiss breaks the silence of Auschwitz, which he felt so strongly, and provides his documentary theater with a mode of representation to which the spectator can relate� 4� One aspect that neither Arendt’s critics nor Weiss seem to pay attention to is the theatricality of the tribunal itself, which Arendt’s quote on the Eichmann trial above highlights� From this perspective, the scandal of Arendt’s observations may have been less her use of the term “banality” than the fact that she described parts of the Eichmann trial as an almost laughable show trial� When Arendt comments that “comedy breaks into the horror itself, and results in stories, presumably true enough, whose macabre humor easily surpasses that of any Surrealist invention” ( Eichmann 50), she no longer observes this trial as an event of world justice but as theater� She even calls prime minister David Ben-Gurion the “invisible stage manager” (Horsman 21) of the trial and Eichmann “a clown” she likes to laugh at (Horsman 16)� Of course, “Arendt’s laughter” (Horsman 17) and her reading of the trial as a comedy had nothing to do with not taking Auschwitz seriously� First of all, the impression of a show On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 99 trial was significantly influenced by Ben-Gurion himself, who had announced that, from an Israeli perspective, the verdict mattered less than the spectacle staged for a global audience - a spectacle “to teach Israel and the world a few lessons about the Holocaust” (Horsman 20)� Secondly, Arendt wanted to point out that even the most shocking facts and testimonies can be politicized and that no court trial can represent the horror of Auschwitz or compensate for the Holocaust� Nevertheless, Arendt’s description of the Eichmann trial as theater raises the question of how to differentiate various theatrical modes of the court in general� Isn’t every court trial theatrical, after all? Under what circumstances does a trial become a show trial? And how is the theatricality of the court actually linked to the long history of court dramas in the theater? These theoretical questions cannot be addressed in detail here, but it is worth briefly discussing the theatricality of law before coming back to Arendt and Weiss� According to Alan Read, theater and law share a set of basic principles that can be attributed to any democratic court trial� First of all, like theater, law addresses the public - “law has to be seen to be done” (Read 8)� Second, like a play, a court trial also has an Aristotelian dramatic structure, consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an ending� Third, in most legal systems court procedures demand certain costumes like robes or wigs� Fourth, judicial spectacle operates simultaneously as ‘reality’ and ‘fiction.’ As a spectacular event, the trial has to happen in real time and all parties involved in it have “to agree to the status of the event for it to be viable and function” (Read 13). And fifth, law is performative in the sense that it demands performative speech acts that lead to further actions like punishment� Cornelia Vismann points out that every criminal court needs to transform the criminal act into a symbolic scene (see Vismann 32)� But the trial could not be staged at the actual crime scene since what is judged is not an act itself but the symbolic representation in the theatrical space of the courtroom� The symbolic representation is then developed collectively with the help of testimonies, inspection of evidence, and pleas� According to Vismann, it is this transformation which makes the court trial theatrical� But if every court trial is theatrical, this begs the question of how to differentiate between democratic trials, show trials, and court dramas� Or must we assume - as Erving Goffman did with regard to social life, and Rüdiger Campe with regard to political and legal representation - that all roles are, to some extent, theatrical? Instead of speaking of a general theatricality in court, I would like to apply a stricter concept of the term based on an action in the mode of “ein Handeln als-ob,” as Matthias Warstat has argued in his book Soziale Theatralität (Warstat 231—42)� It is the as-if that transforms a trial into a theatrical representation and that enables us to differentiate between social roles and costumes on the one hand, 100 Benjamin Wihstutz and dramatic representations of court trials on the other - whether it be entirely fictional, as in Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug , or documentary, as in Die Ermittlung. To use Sylvia Sasse’s terminology, the show trial can be further distinguished from both “legitimate trials” and “dramatic trials” (Sasse 138)� With reference to the Moscow trials organized by Stalin in the 1930s, Sasse demonstrates that a show trial suspends the openness of judgment, since the judgment is set before the trial even starts� As Sasse points out, everyone in Moscow - even the defendants and the audience - had to play dramatic roles (see Sasse 128)� The defendants were often forced to confess publicly to crimes they never committed in order to save their families or friends from death or torture without any chance to avoid their own death penalty, whereas the public had to play the role of the gullible masses to reinforce the totalitarian power of the regime and to verify a false version of history� Compared with the Moscow trials, it would be wrong to call the Eichmann trial a show trial� Despite the fact that everyone was expecting the death penalty as a sentence for Eichmann, and that the goal of the trial was “to teach the world a lesson” according to Ben-Gurion, none of the testimonies were bought or blackmailed, and the trial was based on factual truth� In fact, Arendt’s statement that truth has a despotic character and is hated and feared by tyrants matches Stalin’s practice of the show trial perfectly, whereas her report on the Eichmann trial does not question the validity of factual truth at all, but rather demonstrates how a democratic judicial system can deal with factual truths from the past, and that even a debate on different politics of memory is possible in Western democracy� Thus, the politicization of the trial clearly does not affect the question of Eichmann’s guilt. Arendt’s argument is much more about the interpretation and consequences of this guilt for a future memory culture� But with this interpretation a different kind of theatricality of judgment comes into play that has already been mentioned above under the notion of contemporariness� If true judgment implies the “withdrawal from direct involvement to a standpoint outside the game” (Arendt, Lectures 55), then Arendt’s goal is not to play a part in the political game of Israel teaching the world a lesson, but to keep a distance from it - to be an “emancipated spectator,” as Jacques Rancière would call it; a spectator who challenges the opposition between seeing and acting and acknowledges the capacity of every spectator to make up his own mind of the play: “The spectator also acts, like the pupil or scholar� She observes, selects, compares, interprets� She links what she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages, in other kinds of place” (Rancière 13)� In her lectures on Kant, Arendt points out that Kant’s positive judgment of the French Revolution as a great historical event for mankind was only possible because the philosopher stood back from their own interests and moral stan- On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 101 dards when faced with revolutionary violence� The distance of his spectatorship was also a literal one: observing the event more than a thousand miles away from the action in Paris, Kant’s only sources for portrayals of the Revolution were journals and letters� But despite his moral objections to violence, Arendt writes, Kant resisted taking up the role of a partial political actor� Instead, he stuck to a perspective of disinterested and impartial judgment, one that Kant otherwise ascribes to aesthetic judgment� Aesthetic judgment, from a Kantian perspective, is without interest, which means that it is not bound to immediate responses to sensations like taste but to a distance from the judged objects that is created by the mere power of imagination, and to a judgment of the imagined objects “as though they were objects of an inner sense” (Arendt, Lectures 64)� The political dimension of true judgment for Arendt, therefore, does not imply bias or partisanship but the universal aim of a common sense to share and communicate judgment with other spectators as world-spectators� By observing and reporting the trial in Jerusalem, Arendt sees herself as such a world-spectator, distancing herself from her own feelings of revenge and anger, focusing on the theatricality of the trial and the political intentions that shaped the trial setting and its dominant reception� Paradoxically, although maybe not surprisingly, it took a Jewish philosopher living in the United States to contradict the dominant reception of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and to point out the collective responsibility of the German people in contrast to the idea of payback time against a Nazi villain - a standpoint that neither Hochhuth nor Weiss were ready to fully embrace when writing about Nazi Germany and the Shoah� In 1966, Peter Weiss decided to attend another tribunal, this time not as a spectator but as a member of the tribunal committee� Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre had organized the tribunal on the International War Crimes in Vietnam, indicting the United States and its allies and focusing public attention on the crimes and atrocities committed by the US military in Southeast Asia� Here, the contradiction between the forensic claim and the politicized position of the tribunal can hardly be overlooked� When Russell states at the beginning of the trial that “[o]ur purpose is to establish, without fear or favour, the full truth about this war” (723), he reveals that the actual goal of the tribunal was less a due process but to demonstrate evidence of the American war crimes by presenting its victims to the Western public� From today’s point of view, these pictures also have an unsettling colonial bias with white male experts inspecting young and helpless victims from Vietnam� Apparently, the subaltern is not supposed to speak here, it is Western philosophers who do the speaking� 7 But even with this white Western and anti-imperialist voice, the tribunal apparently still consisted of different opinions and viewpoints. In his notebook from 1968, Peter Weiss expresses his frustration at the lack of unity in the tribunal: 102 Benjamin Wihstutz Die Widersprüche innerhalb des anti-imperialistischen Lagers sind so groß, dass der beispielhafte Kampf Viet Nams die Solidaritätsbewegungen draußen nicht zu einigen vermag, sondern daß sich in deren Vorstößen doch nur weitere Gegensätze und Zerteilungen anbahnen� (Weiss, Notizbücher I, 540) This dissent obviously contradicted Weiss’s own attitude as a political writer� In 1965, he had stated that Jedes Wort, das ich niederschreibe und der Veröffentlichung übergebe, ist politisch, d� h� es zielt auf einen Kontakt mit größeren Bevölkerungsgruppen hin, um dort eine bestimmte Wirkung zu erlangen� […] Da meine Worte immer nur einen verschwindend kleinen Teil ausmachen innerhalb der allgemeinen Opinion, muß ich die größtmögliche Präzision erreichen, um mit meiner Meinung durchdringen zu können� (Weiss, “10 Arbeitspunkte” 14) It seems obvious that, for Weiss, a tribunal in a play seems to be superior to a tribunal in real life. In drama, reality can be shaped and clarified in a way that is able to convince the audience more easily of what is right. Significantly, a play does not have just one audience like a court trial but can be multiplied to reach out to different audiences in different places. 5� When Die Ermittlung premiered in 1965 it was staged in fifteen different productions in East and West Germany, as well as in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company� This ring premiere highlighted Weiss’s claim to be enlightening for the public - simultaneously reaching out to an international audience in sixteen different cities to tell the truth about Auschwitz by the means of documentary theater� Two of the most prominent productions were staged in Berlin under Erwin Piscator’s direction, and in Stuttgart under Peter Palitzsch� According to Henning Rischbieter, the two different audiences got to see completely different plays. In Stuttgart the stage was brightly lit with witnesses entering through a door giving a sober testimony in front of an audience that was given no chance to become immersed in illusions� Music and projections stressed the documentary character of the play� The Berlin production, on the contrary, was criticized by Rischbieter with regard to the way the audience was addressed and influenced by the staging: Erwin Piscators Inszenierung ist zugleich feierlich, theatralisch und polemisch; Sachlichkeit - die dem Zuschauer Freiheit ließe zu intellektuellen Reaktionen - ist ganz von der Bühne vertrieben; vorherrschend ist die Absicht zu erschüttern, zu betäuben, anzuklagen� Das Publikum wird in den Zustand von Fassungslosen und Mitleidenden versetzt� (Rischbieter 114) On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 103 Moreover, according to Rischbieter, the sympathy and identification with the victims was blatantly enabled by a demonization of the defendants as an evil and cynical chorus (“ein bösartiger, zynischer Chor”), that laughed scornfully at the audience, while the witnesses appeared as helpless victims� One can only speculate that Rischbieter’s biased judgment probably exaggerates the contrast between the two stagings� His goal seems to be to deliver a harsh criticism of famous theater director Erwin Piscator who, in his eyes, no longer fits in with West German theater of the 1960s. From today’s historical distance it is hard to tell which version one would prefer: the sober version from Stuttgart or Piscator’s more radical politicized version� It is in fact likely that from a contemporary perspective the historical distance to both of these productions would enable us to take a more disinterested perspective on both, with the impression that today they may similarly look quite outdated with regard to the style of acting, the stage design, lighting and music� The bias of Rischbieter’s description itself and the obvious difference between the two productions leads us to an insight that Arendt also presents in her lectures on Kant and that is often forgotten when political and documentary theater is discussed� She states that aesthetic judgment itself has a political dimension, which lies in the contradiction between an individual and subjective judgment of taste on the one hand, and the claim of the universal communicability of aesthetic judgment on the other (see Beiner)� By providing a forum for discussion and debate about taste (both in the theater and especially after the show), documentary theater can provide a public sphere where common sense (in the meaning of Kant’s Gemeinsinn ) is negotiated and agonistically contested� Therefore, plays like Die Ermittlung should not be reduced to a mere documentation of facts, nor to an educational purpose. Each staging rather provides an occasion to reflect, represent, and think about the history of the Shoah and the ways in which its memory is kept alive� It follows from Arendt’s thoughts on truth, politics, and judgment that documentary theater should not be limited to agit-prop nor to political opinion-making� Rather, each new production may provide a “theatrical public sphere” that goes beyond the actual performance (see Balme), and this is something Weiss ignores in his fourteen propositions� Within the theatrical public sphere, different opinions and judgments can collide and may be confronted with each other� It is precisely this public sphere of judgment that Arendt fought for time and again in her political philosophy, especially since she saw the public sphere slip - in Hitler’s and Goebbels’s Germany, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and in McCarthy’s United States� 8 104 Benjamin Wihstutz Notes 1 There have been many books, especially by Jewish authors, that have triggered political debates in Germany on the Shoah� From Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996) or Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009) to Max Czollek’s polemic essay Desintegriert Euch! (2016), it has been a polarizing issue how Germans take responsibility for the Shoah or appropriate Jewish positions or even a position as “sensed victims” ( Jureit/ Schneider 33), i�e�, the self-perception by those associated with the perpetrators of violence that they, too, are victims� The political debate has become especially tricky in Germany since the 2010s, when it became intertwined with Israeli politics and discussions about anti-Semitism and the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel� This has led to paradoxical situations like German government functionaries calling Jewish intellectuals and organizations anti-Semitic when they take a critical stance towards Israeli politics� 2 In some ways one could say that Agamben himself had set this trap with his own reading of Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception�” This triggered him to see the measures against Covid-19 as a harbinger for the end of democracy as we know it (see Agamben, “Nach Corona”)� 3 Recent debates on Arendt’s own blind spots of colonial and even racist thinking in her work show that she certainly could not escape her own times entirely. Her comments on the Civil Rights Movement (“Reflections on Little Rock”) as well as on post-colonial Africa ( The Origins of Totalitarianism) clearly contradict and complicate her concept of a world-spectator and raise the question of whether judging history impartially and un-timely is even possible� This debate goes beyond the parameters of the present essay, since it shifts the attention away from the argument about documentary theater and the theatricality of judgment� However, I would like to acknowledge the importance of this debate, since it demonstrates not only the extent to which structural racism has influenced continental philosophy as a whole, but also shows how even a Jewish philosopher and important thinker like Arendt could not escape the racist logic embedded in the Eurocentric strands of Enlightenment (see Gines; Rothberg 33—65; Smith 1—18)� 4 It is noteworthy that Weiss had Jewish roots himself� He had a Jewish father who had converted to Christianity, which Weiss only found out when the family emigrated in the 1930s� Thus, although Weiss did not grow up Jewish (also, Jewishness is traditionally passed on by the mother), he did feel connected to the victims of the Shoah, asking himself why he survived, On Truth and Politics in German Documentary Theater of the 1960s 105 especially since many people who were ‘half-Jewish’ were also murdered by the Nazis (see Weiss, Notizbücher I, 293)� 5 Max Czollek especially criticizes the famous speech which German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker held on 8 May 1985, forty years after the end of WWII� Weizsäcker said that the 8 th of May was the day that “liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime�” During the same speech, Weizsäcker quoted Ba’al Shem Tov’s words: “[T] he secret of redemption lies in remembrance�” 6 Of course, one should add that the two trials were very different and cannot be compared directly� 7 The parallel to Spivak’s famous critique of Foucault and Deleuze speaking for the subaltern is obvious and intended (see Spivak)� 8 I would like to thank Daniel Hendrickson and Nathan Taylor for their excellent help with the editing and revision of my English writing as well as Daniele Vecchiato and Matthew Bell for inviting me to King’s College London to a wonderful conference and to contribute to this special issue of Colloquia Germanica � I am very grateful for their editing and thoughtful commentary, as well as for the excellent and thorough reviews, which have been of great value to me� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft�” Gesammelte Schriften � Vol� 10/ 1� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977� Agamben, Giorgio� “What is the Contemporary? ” What is an Apparatus? 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