Inferno Revisited

The Investigation by Peter Weiss. If one had to select the single most infamous word for the most infamous deed of the 20th century, the word would probably be "Auschwitz." Of the 6,000,000 Jews murdered during World War II nearly half died in that concentration camp in southern Poland. Peter Weiss, who authored last season's Marat Sade, has now edited the court records of the Frankfurt atrocity trials of 1964 and 1965, at which those who ran Auschwitz were the defendants. He has put together a catalogue of horrors.

The result is really a recital rather than a play. On a bleacher-sloped stage, the survivors and the accused confront not so much each other as their own benumbed memories of demonic events. The accused deny all responsibility, using the familiar argument that they were merely carrying out orders. The survivors, like men risen from the Inferno, recount horrors that, however familiar they may have become, still beggar the imagination with the terrible knowledge of what man can do to man. Those who lived draw word pictures of those who died: women whose wombs were injected with cement till they perished, naked men who were beaten bloody on the genitals, the beslimed piles of anonymous bodies in the gas chambers.

Many of the vignettes claw at the skin without reaching the heart. A few do both. There was the camp guard who became irritated at the sight of a little boy holding an apple. He swung the child against a cement wall and bashed out his brains. Then he contentedly munched the apple. The theater comes to be haunted with the screams of the tortured. The stench of death so invades the evening that the playgoer is often closer to choking than to crying.

Emotionally, Weiss fails by being emetic rather than tragically cathartic. Intellectually, he appears to embrace the fallacy of universal guilt. The words Jew and German are never once uttered in The Investigation. Ironically, this depersonalization is not unrelated to the dehumanization that made the whole merciless horror possible. As the victims, the Jews merit the epitaph of being named. As the perpetrators of the crime, the Germans deserve to be indicted.

Masochistic guilt collectors will doubtless form a part of any audience that this play may find, as well as unavowed sadists. To arouse the conscience of man is admirable but in this non-play Weiss mainly succeeds in raising the gorge.

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