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The Hebrew University of Jerusalem European Forum Center for German Studies

Jan Khne Suspension of Belief and Dissimulation of Absence: Themes in the Theatrical and Critical Reception of Nathan the Wise in Israel, Germany and Austria after 1945

Table of Contents
1) Introduction ............................................................................................................... 3 2) Contemporary Nathan the Wise Productions ............................................................. 8 3) Nathan the Wise Guest Productions in Israel........................................................... 13 3.1. The Vienna Burgtheater Production in 1968 ..................................................... 13 3.2. Schauspielhaus Dsseldorf, 1985 ..................................................................... 18 3.3. Theatre of Heilbronn, 1998 ............................................................................... 20 4) The Israeli Nathan the Wise Productions ................................................................. 23 4.1. The Habimah Production in 1966 ..................................................................... 25 4.2. The Kibbutz Shoval Production in 1966 ........................................................... 28 4.3. Doron Tavorys Production in 2004 .................................................................. 31 5) Joshua Sobols Nathan the Other ............................................................................ 35 6) Joshua Sobols Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan ........................................... 38 6.1. The Vienna Volkstheater Production of Bloody Nathan ................................... 40 6.2. The Bremen Theater Production of Bloody Nathan.......................................... 42 7) Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 45 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 47

1) Introduction1
A multi-tragic paradigm2 for Jewish fascination with German culture is the writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his theatre play Nathan the Wise (1779). The only German books known to have been translated into Hebrew until 1881 are five works by Lessing, including three different translations of his dramatic poem Nathan the Wise, one by M. Berliner (1856), another by Shimon Bacher (1866) and the third by Abraham Br Gottlober (1874).3 The strength of the fascination held by Jews for German culture is said by some scholars to have augmented a utopian idealism among many German and East European Jews, throughout the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth century. This phenomenon effectively diminished realistic assessments of socio-political changes in the immediate surroundings of these Jews. In Nathan the Wise, for example, Paul Mendes-Flohr identifies one cause for what he diagnoses as a psychic imbalance in German Jewry, i.e. although emancipated Jews were still attached to traditional Judaism, in their antithetical aspirations they were unable to base themselves on a concrete and reliable foothold in German society and culture. Nevertheless, according to Mendes-Flohr, motivated by an optimism generated in the elated readings of Nathan, they pursued this underlying, unattainable aspiration responsible for the respective self-destructive tendency noted in the traditional Jewish identity.

According to Mendes-Flohr, from a Jewish point of view something is profoundly troubling about the play, especially regarding the portrayal of Nathan, but most Jews revered Lessing too much and prized the play too much to dare to raise any
1

With regard to the study underlying this article (A Multi-Tragic Paradigm: Nathan the Wise in Israel), I owe heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Jeanette Malkin, Prof. Dr. Anat Feinberg and Prof. Dr. Jakob Hessing, and especially to the Center for German Studies at the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for their generous sponsorship. Without them this research would not have been possible. Also, thanks to Lindsay King, for her indispensable comments. I borrowed this term from the indispensable essay by Gad Kaynar, Lessing and Non-Lessing on the Israeli Stage: Notes on Some Theological, Political and Theatrical Aspects, Lessing Yearbook 2000 XXXII (2000): 367. See: Naama Sheffi, German in Hebrew: Translations from German into Hebrew in Jewish Palestine: 1882-1948 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi and Leo Baeck Institute [Hebr.], 1998), 50, 71. M. Berliner translated only the ring parable: M. Berliner, trans., Die drei Lessingschen Ringe. 5., 6., und 7. Auftritt des 3. Aufzugs aus Nathan der Weise (Mannheim: Buchdruckerei H. Hogrefe, 1856).

questions.4 This troubling detail can be found in the fact that Nathan is the only and last Jew in Lessings Jerusalem, as Jakob Hessing points out: Lessings Western Weltanschauung does not, despite all good intentions, leave any place for Jews as a group.5 Nevertheless, according to Max Brod, the philanthropist Nathan must be seen before the background of his authors biography: at the time of his work on Nathan, Lessings lifelong love Eva Knig and their only child died, in addition to his increasing social isolation by state censorship. This left Lessing, just like Nathan, lonesome and old, without offspring.6 Regarding this noted absence of Jews in the play other than Nathan, and its various implications, Lessings text itself allows deducing the presence of other Jews in Jerusalem, since the Patriarchs interrogation in IV.2 would otherwise be superfluous. However, Nathans popularity was established despite these troubling details, which led theatre scholar Haim Shoham, similar to Mendes-Flohr, to detect in Nathan and its popularity a preventive agent (Verhinderungswirkung), which hindered the realization of the Zionist solution; and is thereby implied to have contributed indirectly to the Nazis Final Solution. Lessings utopian vision of mankind peacefully united by reason, as well as his espousal of the Jews had reinforced Jewish hopes of emancipation. For many liberal Jews, Nathan the Wise not only embodied Lessings friend Moses Mendelssohn, the father of Jewish Enlightenment, but also epitomized a mythical golden age of German Jewry. However, Nathan can be said to be a reflection both of Lessing and Mendelssohn.7 Therefore, one source of this myth, or Nathan Legend, appears to lie in their asymmetric friendship: This project of reaching out for the other in the name of equality is according to Georg Simmel the defining principle of friendship in modernity, which set through Nathan a paradigm in modern German-Jewish relations and identity.8

6 7 8

Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 36. Jacob Hessing, Epilogue, in G. E. Lessing: Nathan der Weise, trans. Josef Zur (Jerusalem: Carmel [Hebr.], 1999), 225. Max Brod, Nathan the Wise: Drama of Tolerance?, Davar (December 2, 1966): 7. Brod, Nathan the Wise: Drama of Tolerance?, 4; Hessing, Epilogue, 225. See the instructive essay by: Willi Goetschel, Lessing and the Jews, in A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ed. Barbara Fischer and Thomas Fox (New York: Camden House, 2005), 196ff. I owe deep gratitude to Prof. Goetschel for pointing out to me and providing me with literature essential to this topic.

Respective hopes and dreams persisted far beyond the German unification in 1871, sixty-three years after Westphalia had as the first German state granted legal equality to Jews, which it later renounced before granting it again.9 Modern secular Jews remained loyal to Lessings humanist vision despite various such insecurities and disappointments, among them the failure of the French Revolution, its violent backlash, the rise of romantic-exclusivist nationalism and modern anti-Semitism, and, of course, the Nazi terror. The Enlightenment values Nathan promoted became intrinsic to the modern secular German-Jewish self-definition, up to an allegorical point where Nathans loving care for his adopted daughter Recha can be said to have substituted the Jewish passion for the divine female presence of rabbinical traditions, the Shekhina. In that love immaculate, modern Jews in Germany and also in Eastern Europe became agents of the German humanist tradition through their increasingly enthusiastic, albeit initially reserved reception of Nathan the Wise.

The premiere of Nathan in the first private theatre of Berlin (which was later to become the Theater unter den Linden and the Komische Oper) on April 14, 1783, had been a failure, just as the German premiere of The Merchant of Venice in Berlin on August 16, 1788. With regard to the expected attendance of the Jewry (Judenschaft) a harmless reviewer remarked that it had not taken place, since the Jewry had been, apparently on their own account, too modest, in order to listen to an apology, which had, of course, not been written for contemporary Jews.10 This demonstrative Jewish absence from the premiere of Nathan the Wise is documented repeatedly. It is especially astonishing since Lessings old and influential friend Moses Mendelssohn had at this point been actively participating in Berlins cultural life, more than ever before.11 Yet in the course of the nineteenth century, the reception of Nathan was to become eventually more predominant, especially among Jews in Germany and also in Eastern Europe, than among non-Jewish populations.12 For George Lachmann Mosse,

10

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12

Cf. for introduction and reversion Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ltesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 vols. (Leipzig: Leiner, 1900), vol. 11: Geschichte der Juden vom Beginn der Mendelssohnschen Zeit (1750) bis in die neueste Zeit (1848), 287. Reprint of the edition of last hand: Berlin: arani, 1998. See: Erich Schmidt, Lessing Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, Bd. II (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1899), 415. See: Arno Paul, Die Formierung des jdischen Theaterpublikums in Berlin im spten 18. Jahrhundert. Eine quellenkritische Skizze., in Theatralia Judaica, n.d., 68ff., 80. See e.g.: Chaim Shoham, Nathan the Wise among His Own (Tel Aviv: Eked [Hebr.], 1981), 7.

therefore, Lessings play Nathan the Wise was and remained the Magna Charta of German Jewry, the popularization of Bildung and the Enlightenment.13 So strong and persistent is the fusion of modern Jewish identity with Lessings enlightened vision that Zionists like Theodor Herzl, Ahad Haam and even Menachem Begin in the 1970s were unable to ignore the grip that Nathan had on German and, to some extent, all East European Jewry as well. Literature scholar Ritchie Robertson detects a rereading of Nathans ring allegory by Herzl in the context of his theatre play The New Ghetto (Das neue Ghetto) Herzls term for the condition of Jewish emancipation that lacked equality in self-abusive assimilation. This evil ghetto, likened by Herzl to a ring, deformed Judaism, the ring finger on humanitys hand.14 Ahad Haam (Asher Ginzburg) repudiates Nathan as a song of slavery, and views the enthusiasm it caused and the pleasure drawn from it as a sign of depraved spirit.15 Begin argues in his foreword to the 1978 Hebrew edition of Herzls Altneuland that if Jews had waited for the gentiles to arrive at a refinement of the soul, as advocated in Nathan, they hardly would have survived. Begin also contends with regard to the abovementioned developments following the historical period of the Enlightenment, that this refinement has practically never taken place.16 The fact that Zionist leaders of these magnitudes felt the need to refer to Lessings Nathan at all shows the inevitable impact of Lessings play.

With regard to the pursuit of Jewish national definitions, Nathan posed a rival solution to the proposals of the Zionists, a solution inclined towards liberal socialism and the dream of egalitarianism. Jews upheld this dream despite Nazi terror and delegitimization, as in the example of the only silent-movie adaptation and also the
13

14

15

16

See: George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 15. Cf. Mendes-Flohr for whom Mosses spiritual Magna Carta proves to be a rather happy expression. See: Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity, 36. See: Ritchie Robertson, The Jewish Question in German Literature 1749-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 248. For Herzls quote see: Theodor Herzl, Briefe und Tagebcher, ed. Alex Bein (Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna: Julius H. Schoeps und Johannes Wachten Propylen Verlag, 1983), vol. 1, 610. Shoham, Nathan the Wise among His Own, 85. See also: . , , : 0091-8981, . .. See: Theodor Herzl, Preface by Menachem Begin, in Der Judenstaat, trans. Mordechai Joeli (Hadera: Aharonoth Publ. [Hebr.], 1978), 13ff.

first film of the play in 1922. Manfred Noa reframed Nathans ring-allegory into an Orientalist parable for democracy and socialism: the loving hand transmitting the original ring are the people, rather than tradition or God. However, already by that time, Nazis prevented the movies screening.17 It is well known that after the National Socialists had risen to power in 1933, the newly founded Jdischer Kulturbund initiated its repertoire with a Nathan the Wise production under the artistic direction of Fritz Wisten. German Jews could now claim Nathan the Wise as truly their own for Lessings play was no longer permitted on the German stage, notes Mosse, who concludes: the German-Jewish Bildungsbrgertum, more than any other single group, preserved Germanys better self across dictatorship, war, holocaust, and defeat.18

17

18

See: Stefan Drssler, Der Fall Nathan der Weise, in Manfred Noa Nathan der Weise (Movie), (ed. Mnchen: Filmmuseum, Goethe Institut, 2006). See: Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism, 79-82.

2) Contemporary Nathan the Wise Productions

The post-war theatre productions of Nathan the Wise in Germany and Austria clearly reflect Mosses view. The Deutsches Theater in Berlin reopened with Nathan the Wise just four months after the end of the Second World War. It was directed by Fritz Wisten, the Austrian Jew who had been director of the Kulturbund and was a former prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Leopold Lindtberg is another famous Jewish director responsible for productions of Nathan the Wise at the Burgtheater in Vienna.19 There the lead role was played by Ernst Deutsch, a Jewish actor originally from Prague, who did not act the role of Nathan, he was Nathan.20 Thus, enforced by Jewish artists, Nathan the Wise had become the paradigm of German post-war theatre by 1945. Over the subsequent decades, Jewish artists like George Tabori and Peter Zadek continued to exert decisive influence over the Nathan productions in Germany, as part of a complex of stereotypical German perceptions of the Other. This essentially connects to Nathans alter-ego Shylock, who had been abused for Nazi propaganda. Further, its contemporary productions are increasingly influenced by a growing anxiety towards the expanding Muslim presence in Europe, as Karl Josef Kuschel has observed. Kuschel presents an interesting panorama of German efforts to anchor Lessings alleged song of tolerance through youth projects in the Muslim societies of Karachi, Dakar, Addis Ababa, Cairo and Los Angeles, albeit all of which were initiated mostly by German Protestant organizations, by the Goethe Institute and with funds from the European Union. However, none of these projects developed into autonomous productions or were received beyond their Christian-German initiatives, nor did they become part of respective local-culture canons. One of the main reasons for this situation in the Islamic world may be the fact that apparently only one published Arab
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Lindtberg and the Burgtheater also recorded a production for Austrian television: Nathan der Weise (1964) (TV), The Internet Movie Database, n.d., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418000. In addition to Noahs Nathan (1922) and Lindtbergs, hitherto four German movie productions were directed by Karl-Heinz Stroux (1956), Franz Peter Wirth (1967), Oswald Dpke (1979) and Uwe Eric Laufenberg (2006). See: IMDb, The Internet Movie Database, n.d., http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=nathan+der+weise. See the indispensable essay by Anat Feinberg, The Janus-Faced Jew: Nathan and Shylock on the Postwar German Stage, in Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945-2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 135.

translation exists, i.e. by the Christian Arabic teacher Elijas Nasr-Allah Haddad, who had been headmaster and German teacher at the Syrian orphanage school in Jerusalem in 1932.21 Haddad also published a small dictionary, specific to the vocabulary of his translation.22 His Nathan project therefore can be surmised to have served teaching the German language, while attempting to introduce Secularization and

Enlightenment into the Arab world. In the foreword to his translation, Haddad emphasizes the necessity of this enterprise.23 In a similar fashion the theologian Kuschel emphasizes the necessity of a modern Arabic translation of Nathan.24

Before the background of the expanding Muslim presence in Europe, however, Nathan is still produced on German stages also with regard to the increasing discomfort and xenophobic populism which accompanies this phenomenon. Here Nathan serves theatres and pedagogues as both an antidote and universal model for delegitimizing and deconstructing stereotypes, in order to foster inter-cultural dialogue. Beginning in 2000, various youth projects used Nathan the Wise as a platform for international, inter-religious encounters between high school students, with emphasis on the Jewish, Christian and Islamic relations; especially focusing on Israel, Germany and Palestine.25 All projects shared essentially the same didactic
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23 24

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nassan Al-Hakhim, trans. Elias Nasr-Allah Haddad (Jerusalem: Syrian Orphanage Press, 1932). Elias Nasr-Allah Haddad, Wrterbchlein zu Nathan der Weise (Jerusalem (assumed) [National Library S 36C 3/90]: Syrian Orphanage Press (ass.), 1932). I owe thanks to Nidaa Assaliyeh for her patient help in translating. Karl-Josef Kuschel, Jud, Christ und Muselmann vereinigt? Lessings Nathan der Weise (Dsseldorf: Patmos, 2004), 24. Interestingly, probably the first Oriental production of Lessings Nathan the Wise was put on 1834 in Constantinople, Turkey. Under the title The Wise Jewish Elder, Lessings Nathan the Wise was staged in a Greek(!) translation and Orientalistic production (ganz im Geiste des Morgenlandes gehalten und auch demselben entlehnt). According to the report in the GermanJewish newspaper Sulamith, especially the fable of the rings apparently entertained the Turks and the Sultan present in the audience: In the end jubilations broke out, into which even the most taciturnly Muslims joined (Am Schlusse der Erzhlung brach ein Jubel aus, in den auch die schweigsamsten Moslem einstimmten). Anonym., Konstantinopel, Sulamith Jg 8, Nr. 2 (1834): 261. The 2000 project was conducted with German, Israeli and Palestinian students by the Protestant church community Johannes-der-Tufer in Hannover-Wettbergen, with the support of the German Ministry of Education and Research. After each of the three groups had staged their production in Hannover, they finally staged together a trilingual performance in Berlin, in October 2000. This project was paralleled by four similar productions of German, Israeli, Turkish and Greek students in Duisburg, Germany (July 2000), and was continued in Marmaris, Turkey (2001), in the framework of the European Union and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The 2002 attempt to bring this multicultural youth-exchange to Tel Aviv failed because of the Second Intifada. In 2009 Nathan was again initiated by a Protestant church community, in cooperation with an anthroposophical school in Kibbutz Hardof, Israel. Three performances were produced, with German, Israeli and Palestinian

method. After having each group stage Nathan in its own language, style and context, the groups met for a joint production, whereby the actors were interchanged und recombined so as to have one or many multi-lingual Nathan productions, at times containing parallel repetitions of the same scene within one performance. The production processes themselves were accompanied by exchange programs and various workshop activities, so that the students became familiar with the cultural, religious and personal backgrounds of the respective other.

All productions were initiated, organized and produced primarily by German organizations, affiliated in one way or another with Protestant church communities. Beyond their didactic interests, for which they appropriated Nathan as a solution for intra-German socio-religious conflicts, these groups also sought in Nathan a remedy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most directors and participants, though, argued in our interviews that any theatre play could serve as a trigger for trans- and intercultural encounters, not just Nathan. Nevertheless, as one of the Turkish participants, Asli Sahlin stated: It could have been any play but surely Nathan put a bit more spice in the dish subconsciously.26 Closer research could possibly identify in these productions of Nathan a German, predominantly Protestant Christian desire to reroot and extend the ideal of a Jewish-German cultural encounter towards a JewishChristian-Muslim cultural symbiosis.27 Attempts, however, to transform Nathan into a paradigm for a new German-Jewish/Israeli encounter via these youth projects in Israel failed. Plans for the due to security reasons suspended 2002 Euro-Med project in Tel Aviv show a parting from Lessings Nathan to a broader creative framework.28

Nathan the Wise continues to be one of the most popular theatre plays performed on the German stage (seventeen productions alone in latest figures from the 2008-09 season).29 This phenomenon can be explained also through the plays noted function as Wiedergutmachungsdrama (reconciliation drama), apparently enabled by the

26 27 28 29

students in Basel and in southern Germany (Winterbach/ Remstal, Freiburg). Email to me: July 19, 2010. Cf. Karl-Josef Kuschel, Jud, Christ und Muselmann vereinigt? Lessings Nathan der Weise. At the Tel Aviv-Yaffo municipality. See file number: 2015A. A decrease by eight productions in comparison to the 2007/8 season. See the URL: http://www.buehnenverein.de/de/presse/pressemeldungen.html?det=261.

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forgiving attitude of Nathan, the sole and, apparently, last Jew.30 I assert that the canonical theatrical and curricular presence of the fictional Jew Nathan in the German public sphere after the Second World War functions also as a dissimulation of Jewish absence that is, not only as a simulation of a Jewish presence which no longer exists, but also as a suppression of loss.31 The German Nathan productions can be said to create a virtual, almost simulacric presence of Jews after their annihilation in Nazi Germany, and also to repress a subsequently felt absence. It can be likened to a totemization in Freuds sense,32 accompanied by its taboo to present Jews on the postwar stage only in a favourable light. The Jewish director Peter Zadek was the first to break this taboo with his 1961 production of The Merchant of Venice in Ulm.

Theatrical dissimulations of Jewish absence in the public sphere can be said to have a detrimental effect on Jewish presence outside the theatre as well. 33 As is the problem with any play presenting only one Jewish character, Nathan also stands symbolically for all Jews, and since the 1933 Kulturbund production for their forced violent disappearance in Germany.34 Nathan has become a reminder of the curiously absent presence35 of Jews, with the well-intended productions of Nathan the Wise

30

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34

35

See: Maariv 28.10.1966 [Hebr.], also: Jo-Jacqueline Eckardt, Lessings Nathan the Wise and the Critics: 1779-1991 (Columbia: Camden House, 1993), 63. See also: Anat Feinberg, Wiedergutmachung im Programm Jdisches Schicksal im deutschen Nachkriegsdrama (Kln: Prometh Verlag, 1988). See also fn. 5,6 The term dissimulation was chosen because it in itself implies an absence, and the danger of a simulacric image. Compare: To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesnt have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, in Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 3. Here I only recognize this phenomenon, whose social, political and therapeutic functions underlie a separate discourse. See also fn. 33. The function of a Totem in Freuds sense is to symbolize the murdered, which has become sacred (in a process retroactively seen as sacrifice, as the word Holocaust connotes) through feelings of shame and guilt. The various reenactments of Nathan in Germany and by Germans can, then, also be seen as having a catalyzing function for the death wish towards the totem, i.e. the Jews, which is implied by its taboo. Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu : einige Uebereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1961). It bears the danger of a transition to the hyperreal a simulacric image with no connection whatsoever to a profound reality with its decisive turning point being The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing. See: Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, 6. Also: fn. 22. Mit der Figur des Juden auf der Bhne untrennbar verbunden ist die Erkenntnis, da der Jude nicht nur ein bestimmtes religises oder ethnisches Phnomen darstellt, [Reich-Ranicki...] sondern gewissermaen nach Auschwitz zum Reprsentanten eines Volkes geworden ist, in dessen kollektivem Gedchtnis ide Erinnerung an den Holocaust unauslschlich eingegraben ist. See: Anat Feinberg, Wiedergutmachung im Programm Jdisches Schicksal im deutschen Nachkriegsdrama (Kln: Prometh Verlag, 1988), 8ff. Decontextualized usage of a term borrowed from the essay by Goetschel, Lessing and the Jews,

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after 1945 always being in danger of reducing the ambivalently charged neurotic relationships of Germans to Jews to the fiction of a symbiotic coexisting presence, by dissimulating Jewish absence in public consciousness.36 Thereby, the canonical Jew Nathan has impressed himself so deeply into the German collective consciousness as an idealized human figure that he threatens to impose his definition not only with regard to what it means to be a good human, but also what a good Jew or rather, one tolerated in German eyes ought to look like. Even today Jewish directors and actors in Germany continue to labour in Germany against this philo-Semitic stereotyping.

36

185. This is reminiscent of the compulsive acts and fearful conscience of the neurotic, as described by Freud, whose wish to kill an ambivalently charged person expresses itself by an exaggerated concern and preoccupation with the loved person. Non-accordance with this positively presented wish would, in the mind of the neurotic, constitute a justification for killing that loved person. See: Freud, Totem und Tabu: einige Uebereinstimmungen im Seelenleben der Wilden und der Neurotiker.

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3) Nathan the Wise Guest Productions in Israel

3.1. The Vienna Burgtheater Production in 1968
As Austrian and German gestures of good intentions, reconciliation, solidarity, and symbols of a new Austrian or new German after the Second World War, Nathan the Wise was put on in three guest-performances in Israel.37 In 1968, the Wiener Burgtheater began its world tour in Israel under the artistic direction of Leopold Lindtberg with three performances. Among them was Nathan the Wise, the Burgtheaters most important contributionfor an examination, which only begins where the ring parable ends.38 Indeed, since Lothar Mthel had been allowed to direct the post-war premiere of Nathan the Wise at the Burgtheater in Vienna in December 1945, this examination was highly controversial and could not avoid a selfreflection on historical guilt and responsibilities. The former Nazi Party member Lothar Mthel had been director of the Burgtheater from 1939 until the end of the war. His 1943 production of Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice with Werner Krau as Shylock is notoriously known for its ideological [i.e. anti-Semitic] rape of the source text.39 Foremost among the crucial changes and their dissimulations of Jewish absence in Vienna at the time, Shylocks daughter Jessica was turned into a half-Jewish, almost pure Aryan woman, not of Shylocks blood. This racial wedge driven into the relations between Jews and Christians may, therefore, provide a point of comparison to the relationship between Nathan and his adopted daughter Recha. Furthermore, Mthel and Krau presented Shylock as an archetypical villain, while his adaptation of Nathan the Wise in 1945 presented the Jew merely in an

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There has also been a French production at the Israel Festival in 2004/2006, with the directors Thierry Charlier and Guillaume Ledun. Nathans universal relevance and naivety make its productions repeatedly necessary, in the view of Dominique Lurquel. See URL: http://passeursmemoires.free.fr/Nathan_le_Sage.html. Also, Jan Mller-Wielands opera Nathans Tod had been invited by Hanna Munitz, head of the Israeli Opera, to Israel in 2001, but the project was cancelled because of the intifada. Email by Matteo de Monti to me, April 21, 2010. Emanuel Bin Gorion, Im Lande Nathans, in Die Welttournee des Burgtheaters, ed. Friedrich Langer (Wien-Berlin: Verlag A. F. Koska, 1969), 93ff. Oliver Rathkolb, Fhrertreu und Gottbegnadet. Knstlereliten im Dritten Reich (Wien: sterreichischer Bundesverlag, 1991), 162. See also: Markus Grassl, Reinhard Grapp and Eike Rathgeber, eds., Kontinuitten der staatlichen Kulturverwaltung, in sterreichs Neue Musik nach 1945: Karl Schiske (Wien: Bhlau, 2008), 34.

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inverted fashion, as a fairy tale.40 The Burgtheaters choice of Nathan the Wise for its world tour beginning in Israel, therefore, had to and did represent a self-examination, and -criticism, as well as a certain reckoning with its own self-abandonment to the Nazis, to their ideology and praxis. This reckoning with the Burgtheaters past was explicitly formulated by Emanuel bin Gorion, son of the well-known Hebrew writer Micha Josef Berdyczewski (Mikhah Yosef Bin-Gorion). He contributed an essay about the Burgtheaters guest productions in Israel to a book by Friedrich Langer that officially recapitulated the Burgtheaters world tour.41 The essay begins with a condemnation of the inner emigration, that is, a forced yet willful withdrawal from social, political and foremost human responsibilities, which many artists had claimed apologetically as an excuse for their compromises to the Nazi terror regime. Mthel is implicitly mentioned in Bin Gorions account of celebrities, who could make a career thrice with this kind of apology: before, during and after the Third Reich.42 This, however, would not purify them of their guilt but further expose their egoistic weaknesses, writes Bin Gorion. In his opinion the Burgtheater had now returned to its artistic duty and secular post-war obligation to commemorate. In addition, he states that with director Lindtberg and actors like Ernst Deutsch and Paul Hrbiger, reality had infused the theatre play to such a degree that a separation would no longer be possible. Their survival of Nazi persecutions had turned them into champions [Vorkmpfer] of Lessings truth, into revivers [Verlebendiger] who had proven their loyalty to art and thereby made the staging of Nathan possible at all; to whom Bin Gorion demands to be allowed to prostrate himself in admiration.43

Some characters of Nathan, therefore, appear to have drawn a special legitimization from (post-) war reality through these once persecuted actors, writes Bin Gorion. Through the Shoah the play had gained a relevance, which Lessing could

40

41 42 43

Hilde Haider-Pregler, Shylock 1943, Maske und Kothurn Internationale Beitrge zur Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, 2010, 120-123. Bin Gorion, Im Lande Nathans. Ibid., 89. Ihr berleben, als Menschen und Knstler zugleich, erhebt sie erst zu Vorkmpfern der Lessingschen Wahrheit, wie sie Knstler vergangener Generationen, die in beiden Rollen brilliert haben, sie auch nur hnlich nicht durchlitten haben knnen. Ibid., 103.

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not possibly have had a premonition of. This relevance, however, which Bin Gorion bases in the timeless quality attributed to Lessings Nathan, is said to contain yet further references to contemporary times: in its outlawry not only of religious but also of nationalistic fanaticism, Lessings dramatic poem also relates to the case of Jews regained power over Jerusalem, and not only to the various historic (re-)conquests by Christians or Muslims.44 Yes, Nathan the Wise, writes Bin Gorion, staged in the Hebrew Jerusalem of the year 1968, almost a year after the Six-Day War, which had brought the reunification of the city, and twenty [years] after the proclamation of the state of Israel; but also not even twenty-four after the murder-machine had come to halt, which had orphaned every surviving Jew in the world: this was a [kind of] theatre, which only Lessing could have intended and preconceived, who had not only presented to his contemporaries this immortal Shibboleth.45

Nathan the Wise, therefore, was found appropriate for beginning in Israel the world tour of the Vienna Burgtheater, since the production would contain references to the Shoah and the Burgtheaters own Nazi history. Justification it drew from its goodwill and the feeling of an honest fulfilling of a special mission46 by presenting the other Austrian, who had also suffered under the Nazis, combined with socio-religious and political criticism, as well as an expression of solidarity with the state of Israel. Especially the latter was intended to serve as an identification bond between Austria and Israel, for both states had (re-)gained their national autonomy after the Nazis, as it could be seen, and because shared suffering is said to unite more strongly than death or love, according to Bin Gorion. But essentially Nathan had been staged for the lack of a better and more appropriate choice. Nathan the Wise had been wise; writes Bin Gorion, also wise in his ethics; but he had nothing of a seer. The Jew for whose

44 45

46

Ibid., 94. Ja, Nathan der Weise, im hebrischen Jerusalem des Jahres 1968 aufgefhrt, ein knappes Jahr nach dem Sechstagekrieg, der die Wiedervereinigung der geteilten Stadt gebracht hat, und zwanzig nach der Ausrufung des Staates Israel; aber auch keine vierundzwanzig, nachdem die Mordmaschine zum Stillstand gekommen war, die jeden berlebenden Juden in der Welt verwaiste: das war Theater, wie nur ein Lessing es gemeint und vorempfunden haben kann, der dieses sein unsterbliches Schibbolet nicht nur seinen Zeitgenossen vorgehalten hat. See: ibid., 93ff. Ibid., 90.

15

valid presentation the stage is still waiting, is the visionary of our days.47

This visionary is, I assume, Theodor Herzl. Ernst Haeusserman, then director of the Burgtheater, addressed the Israeli audience in a program leaflet by recalling Herzl as a common factor in the history of Austria and Israel. Haeusserman writes: It should not be considered a coincidence that the Burgtheater and its ensemble will give the first performance on its world tour in the State of Israel. it was clear to all of us that the visit to a country and to a people whose existence is based upon idealism and heroism would mean far more to the Burgtheater and to its members than a mere representation of the theatrical art of our theatre and its tradition. Our visit to Israel will recall to many now living there innumerable old ties and may also inspire new and fruitful contacts. The fact that Theodor Herzl, once a Viennese newspaperman and a Burgtheater author, was called upon to present the basic idea for the foundation of the State of Israel, may be a good omen also in connection with our visit as well as a symbolic aspect for the entire venture.48

Nathan the Wise was staged in Israel together with two other performances. Herman Bahrs The Concert was intended both as a light, entertaining balance to the profound Nathan and in order to represent Austrian literature. Loek Huisman was responsible for selecting literary documents about The Young Goethe, which were then dramatically read under his direction by actors not participating in one of the parallel performances. This most original and most instructive contribution also seems to have been well chosen. It could be considered as a supplementation to the Nathan production, too, for The Young Goethe sought to delve into the mythological attraction of German literature. In total, Nathan and The Concert were performed seventeen times in eleven days.49

47

48 49

Nathan der Weise war weise; auch in der Ethik weise; aber in ihm war nichts vom Seher. Der Jude, auf dessen gltige Gestaltung die Bhne noch wartet, ist der Visionr unserer Tage. Ibid., 109. Israel Goor, Theatre Archives and Museum (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, n.d.). Additionally, The Young Goethe was read five times, and four times works by contemporary Austrian writers were read. Tourdates: 29.-5.3. Haifa, 5.-6.3. Tel Aviv, 6.3.-9.3. Giwatajim, 10.-11.3.

16

Advertisement for the Burgtheater in Israel, 1968.

Apart from the performances in various kibbutzim, the theatres in Tel Aviv (HaCameri) and Jerusalem (Binyanei Haumah, Beit Haam) offered the more serious venues. Still, the audience was assembled in all places almost exclusively by GermanJewish immigrants from the Fifth Aliyah (1929-39).50 They, of course, were not strangers to Lessing thanks to their classical German education. To them it might have been a nostalgic and meaningful experience, but the Israeli theatre scholar Mendel Kohansky attested to his increasing boredom during the performance. He stated the conviction that Nathan has absolutely nothing to say to the modern viewer, unless if he or she had enjoyed a classical German education. The plays relevance with regard to the explosive situation between Jews, Muslims and Christians is, according to Kohansky, dissolved by the illusions of days gone by.51

Also Michael Ohad, on his part connoisseur and critique not only of the Burgtheater productions and history, but also intimate with Austrian-German theatre in general, would have preferred to dispense with Nathan, despite it being a great humane document, and despite the fact that Ernst Deutsch played an impressive
Jerusalem, 12.-13.3. Petach Tikva. Bin Gorion, Im Lande Nathans, 74, 104. Ibid., 105. Jerusalem Post, 4.5.1968.

50 51

17

Nathan shockingly.52 Ohad familiarizes the readers of his elaborate essay in Haaretz with a brief and anecdotal history of the Burgtheater, thereby sketching its peaks and abysms. The 1968 Nathan production is mentioned only briefly in passing and perishes in Ohads passionate panorama of the Burgtheaters history, importance and contributions to European culture, society and politics. His position and critique on the Burgtheaters guest production, then, is best expressed by his rhetorical question towards the end of the essay: What, therefore, remains in 1968 of the magnificent tradition of Sonnenthal, Voltaire, Kainz, and Bleibtreu, except a house of marble with its golden decorations?53 In fact, Ohad would have dispensed completely with the repertoire that the Burgtheater had brought to Vienna. Instead he suggests Johann Nestroys Einen Jux will er sich machen, Friedrich Schillers Don Carlos and Arthur Schnitzlers Anatol. But he does not expend another word on Lindtbergs Nathan the Wise production.

3.2. Schauspielhaus Dsseldorf, 1985

Few traces remain of two German guest productions in Israel. The Stadttheater Dsseldorf (Schauspielhaus) visited the Jerusalem Theatre in 1985 and staged Nathan in German, as did the Burgtheater. Yet the Stadttheater also tried to reach the nonGerman-speaking part of the Israeli audience, which otherwise consisted mostly of Ashkenazi Jews familiar with German culture, with the help of a simultaneous translation. Technical and professional problems in this translation, however, rendered the play and its relations to contemporary times incomprehensible to that part of the Israeli audience. Nevertheless, director Volker Hase and his troupe apparently presented Nathan the Wise on a very high artistic level,54 yet failed to make the play relevant to its Israeli audiences.

According to Boas Ekron, the problems of the rigid structure of the play were solved well. Hase managed to soften the rhetorical characters and to transform abstract ideas into living human beings.55 All critics praised the excellence of the

52 53 54 55

Haaretz, 23.2.1968 [Hebr.]. Adolf von Sonnenthal (1834-1909), Josef Kainz (1858-1910), Hedwig Bleibtrue (1868-1958). Ibid. Al Hamishmar, 17.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Yedioth Aharonoth, 10.4. 1985 [Hebr.].

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actors. The German performance surely lends the play an authentic touch, which sends real shivers down the spine, writes Shebach Friedler,56 and Giora Manor attests to the creation of a tense atmosphere.57 In addition, with the help of scenes fading into each other and by extending the performative space beyond the limits of the stage, the production succeeded to impress critics with a sophisticated production, which centred in an original interpretation of the ring parable. Sultan Saladin snoops into the James Bond-like suitcase of Nathan, which he investigates as if it were already his property. He finally tosses on top of it a handful of coins, which were taken from Nathans suitcase. This scene displays the situation of the persecuted Jew better than those of the accompanying production of the play Good, which the Schauspielhaus had brought with it; explains Giora Manor: You feel threatened by the prolonged investigation and the famous monologue is suddenly turned into riveting drama.58 Nevertheless, It is right, writes Chava Novak in regard to the ring parable, that this is the most important statement of Lessing, which, without doubt, is valid also in our days; but I dont see in this emphasis any actualization of the art work.59

For Novak, contrary to expressed intentions and despite efforts to evoke in Sultan Muammar al-Gaddafi, for example, or with allusions to the Lebanon war mainly through costumes, Hase did not succeed in either modernizing the play or making it relevant to the Israeli or Middle Eastern socio-political context.60 The reception remained restricted to the German- Israeli context, or rather to its European provincialism.61 A similar stance was taken by Giora Manor, who apart from praising the originality of the sophisticated production criticized its nave choice of a realistic dramatic space: To stage for us a play whose plot is located in Jerusalem is, of course, possible but not in a realistic lighting. In our days, as a matter of fact, in other countries as well, it is impossible to stage some painted Jerusalem,

56 57 58 59 60 61

Maariv, 5.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Al Hamishmar, 17.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Ibid. For this non-identified article see: Israel Goor Archive ,101I,II. For this non-identified article see: Israel Goor Archive ,101I,II. Ibid.

19

some buildings or somewhat realistic background since Jerusalem is an image, which cannot be separated from the television screens and from the newspaper headlines.62

However, all Israeli critics concurred in appreciating the courage and good intentions in the shadow of the past.63 The Dsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, states Manor, entered courageously the minefield of these so complicated relationships between the Jewish and the German people. In itself, this coping is worthy of recognition.64 All critics can be said to be inclined towards Shebach Friedlers assumption of the main intention not having been to present the good Jew, but rather to present the good German after 1945.65 This impression is supported by the chief intendants choice of Good by Cecil Philip Taylor for the second play in the Schauspielhaus guest repertoire. It tells the story of the liberal German professor Halder whose moral cowardice and subtle corruption leads to his involvement with the Nazi war machine and the annihilation camps in Auschwitz. This choice further emphasizes the Schauspielhauss intention to intensify cultural relations between Germany and Israel, founded on a continuing reflection on the German past. Both plays are, in fact, a clear gesture of the German theatre, regarding the collective historical guilt of the German people towards the Jews.66

3.3. Theatre of Heilbronn, 1998

For a few evenings in 1998, the Gesher Theatre hosted the Municipal Theatre of Heilbronn, which performed Nathan under the artistic direction of Klaus Wagner. The production was faced with similar difficulties as Hases production in 1985. Also in 1998 Nathans audience was largely constituted of the older German-born generation of Israelis, who well-remembered the text and who were overcome by nostalgia.67 Again, primarily due to technical problems in the simultaneous translation the play
62 63 64 65 66 67

Al Hamishmar, 17.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Yedioth Aharonoth, 10.4. 1985 [Hebr.]. Al Hamishmar, 17.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Maariv, 5.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Al Hamishmar, 17.4.1985 [Hebr.]. Jerusalem Post, 27.10.98.

20

remained unintelligible to the non-German-speaking audience, which therefore missed its relations to the contemporary situation, writes Carmit Meron, and continues before the background of the failing peace process: This is highly regrettable, for when if not in these days is it necessary to voice religious tolerance and international solidarity, at home and abroad.68

Apart from the bad translation, reviews criticized the slow pace of the production, and according to Naomi Doudai the acting styles failed to realise the texts eloquent message in terms that would move a modern audience.69 Like most other critics, Doudai acknowledged the good intentions of the company of German actors: with the plays socio-moral-political message aimed at Jews, Muslims, and Christians still acutely relevant, the actors obviously hope to promote mutual understanding and greater tolerance for this region.70

Indeed, the Heilbronn Theatre had hoped that Nathan, which apparently had turned in Germany into a dusted classic, would prove to be of acute relevancy (von echter Brisanz) in Israel and Palestine. Lessings message of conciliation was supposed to reach all sides of the area of conflict, for which purpose the production was accompanied by a German television team (ARD) on its tour through Haifa, Tel Aviv, Nablus, Ramallah and Gaza.71 Nevertheless, like all guest productions of Nathan, the play instead aroused opposition among both Israelis and Palestinians, who despite official acknowledgments of their guests good intentions responded to what they perceived as pretentious, hypocritical and presumptuous meddling. Apart from the fact that Palestinians could hardly believe that the role of a peacemaker could be attributed to a Jew, intellectuals expressed their protest against the clownlike depiction of Sultan Saladin.72 This is by no means an oversensitive reaction, but is instead related to the Orientalism implied in Lessings still so enlightened work also progressive if only for Lessings age and with regard rather to

68 69 70 71

72

Zo Haderekh, 21.10.98 [Hebr.]. Jerusalem Post, 27.10.98. Ibid. See the online publication Das Theater Heilbronn dramatisch, aktuell, July 2010, URL: http://www.pro-region.de/web/media/proregion/pdf/wissenswertes/3wissenswertestheaterheilbronn.pdf. See fn. 38.

21

the inversion of Shylockian stigma. But even today we can observe trends to trivialize and to ridicule the Muslim characters in productions of Nathan in German and Israeli theatres.73

In summary, regarding the Austrian and German guest productions of Nathan the Wise in Israel, we can observe with Klaus Wagners 1998 production a turning away from the preoccupation with Nazi Germany and German-Jewish relations. Simultaneously Nathan began to be promoted as a kind of solution for the ZionistArab conflict. A shift can therefore be noted, from a guilt-ridden self-reflexive preoccupation with the past into a well-intentioned preparedness to positively influence the present. The Wiedergutmachungsdrama had turned into a

Gutmachdrama, which supposedly offered a universal solution to any kind of specific problem of coexistence. Its timeless references, those relevant and acute also to the contemporary situation in Israel/Palestine became increasingly accepted among Israeli critics, too, however beginning only with the 1985 Nathan production. This phenomenon, the slight decline of a willing suspension of belief in the relevance of Lessings Nathan for Israel, can be observed also in the reviews of the Israeli Nathan the Wise production. Worth mentioning too, however, is that this phenomenon the increasing acceptance among critics of Nathan regarding its relevance appears to coincide with the first recognitions of the limits of military power, such as the First Lebanon War and the uprisings of Palestinian populations, which may have fostered the perception that although life can be secured through armed forces, the establishment of peaceful coexistence demands in addition the nurturing of mutually benevolent attitudes in the conflicting parties, similar to the ones depicted throughout Lessings Nathan the Wise. The critics testify to a felt absence of these attitudes in Israel and Palestine, and their transformations.

73

See the instructive book by Karl-Josef Kuschel, Jud, Christ und Muselmann vereinigt? Lessings Nathan der Weise, 16.

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4) The Israeli Nathan the Wise Productions

All critiques which addressed the Arab and Muslim characters in the first Israeli Nathan production in 1966 put on by Habimah, the official Israeli state theatre, also noted the ridiculousness of Sultan and at times also of El-Khaffi, who were turned into involuntary clowns.74 The reasons for this can partly be found in Habimahs wellintended attempt to adapt Lessings Christian illustration of the ring parable to the chasm between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Israeli society and politics. Trying to present Nathan as a Sephardic Jew and the characters in the setting of One Thousand and One Nights, on a theatrical stage affixed to Europe,75 proved to be an unrealizable task vis--vis the diction of the mostly Ashkenazi cast. Nevertheless, the Israeli critic Boas Evron even went so far as to argue: The manner in which Yehuda Ephroni played the great Sultan Salah ad-Din, legendary hero both in Islam and Christianity, leaves no other interpretation than anti-Arab war propaganda. It is the image of a haphazard fool rather than of a political leader and soldier.76 It is Lessings merit not only to have strategically upgraded the image of the despised Jew in theatre, but also that of the Muslim, explains Karl-Josef Kuschel.77 Indeed, two years before Mozart published his opera The Abduction from the Seraglio in 1781, Lessing presented Sultan Saladin, his sister Sittah and the dervish Al-Khaffee to the German public, which throughout the nineteenth century had been familiar with the Middle East mainly through the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, which had been translated into German in 1727. The works of Lessing and Mozart mark the departure from the strategic degradation of Turks and thus of Muslims by the Church, which had considered them the antithesis and arch-enemies of the German world

74 75

76 77

Omer, 28.10.66 [Hebr.], Kol Haam, 26.11.67 [Hebr.]. This allegorical term is taken from Saids description of the peculiar European perception of the Orient as Orient, in the theory and praxis of Orientalism: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear figures whose role is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate.... The Orient...seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe. See: Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 25th ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 63. Yedioth Aharonoth, 26.10.66 [Hebr.]. For Kuschels theoretical concept of the calculated or strategic upgrading of the despised in Lessings Nathan, see: Karl-Josef Kuschel, Jud, Christ und Muselmann vereinigt? Lessings Nathan der Weise, 18ff.

23

since the sixteenth century.78 Stains remain up to our day. Doron Tavory, on whose Israeli Nathan production in 2003/04 we will remark soon, noted in 2009 that only Saladin lacks the authenticity of the other Nathan characters, as he is a kind of colonial fantasy. Yet in comparison to Mozarts caricature of Sultan Selim in The Abduction from the Seraglio, Tavory believes that Lessing indeed succeeded in creating an authentic human character.79 The humanness lies precisely in the comic effects of Saladins difficulty in accepting Nathans idealism, says Abraham Dana. Moreover, the production in 1966, as discussed below, attests to Saladin having being the funniest character. In being repeatedly dumbfounded by his contemporaries, who introduce unexpected, unconventional twists into his stagnant routine,80 the Sultan could also be said to represent that tranquilized human sensibility which Lessing intended to arouse humourously in the culinarian part of his audiences. 81 Apologetically speaking, Saladin may represent that obstacle of self-righteousness, which any reader of Lessings dramatic poem might encounter, regardless of his ideological background and religious affiliation.

The problem remains, essentially, how much audiences and actors are willing and able to empathize with the characters of Lessings drama beyond, and expressly with disregard to, the particularistic boundaries of ethnicity, religion, gender, complexion and time. This difficulty is, ultimately, a universal human characteristic and well pronounced in Lessings Nathan. The concealed criticism, which appears to subvert any given exclusivist self-perception and separatist national politics in favour of liberal humanism and universal perspectives of peaceful dialogue, is evident for example in Rechas statement, which attests the characters opinion to be in accord with that of her father Nathan. She contests the notions of God owning humans and of humans being bound to a certain lump of earth (Erdklo). Thus Nathans view, as reflected by Recha, does not seem to reject Diasporic existence in the least. Nathan knows, how good men think; he knows That all lands bear good men (II, 5: 1273ff.)
78

79

80 81

See: Mathieu Lepetit, Die Trken vor Wien, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte Vol.1 (Mnchen: Beck, 2009), 396-405. For the whole conversation see: Doron Tavory, Nathan the Wise 2003/4 Interview, recorded. Israel Goor Archive Jerusalem, March 18, 2009, 390. E.g. scenes II, 1 and III, 7. Conversation with me in Tel Aviv, July 28, 2010.

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4.1. The Habimah Production in 1966

As a result of the plays criticism, as explained above, Lessings Nathan the Wise actually clashed with the particularistic and nationalistic ambitions of the Habimah Theatre in 1966.82 More than thirty years after its series of plays dealing with the German-Jewish legacy and the self-betrayal of assimilation (e.g. Jud S, Merchant of Venice, Der ewige Jude), Habimah staged Nathan after a long history of deferrals. Max Brod, then a retired dramaturge from Habimah, appears to have been the first and only Israeli advocate for Lessings dramatic poem that we know of in Israel since the 1930s. He considered Nathan the Wise a constructive contribution to the aim of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, one that could prepare the ground for an attitude exceeding mere peace agreements.83 Nevertheless, only the repeated initiatives of the star actor Shimon Finkel could eventually, under specific opportune conditions, overcome the decades-long resistance and produce the show with director Peter Frye. Habimah staged Nathan only twenty-seven times a moderate failure, both artistically and economically. The Israeli National Theatre had been at great pains to render the play attractive and entertaining for the Ashkenazi audiences within an Israeli context, but this meant essentially changing the play to fit a parochial religious perspective. By playing down to the audiences, in addition to Tirza Atars translation which suspended with Lessings jambic metre and poetic flow, the director erased significantly a key sentence in Lessings dramatic poem: Mglich; da der Vater nun / Die Tyrannei des einen Rings nicht lnger / In seinem Hause dulden willen!84
82

83

84

For a very instructive introduction to the reception of Lessing in Israel see: Gad Kaynar, Lessing and Non-Lessing on the Israeli Stage: Notes on Some Theological, Political and Theatrical Aspects, Lessing Yearbook 2000 XXXII (2000): 361-368. Brod presents Nathan in his autobiography as one of his unrealized political staging-plans (politische Bhnenplne): Den Tag, an dem die Habimah Lessings Nathan der Weise spielen, den groherzigen Arabersultan Salah-ed-Din (Saladin) mit dem Juden Nathan Vershnungsworte tauschen lassen knnte, wrde ich als einen der glcklichsten meines restlichen Lebens ansehen, nicht etwa, weil ich die Augen davor verschliee, da Kunst und politische Arbeit in getrennten Rumen vor sich gehen sondern weil ich von der symbolischen Bedeutung der Kunst fr beide Rume berzeugt bin. See: Max Brod, Streitbares Leben (Mnchen: Kindler, 1960), 516. See: Tirza Atar, [ - directorial manuscript] (Tel Aviv: Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts [6.4.10], 1966), 59; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,

25

[Possibly the father wished / To tolerate no longer in his house / The tyranny of just one ring!] This willing suspension of belief85 with regard to Lessings vision of peaceful human coexistence in a world of reason and post-religious separatism was shared to the largest extent only by Israeli newspaper critics. According to the great majority of reviews, Nathan had become obsolete and was irrelevant for Israel. As Aharon Dolav writes: It is easy to imagine generations of German-Christian audiences, which attend the theatre in order to achieve their catharsis, with the help of an annihilated Jew, who forgives.86 He not only points to the specific German humanist responsibility after the Second World War a responsibility which most reviewers did not consider to be in any way related to the Jewish struggle for survival in Israel and in the Diaspora. In addition, Dolav already anticipates the German abdication from its responsibility through the theatrical dissimulations of Jewish absence via Nathan, which emerged in German consciousness only decades later.87

85

86 87

Nathan der Weise Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fnf Aufzgen (Kln: Anaconda, 2005), III, 7: 2035-37.Cf. Lessing, Nathan der Weise Ein dramatisches Gedicht in fnf Aufzgen, III, 7: 203537. that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (my emphasis) became in the twentieth century a widely and more loosely quoted reference by and to the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). See his Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. XIV. Maariv, 28.10.66 [Hebr.]. See the works by Anat Feinberg, Wiedergutmachung im Programm Jdisches Schicksal im deutschen Nachkriegsdrama; The Janus-Faced Jew Nathan and Shylock on the Postwar German Stage; Juden in deutschen Stcken, Die deutsche Bhne, no. 5 (1988).

26

Shimon Finkel as Nathan the Wise, with Yehuda Ephroni as Sultan Salah a-Din and Tikvah Mor as Sitta in the 1966 Habimah production of Nathan the Wise. (Dir. Peter Frye)

Only some critics of Habimahs Nathan production in 1966 pointed to the already then fermenting religious-Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, which repeatedly interfered with the cultural activities of secular Jewish aesthetics. One anonymous critic for Die Stimme,88 a paper published by Bukovinian immigrants, laments the productions reduction to the nationalistic and sees Nathans absence from the cultural canon as caused mainly by the principle to proscribe anything German in Israel. The mentality of these cultural advocates, continues the reviewer, is responsible just like the Nazis, for the decisive dramaturges not-allowing the production of Nathan, or which is probably closer to the truth they feared the production, since they had to take into consideration the reaction of radical hyper-nationalists [berNationalisten], as known from similar events.89

88

89

No author mentioned. Editor in chief of the January 1967 issue was Dr. Maximilian Weinberger. Editors: Dr. Meier Teich, Dr. Walter Kiesler. E.g.: the German culture week in Jerusalem, 1971. There, the Schiller Theatre from Berlin staged Lessings Emilia Galotti. Its performance was severely and repeatedly interrupted by religious rowdies. They demonstrated against what they perceived as Nazis and their Israeli collaborators. Police intervened, but less drastically than in similar acts of violence, reports the anonymous author. Apparently, one tried to avoid any scandal regarding the German culture week. Therefore no governmental authority was willing to take responsibility for it. When leaving the building the audience were forced to pass through lines of demonstrators, mostly incited youths. The anonymous

27

Indeed, on the heels of the Shoah, the German classic Nathan could not be read outside of this context, which either obstructed the plays universal didactic intentions in a willing suspension of belief or else rendered it hypocritical in the face of the German-Jewish catastrophe, to which this production attests. The staging directive therefore imposed on the Templar the German declaration: und Jud ist Jude, while Daja was to utter a militant Jawohl!90 By thus emphasizing the German background of Templar and Daja (but not Recha!), their anti-Semitic sentiment is strengthened through the German speech-fragments and the repeated addressing of Nathan as Jew both additions to the original text. In the social conventions of the mid-1960s, they are thus clearly identifiable as German Nazis.91

4.2. The Kibbutz Shoval Production in 1966

For some critics it might go without saying that Lessings last, pale-Jewish protagonist, with his Diasporic habitus and his emphasis on diplomacy rather than force, could hardly meet an Israeli reality-perception conditioned by its military history a habitus which in fact may be incompatible with the Zionist role-model of a New Jew. The Kibbutz Shoval production of 1966, though, was able to show the compatibility of Lessings Nathan with the socialist ideals of its almost anti-religious ideological setting promoted by the Zionist movement HaShomer HaZair. This amateur production fused naive belief in the improvability of the world with theatrical enthusiasm. The actors meant to play Nathan not only on stage but also in the genesis of a trans-utopian perfection, which supposedly began with the kibbutz movement. Both Joseph Zur, the initiator of the project who had laboriously translated Nathan into Hebrew,92 and Abraham Dana, its director, had been convinced that their Nathan
author reports further: The departing audience buries on its return home the German culture week, and together with it also what little cultural relations were established between the two nations through hard work. The article is dated 21.11.1971, but no newspaper is mentioned. I found it in the Israel Goor Archive, where it was attached to a review by Haim Gamzo, about the performance of the Schiller Theatre in Tel Aviv, in Haaretz of 10.4.1971. See: ,101I,II. See: Atar, [ - directorial manuscript], 22, 66. See: Moshe Zimmerman, German Past Israeli Memory (Tel Aviv: Am Oved [Hebr.], 2002), 245, 252. This translation is hitherto the only published translation which was completed after 1948. It contains an explanatory apparatus and afterword by Jakob Hessing. See Joseph Zur, trans., Nathan der Weise Dramatisches Gedicht in fnf Aufzgen (Jerusalem: Carmel [Hebr.], 1999). Cf. Yitzchak Sela, who rendered the ring parable into Hebrew some forty years earlier in his book:

90 91

92

28

production, or any other, would directly influence the political discourse in the Middle East towards a better understanding and acceptance of Israel. We just wanted that Sadat and Begin would sit together, recalls Dana, that Begin would tell him about the three rings, and that Nasser would say: OK. Lets make peace.93

However, in the course of history, this naive and engaged idealism unwillingly suspended its belief in the plausibility of Lessings humanism, and in the chance of peace in Israel and Palestine through diplomacy. Rather, Dana pointed to the economic nature of the Israeli dilemma, whose material conditions stand in an unequal relation to the historical and theological setting of Lessings dramatic poem in Germany. Dana added a well stone in his stage-adaptation, which became central to the stage design of every scene. As a kind of Miriams well 94 and axis mundi, it marked the centre of kibbutz life and (agri)culture: Water.. symbolizes life in our region the conflict here is really about water, says Dana, and he adds: All that war is, in fact, just business.95

93

94

95

Yizchak Sela, Bamot Olam World Theatre from Antiquity to Our Times and a Selection of Famous Plays (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass [Hebr.], 1958). For our whole conversation see: Abraham Dana, Nathan the Wise 1966 Interview, recorded. Israel Goor Archive Jerusalem, March 13, 2009, 455. See Rashi and Midrashim to Numeri 20:1-2. I owe thanks to Prof. Dr. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi for this association. An observation, however, already made by Lessing, who points to the dialectics of money and truth (in III, 6: 1868-69): als ob/ Die Wahrheit Mnze wre!

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Kibbutz Shovals Nathan the Wise production, 1966 (Dir. Abraham Dana). Top row: Abraham Dana, Joseph Zur, ?, Yeshayahu Zirkel, Itzik Kehlrman, Rubich Gein. Bottom row: Miriam Wechsler, ?, Leah Ogen, Gadi Meiri.

In the context of Israeli Nathan production, Kibbutz Shovals production represents a precious curiosum. Preceded and followed by decades of negation, and yet unrecognized presence of Lessing in the Israeli theatre, characterized by an incomprehensible indifference;96 simultaneously with the Israeli appearance of Nathan on Habimahs stage, one year before the 67 war and two years before the Burgtheater visit, Kibbutz Shoval mounted three productions successfully through private initiative with highly motivated amateur actors. The kibbutz audiences, consisting mostly of Shoah survivors, gave the play a good reception. The production, though, did not develop any explicit references to the Shoah beyond the associations contained in Nathans pogrom narrative at Gath (VII, 4). Nevertheless, for Josef Zur, who had left Germany as a child in 1939, Lessings Nathan the Wise is a prophetic antithesis to the Shoah97 as relevant today as it ever was.

96

97

For this analysis see: Kaynar, Lessing and Non-Lessing on the Israeli Stage: Notes on Some Theological, Political and Theatrical Aspects, 361. Conversation by telephone, July 22, 2010.

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4.3. Doron Tavorys Production in 2004

The third and hitherto last Israeli production of Nathan the Wise was a private project initiated, produced and directed by the exceptional and well-known actor Doron Tavory in the 2003/04 season. Tavorys outstanding engagement shows primarily a suspension of belief in the terribly important and boring and heavy [that is, the] German production style of Nathan that he had come to regard as weighing on the audience like a ton of bricks.98 Tavorys first encounter with Lessings dramatic text itself had left him with a totally different impression: After two pages, tears filled my eyes and I thought: I have to do this. This is not being done right, not at all. It isnt heavy, it is light. It is Mozartish and gracefula humanism which touches the heart. I was very excited from this reading and it was clear to me, I began to translate it immediately. The Cameri theatre under Omri Nitzan agreed to a production with Tavorys translation, but later Tavory was faced with a campaign of pressures,99 which eventually led to the termination of the rehearsal process.100 It was very difficult for me, stated Tavory in 2004, to resign myself to the situation in which a play like this could not find a stage. From the perspective of our history as Jews, the production of Nathan the Wise marks an important milestone. It speaks about humane solidarity beyond the constraints of religions, in an age where we witness a return to religious, bloody wars.101
98 99 100

101

Tavory, Nathan the Wise 2003/4 Interview. Maariv, 19.3.2004 [Hebr.]. Cutbacks in the Cameris budget in 2002 led to repeated delays in the production of Nathan the Wise, followed by its complete withdrawal from the project. Gadi Role, who had been designated director, and Roni Toran, the intended set designer, claimed their wages and sued the theatre in this matter. Both won their claims and the Cameri paid them out. Both left the project for good. See: Haaretz 25.2.2004 [Hebr.]. In response to my repeated inquiries to Omri Nitzan, I finally received an email from his assistant artistic director Noam Shmuel on October 20, 2009. I had asked for the reasons why the production was cancelled and received the following answer: The play Nathan the Wise was an independent production produced by an independent company, hosted by the Cameri Theatre for a few nights only. The Cameri offered the company some limited assistance according to our ability. Maariv, 19.3.2004 [Hebr.].

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Doron Tavorys Nathan the Wise, 2004. Pictured are Roberto Polak as Al-Khafee and Tavory as Nathan.

Tavory mobilized his best friends, outstanding actors from seven different Israeli theatres, who agreed to work on the project without salary out of a loving devotion to Lessings masterpiece.102 This joy of acting with friends103 was realized virtuously on a minimalist stage, and therefore, unlike the laborious, grand-opera-like stage design of Habimah in 1966, could leave room for the audience to concentrate, think, reflect and still laugh upon Lessings theatrical sermon. Despite the not only artistically successful performances,104 Tavorys staging could not be continued because of the limited capacity of the actors, who had already sacrificed considerably. Newspaper critics almost univocally praised not only these outstanding artistic endeavours and achievements, but also emphasized the relevance of Lessings dramatic poem for contemporary Israel, in terms of its ethical and moral teachings. However, Tavory denied any intention of reference in the production to Nazi Germany and the Shoah, arguing that as
102 103 104

Production cost: 2000 Shekel. There was no risk involved, said Tavory. See fn. 80. Tavory, Nathan the Wise 2003/4 Interview. Eight performances in total: three at Pardes Channah and five at the Cameri. These five performances were sold out despite the plays scheduling at noontime on Fridays, twice a month, dependent on the disposition of the Cameri. The premiere took place at the Moshe Meir Centre for Stage Art in Pardes Channah on December 2, 2003, followed by two performances. Five performances were hosted by the Cameri on the Fridays of March 5, 19, April 2 and 16, 2004 (Yedioth Aharonoth, 27.11.2003 [Hebr.], Haaretz 25.2.2004 [Hebr.]).

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a very very drastic event,...it remains an event. The play was written a long time before itthere are references to pogroms, that is to say Nathan emerged from the pogrom as a better person. The Jews emerged from the Shoah as worse people. We can observe this concerning what is happening in Israel. I dont know so how is the Shoah relevant here? Its more relevant for Germans, who cannot talk about Jews without bringing to mind the crime of the Nazis. [laughs] I am free from it.105 Tavory, who himself had played Nathan, felt at the end of each performance that the different religious identities became interchangeable and were transcended during the play.106 What had come to the fore were shared human characteristics in the dialogues of the multi-ethnic cast,107 a universal being in its playful, colourful vitality dissociated from the darkness backstage, with a distinct and particular Israeli habitus. Tavorys decision to produce Nathan, among other plays, therefore, denotes also a suspension of the belief in characteristic ideological calculations of Israeli mainstream theatre, often preoccupied with biblical myth and the trauma of the Shoah,108 and somewhat ignorant of classical canons. By being concerned with universal culture and art for its own sake, Tavorys Mozartish Nathan production suspends and demarcates one boundary of a trans-Zionist space in Israeli culture. Among the Israeli Nathan productions it denotes a conscious departure from the plays stigma as Wiedergutmachungsdrama, which is characterized also by its transition from tragic to comic mode.

With regard to these three Israeli theatre productions, it is clear that Nathan the Wise never became canonical as it did in Germany, where former president of the Bundestag Rita Sssmuth presents it even as an universal standard for measuring degrees of Enlightenment. A specific association to the Habimah production and to a
105 106 107 108

Tavory, Nathan the Wise 2003/4 Interview. Ibid. Amal Qays, who played Recha, is probably the only Druze actress in Israel. See: Olga Levitan, The Holocaust in Israeli Fringe Theatre, Teatron 26 (2009): 65-73, which presents the Holocaust thematics as one of the central motifs of the Israeli theatre, both mainstream and fringe. Different aspects of this theme are discussed in F. Rokem, On the Fantastic in Holocaust Performances, and G. Kaynar, The Holocaust Experience through Theatrical Profanation, in C. Schumaher, Staging the Holocaust (Cambridge University Press 1998), 40-52, 53-69. Also in Hebrew: B. Faingold, HaShoa be-drama ha-ivrit (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuchad 1989).

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general socio-political responsibility of any Nathan the Wise production, may be hard to dismiss in the light of this perception: And also the deep truth expressed in the ring parable, which Lessing had taken up in his Nathan the Wise, we have been unable to implement into concrete action But again and again we experience especially in Jerusalem, albeit also in other places, that the claim to absoluteness of some religion breaks open and turns into the tyranny of just one ring (Lessing). It thereby seeks to enforce the proof of truth for some belief not by the measure of tolerance and love, but through pre-enlightened claims to absoluteness.109

109

Und auch die tiefe Wahrheit, die in der von Lessing in seinem Nathan der Weise aufgegriffenen Ringparabel zum Ausdruck kommt, haben wir nicht in konkretes Handeln umsetzen knnen. Immer wieder erfahren wir aber vor allem in Jerusalem, aber auch an anderen Orten, da der Absolutheitsanspruch irgendeiner Religion aufbricht, zur Tyrannei des einen Ringes (Lessing) wird und so den Beweis der Wahrheit einer berzeugung nicht durch das Ma der Toleranz und Liebe, sondern durch vor-aufklrerische Absolutheitsansprche durchzusetzen versucht. See: Rita Sssmuth, Kommunalpolitik als Friedenspolitik, in Erbittet fr Jerusalem Frieden Hoffnungen zwischen Visionen und Wirklichkeit, ed. M. Langer and Armin Lachet (Aachen: Einhard, 1991), 93ff.

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5) Joshua Sobols Nathan the Other

Nathan productions in Israel were and are possible only for outstanding artistic individuals who either found or could create the appropriate conditions to allow their aesthetic appreciation to prevail over any ideological or commercial proviso. Hence, of special interest are Joshua Sobols Nathan the Wise adaptations and its German productions. (No Israeli production has taken place, so far.) Commissioned in 1994 by the Volkstheater Wien, Sobol wrote two contemporary versions of Lessings Nathan in English, which criticize conventional, naive and idealistic readings of the play, as well as the contemporary socio-political conditions in Israel a voluntary suspension of belief both in the Enlightenment and in Zionism. His approach refuses to dissimulate the gap between these ideological perceptions and reality and instead seeks to expose it. Sobols Nathan the Wise variations can thus be said to have become part of an Israeli theatre tradition that commenced with The Dybbuk, namely the examination of the constant clash between Zionist ideology and Israeli reality. 110 Sobols first version of Nathan the Other, written in English, confronts Lessings crushed humanist utopia and the traces it left in German cultural consciousness, along with Jewish history and Israeli reality. The play dissects Nathans German alter-ego in the both real and allegorical brain surgery performed by a Jewish doctor (Nathanson). In close intertextuality with Lessings original, Sobol introduces Johann, a young German, who came to Jerusalem to atone for the sins of his father but was then attacked by religious fanatics. Sobol does not specify the religious affiliation of the attackers. The drama, then, is a cycle of hallucinations taking place in Johanns delirious mind, as he lies convalescing of brain surgery in a hospital in Jerusalem. The hospital appears as a prison in Johanns delirium, in which he envisions himself and his medical entourage as the protagonists of Lessings play NATHAN THE WISE, performed by a group of criminal convicts. As Johanns condition improves, and as he comes closer to reality, the characters
110

For a description of this theatre tradition see: Freddie Rokem, Yehoshua Sobol between History and the Arts: A Study of Ghetto and Shooting Magda (The Palestinian Woman), in Theatre in Israel, ed. Linda Ben-Zvi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 221.

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emerge from their nebulous appearances to become what they are in their everyday extra-imaginary existence.111 Thereby Lessings play, as it were, appears unfit for theatrical performance nowadays. Nevertheless, Sobol reframes Nathan as hauntingly relevant with regard to the universal human issues it raises, among them the Jewish-German assimilation and delusion with Nathan, dangers of nationalism, Shoah trauma and memory, dissimulation of Jewish absence, (im)possibilities of reconciliation, the rise of nationalistic terror, separatist terrorism in general, and religious fundamentalism. Also, Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, human dignity, organ donation and the threats posed by nuclear power are some of the particular Israeli concerns that Sobol deals with in Nathan the Other. In one passage he presents Lessings ring parable, via the Jewish doctor David Nathanson in a conversation with his Muslim colleague Omar, as a most dangerous story which has deluded generations of my people to believe that reason, tolerance and love were going to prevail throughout Europe in general and Germany in particular You see, my grandfather and my father paid with their lives for believing in that delusive message. Nathan wasnt wise at all. He was blind to reality, and indulging in wishful thinking. If he were wise, he would have told the Sultan the tale of the three stones. OMAR Whats the tale of the three stones? DAVID Once upon a time a man received from his loved one a stone with the magic power to destroy the universe. He had three sons whom he loved equally. When his hour came, he split the stone in three equal stones, which could each still destroy the universe. He gave each one of his sons such a stone, and if they hadnt so far destroyed the universe, they live in peace with each other to this very day. OMAR Oh, David! DAVID If my father had such a stone in his possession instead of the stupid faith in Lessings magic ring, he would not have been destroyed the
111

Yehoshua Sobol, Nathan the Other: A Confrontation with Nathan the Wise by Gotthold E. Lessing (hitherto unpublished, 1993), 1ff.

36

way he was, like a stray dog.112 However, in the face of the contemporary threat of nuclear apocalypse, Sobols Nathan the Other does not represent a suspension of belief in the feasibility of Lessings utopian vision, but rather alters the means by which it is achieved Not only by noble, enlightened spirit, nor by love devoid of prejudices alone, but rather with strategic strength. Such prophetic awareness, paraphrased in inversion, can be said to reframe Lessings dramatic poem.113 Nevertheless, this is not an appeal to the tyranny of just one ring, but rather a forceful call to reason through a sensible balance of power, which may or may not prevent that tyranny.

112 113

Ibid., 52ff. Cf. Zechariach 4.6.

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6) Joshua Sobols Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan

The Volkstheater in Vienna refused to perform Sobols version Nathan the Other for dramatic weaknesses, incongruencies with contemporary reality and stylistic distance from Lessings dramatic poem.114 Only after Sobol had stripped the play of any concrete historical and geographical references did the second version Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan arrive on the Volkstheater stage in early 1996, followed by one production in Bremen some months later. Bloody Nathan narrates the kidnapping of a Nathan the Wise actor by liberation fighters and is meant to be as bloody as reality. It is written in English, too, for it is simply the only language the characters have in common, according to Sobol.115 In the play, the Nathan actor taken hostage by terrorists manages to get hold of a gun by lulling his kidnappers to sleep through narrating the ring parable. This act of taking hold of the gun parallels the revelation of the authentic ring, whose magic power allows its bearer to kill man and god. It marks Sobols complete inversion of Lessings ring symbolism, which brought delight to god and man.116 Delight turns into might, and in the final soliloquy the consequent inversion of Lessings message of unconditional love occurs: unconditional hate overcomes the vengeful actor, who then pulls the trigger of his AK-47. He has failed to live up to his own insights: If your enemy makes you hate him/ This is the greatest victory and your most fatal defeat/ Because there is no worse punishment for a man than/ To carry in the bosom a heart poisoned with hatred. 117

Hatred is a central motif in Bloody Nathan, wherein Sobol appears to have investigated the roots of anti-Semitism and to have found them in a general human inclination towards misanthropy. You are here because you are a Human Being thats all says the terrorist woman to the hostage: Any other Human Being could serve as
114

115

116 117

From the list of defects in the play, assembled by the dramaturge and translator Ingrid Rencher, one could get the impression that the demands Sobol had imposed on his readers and the potential audiences were too high. Wienbibliothek, Vienna, file 2744. Hitherto unpublished. For a copy see: Yehoshua Sobol, Signed with Blood or: Bloody Nathan, in A Multi-Tragic Paradigm: Nathan the Wise in Israel, ed. Jan Khne (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Israel Goor Archive 41 ,.)411, 9002 Cf. Nathan the Wise (III, 7: 1915ff). Hitherto unpublished. For a copy see: Yehoshua Sobol, Signed with Blood or: Bloody Nathan, in A Multi-Tragic Paradigm: Nathan the Wise in Israel, ed. Jan Khne (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Israel Goor Archive 41 ,.)941, 9002

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well as you for our purpose/ If theres anything I hate about you its precisely the fact that/ You are a Human Being/ Theres nothing as hateful as ignominious as the Human Being118

Sobol identifies this misanthropy, against oneself and against the other, as the empowering motivation for the circulus vitiosus of victimizer and victim. Through the terrorist kidnappers the actor as hostage gets infected with this misanthropy and acts out his vengeance, thus caught in the illusion of self-liberation from the Other. Moreover, the actors revenge is the only instance in the Israeli Nathan adaptations where I can detect a slight, albeit remote and critical allusion to Shylock, who figures so prominently in German productions and adaptations of Nathan:119 SHYLOCK Why, revenge! The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (The Merchant of Venice, III:1)

Nevertheless, Bloody Nathan suspends the belief in revenge as a valid practice of justice, and focuses instead on a clean and subtle humanist line in the transition from a diplomacy of survival to a fight for survival. For Sobol, the issue of survival generally denotes the crux of Jewish civilization.120 Armed survival is hereby the special hallmark of the modern Jewish nation-state. In this respect, Bloody Nathan marks a personal turning point in Sobols disillusioned attitude regarding the conflict of his homeland: his suspension of belief in the possibility to arrive with the help of nice words towards an understanding, to regulate to calm the conflict and to find a

118 119

120

Ibid., 129. E.g. Elmar Goerdens Lessings Dream of Nathan the Wise. Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice was produced five times in Israeli theatre. Apart from the aesthetic differences in the entertainment character between Lessings Nathan and Shakespeares Merchant, this ratio in favour of Shylock which denotes a relative inversion of the numerical ratio in Germany, where Nathan is produced more than the Merchant can also be explained with Hans Mayers observation that Shylock was usually understood [in the Weimar Republic] as ethnic or nationalist, Nathan was understood primarily in a religious category. Cited in: Hans-Peter Bayerdrfer, Bringing Together Shylock and Nathan, or: Lessings Dream, Assaph Studies in the Theatre, 2008, 178. For the Merchant productions in Israel see: Avraham Oz, Transformations of Authenticity: Shylock among His Countrymen, in The Yoke of Love: Prophetic Riddles in the Merchant of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995). Yehoshua Sobol, Interview about Bloody Nathan, recorded. Israel Goor Archive Jerusalem, September 25, 2009, 80 III.

39

rational solution.121 This precise belief in diplomacy is mostly upheld in connection with Austrian and German Nathan productions, and in relation to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in general to which the reception of Sobols Bloody Nathan in Vienna and Bremen in 1996 may testify.

6.1. The Vienna Volkstheater Production of Bloody Nathan

Jens Schmidl, director of the Vienna Volkstheater production of Bloody Nathan, took liberties beyond Sobols text in an ultra-violent realism, detrimental to the plays subtle humanist line.122 In an avalanche of violence,123 rudely shocking,124 and as an orgy of hatred and violence,125 Schmidl staged Sobols renunciation of Lessings idealist tolerance, as it was perceived by many critics,126 as an act of revenge stemming from the impossibility of reconciliation.127 Though the audiences fled and reviews were deadly, it is hard to ascertain whether Sobol or Schmidl was responsible for this failure. Sobols transformation of diplomat of survival into fighter of survival appears to have been rather a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a transformation from a humanist into a vengeful Tartar.128 Most critics blamed Sobols text, often accompanying their review with an expression of disappointment in the well-known dramatist himself.129 Some, however, agreed with Sobols thesis that Lessings tolerance and humanism are suspended today,130 or at least since Auschwitz.131 Others attested to the plays undeniable reflection of a contemporary reality existent both in Israel/Palestine and in former Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, their reservations note that theatre is a rather inapt place for reality TV.132

121 122

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130

131 132

Ibid. E.g. Schmidl adds the rape of the Actor by a terrorist. See: tglich Alles, Wien 16.5.1996; Kleine Zeitung, Klagenfurt 16.5.1996. Schmidl changed and added to Sobols text. See: Sdkurier, Konstanz (21.5.1996). Die Welt, 17.5.1996. Volksblatt, 17.5.1996. Tiroler Tageszeitung, 17.5.1996. E.g. Neue Zeitung, Graz 16.5.; Sdkurier 21.5.; Volksblatt 17.5.; Kurier 16.5.1996. Salzburger Nachrichten, 18.5.1996. Tglich Alles, 16.5.1996. Die Presse, 17.5.; Salzburger Nachrichten, 18.5.; Tiroler Tageszeitung, 17.5.1996. E.g. Die neue Furche, 23.5.; Neue Voralberger Tageszeitung, 17.5.; Sdkurier, 21.5.; Tiroler Tageszeitung, 17.5.1996. Neue Nn, 29.5.1996. However, this is the only noted reference to the Shoah. Tiroler Tageszeitung, 17.5.; Krone, 16.5.1996.

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Apparently, one critic suggested, Schmidl himself had not been convinced by Sobols motives for a suspension of belief in Lessings idealism. That may provide a reason for Schmidls distortion of the plays subtle humanist psychology with his stupendous tour de force133 of physical acts of violence.134 But this remains a speculation. According to the majority of critics, Sobol did not succeed in making this suspended belief plausible in Bloody Nathan. They were not at all convinced either by Sobols thesis or by the plays quality, or that of the production. The Austrian audiences thus, for their part, suspended their belief in Sobols Israeli realism, while having apparently expected a utopian idealism la Lessing: one newspaper calls the production a disposable play also inasmuch as it is wholly a renunciation of tolerance.135 Precisely for this reason Otto Tausig had withdrawn from the role of (bloody) Nathan, since he had wanted the Toleranz-Nathan. This is all the more tragic, since he had initiated the modern Nathan version of the Volkstheater and had provided the underlying idea for Bloody Nathan, which in the end turned out to be too bloody for him.136

133 134 135 136

Sdkurier, 21.5.1996. Tglich Alles, 16.5.1996. Neue Zeitung, Graz 16.5.1996. Otto Tausig, Interview about Bloody Nathan, telephone, November 11, 2009.

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1996 Vienna Volkstheater production of Joshua Sobols Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan (Dir. Jens Schmidl). Pictured are Andrea Eckert as The Woman and Michael Rastl as The Actor.

6.2. The Bremen Theater Production of Bloody Nathan

Quite contrary to Schmidl, artistic director Joachim Lux avoided realism in the Bremen production of Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan, which was mounted some half-year after the Vienna production in May 1996. Sobols text through Luxs interpretation became an apocalyptical,137 theatrical act of revenge,138 which belied the stage as moral institution139 and fell thereby (in)conveniently with its abused ring parable140 into the holiday season of Christmas (similarly to Schmidls productions around Easter). Some critics held the opinion that only in Israel could Nathan the Wise deteriorate into a mere unrealizable utopian fairy tale, 141 but most regarded it as the reflection of a universal problem not confined to Israel and Palestine alone.142 Nevertheless, Sobols sobering contra-play (Gegen-Stck)143 and Luxs
137 138 139 140 141 142

NDR 3, Texte & Zeichen, Michael Laages, 16.12.1996. Die Tageszeitung, 16.12.1996. Nordsee-Zeitung, 16.12.1996. Main-Echo, 18.1.1997. E.g. Berliner Morgenpost, 15.12.; Nordsee-Zeitung, 16.12.1996. Delmenhorster Kreisblatt, 17.12.1996; Foyer, Januar-Mrz 1997; Handelsblatt, 20-21.12.1996.

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symbolistic production of a stylized144 general-existential fable145 could not meet the expectations of the audiences.

1996 Bremen production of Joshua Sobols Signed with Blood, or: Bloody Nathan (Dir. Joachim Lux). Pictured are The Actor (Andreas Herrmann), The Woman (Gabriela Maria Schmeide) and The Father (Lutz Lukasz).

Luxs production did without dramaturgical help and appears to have been rather grotesque and ironic. In the added prologue a senile elderly recited in a shrieking voice parts of the Lessing sequence from Heiner Mllers play Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preuen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei. Ein Greuelmrchen (1976). The inventory remained as abstract as the stage design and fetters were pantomimed by the hostage himself.146 Lux added a choir in the background147 and introduced the issue of Jewish identity by having the hostage-taken actor marked with a Jew-cross (Judenkreuz [sic]).148 He was then identified in one case as Jewish actor,149 but
143 144 145 146

147 148

Handelsblatt, 20-21.12.1996. Main-Echo, 18.1.1997. Foyer, Mrz 1997. Pforzheimer Zeitung, 17.12.1996; Prinz, Februar 1996; Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 19.12.1996; Weser Kurier, 16.12.1996; Die Tageszeitung, 16.12.1996; NDR3 Texte & Zeichen, 16.12.1996. Nordsee-Zeitung, 16.12.1996. Weser Kurier, 16.12.1996.

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most critics understood him as an Israeli in the Middle Eastern context. Despite these particularities, the production was generally understood to be applicable also to the conflict-ridden regions of Algeria, former Yugoslavia, and others.150

Only one critic imagined the actor to be the intended disappointed and disillusioned Peace Now activist151 an autobiographical reflection of Sobols insight into the powerlessness of words (Ohnmacht der Worte), which Lux had set into relation with the persistently increasing longing for silence (immer heftigeren Sehnsucht nach Schweigen), which Heiner Mller had placed into the mouth of Lessing.152 Thus uttering and blood-spitting dies Lessing in the added epilogue of Luxs production of Bloody Nathan. Lux emphasized with Mller Sobols message of the absolute failure of the Enlightenment.153 At the same time Lux added with Mller a dimension of empathy to the unforgiving cruelty depicted in Sobols Bloody Nathan.154 Essentially, within Sobols state description of society155 Lux staged Lessings death, dying as an old man on stage. Possibly meant as a metaphor for the death of the Enlightenment, it might be considered a continuation of a trend five years after it had found its peak in George Taboris Nathans Death.156

149 150 151 152 153

154

155 156

Nordsee-Zeitung, 16.12.1996. E.g. Delmenhorster Kreisblatt, 17.12.96; Foyer, Januar-Mrz 1997. Die Tageszeitung, 16.12.1996. See: Genia Schulz, Heiner Mller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980), 147. See: Norbert Otto Eke, Heiner Mller (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1999), 197. Also: NDR3 Texte & Zeichen, 16.12.1996. In regard to this dimension see: Thomas Eckardt, Leben Gundlings Friedrich von Preuen Lessings Schlaf Traum Schrei, in Heiner Mller Handbuch Leben, Werk, Wirkung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2003), 239. Nordsee-Zeitung, 16.12.1996. For a discussion see: Barbara Fischer, Nathans Ende? Von Lessing bis Tabori: Zur deutschjdischen Rezeption von Nathan der Weise (Gttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000), ch. 8. See also Jan Mller-Wielands opera version of TaborisNathans Death, by the same name. See also fn. 39.

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7) Conclusion
In summary, audiences in Vienna and Bremen found Bloody Nathan diametrically opposed to the spirit of Lessings Nathan, much in accordance with the authors explicit intentions. Yet Austrian and German critics implicitly accused Sobol of presumptuous and disrespectful meddling with Lessing and his, or rather their Nathan. This stance may be due foremost to the sanctified position Nathan has attained in German culture; a sanctification which was originally initiated by Jews. 157 In addition, this perception may also imply a psychological defence mechanism against the exposure of the Enlightenments failure. Consequently, against the Shoah, its memory and trauma and especially against the acknowledgment of the resulting Jewish absence which was conventionally expected to be dissimulated in connection with German-speaking Nathan productions Sobol had opposed the idealistic optimism prevalent in the German interpretations of Lessings Nathan, presenting his own dystopian, apocalyptic perception of contemporary reality. He thereby actually confirms that Lessings classic relates to fundamental and universal problems of mankind, but he renounces the universal claim in the solution that Lessings readers see in the original version. Sobol, moreover, thereby portrays a Jewish hope disappointed and a suspension of belief in Nathan a denial of the universal and eternal relevance of German humanist traditions. Paradoxically, precisely in their critiques and willing suspensions of a naive belief in idealism, Nathan the Other and Bloody Nathan can be understood as the continued representation of a German humanist tradition by an Israeli playwright and intellectual.158

To some extent the reception of Bloody Nathan actually shows that despite the controversial nature of play and its productions, independent of their successes, the majority of critics opposed the bloody reality depicted therein, regardless of whether they deemed them a credible reflection of the contemporary human condition or not.
157

158

E.g. Bayerdrfer, Bringing Together Shylock and Nathan, or: Lessings Dream, 175. See also: Berliner, Die drei Lessingschen Ringe. 5., 6., und 7. Auftritt des 3. Aufzugs aus Nathan der Weise. In a public debate on Bloody Nathan in Bremen, Sobol was called a modern Lessing, a moralist just like him [Lessing]. Jan Phillip Reemtsma had been invited, but cancelled after having seen the play. At the time he was still in court against his kidnappers. See: Bremer Anzeiger, 29.1.1997.

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Therefore Sobols play Bloody Nathan has been successful precisely because it was not accepted. Of course, one could reply that the rejection of that kind of reality in theatre might include the rejection of criticism of the conditions outside the theatre. Refusal of realism is a known theatre-reflex, writes Ronald Meyer-Arlt,159 which may be relevant for audiences both in Vienna and Bremen. This Austrian-German inclination towards Lessings idealism implies a suspension of belief in Sobols Israeli realism and marks a gap between reality aesthetics and ideologies of perception. However, the failure to recognize this gap and the tendencies to ignore it in theatrical processes that dissimulate this absence exist both in German and Israeli productions of Nathan the Wise. We can identify this dissimulation in the constrictions of the Habimah production, as well as in the nave idealism of Kibbutz Shoval. Even Tavory, unwilling to concede socio-political intentions in his liberated and comic Nathan, unwillingly attests to this implication. Whereas German guest productions sought the suspension of disbelief towards Lessings vision and towards a new and better, democratic Germany in their Israeli audiences, their good intentions and emphasis on universal human values could not dissimulate the particular differences between Germany and Israeli realities. As temporal dissimulations they are suspended in history itself and exemplify that Lessings dramatic poem can hardly serve as a universal and timeless model for intercultural dialogue. Nevertheless, Nathan the Wise will continue to remind us of essential human duties that demand their particular practice in any specific context provided that indeed we want this historic play to be neither a mere nostalgic Jewish-German anecdote, nor a retroactive justification for the play of history.

159

Realismusverweigerung ist ein bekannter Theaterreflex. See: Pforzheimer Zeitung, 17.12.1996.

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Picture Credits
p.15 p.24 p.26 p.28 p.37 p.38 F. Langer, Die Welttournee des Burgtheaters, p.100. Israeli Documentation Center for the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University, f. 6.4.10. Israel Goor Archive, Jerusalem, f. 390. Israel Goor Archive, Jerusalem, f. 455. Wien Bibliothek, Vienna, f. 2744. Theatre Bremen, Archive. f. 1996 Bloody Nathan.

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