Guilty Memories: Remembering the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Concentrationary Theatre
Guilty Memories: Remembering the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Concentrationary Theatre

Summary/Abstract: One of the issues theatre must deal with when approaching the topic of genocide is representation. How can theatre, an art of mimesis, represent extreme violence, absolute evil? What can be shown, so as to honour the memory of the victims and at the same time convey the idea of radical evil? At the turn of the 21st century, two playwrights, Enzo Cormann (France) and Juan Mayorga (Spain) approached the issue of the Holocaust through memory. In Toujours l’orage [Always the Storm](1997) and respectively Himmelweg [Way to heaven] (2002) the protagonists revisit, after several decades, the traumatic events of 1944, when they witnessed or participated in the perversion of life and theatre by the Nazi. This paper will analyse the modalities of the memorial mechanism, among which the metatheatrical devices facilitating the representation of the traumatic event.

• Details
• Contents