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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
ness. This dialectic gives the playa dangerous edge in the unrest and con–
fusion ofWaldheim's Vienna.
One of the most scathing attacks came from Peter Sichrovsky, a
local Jewish journalist. He condemned Bernhard for using a Jew to vent
his own obsessions and what's worse, to lend the victim certain features
of the oppressor. "A director from Bochum aided by an Austrian writer
makes a Jew bark like a German Shepherd," he wrote, although he
never actually saw the director's work. He called for a boycott of the
production after he read the play, which he reviewed on the day of the
opening. The son of Austrian parents who had emigrated to England
and returned
to
Vienna after the war, forty-three year-old Sichrovsky has
established himself as one of the most outspoken representatives of his
generation of Austrian Jews. He is the author of
Strangers in Their Own
Land
and
Born Guilty,
both collections of interviews with children of
survivors and of Nazi criminals, respectively. In his play,
Das Abendrnahl
(The Supper,
as in
The Last Supper,
also commission cd by Peymann for the
year of commemoration), he attempted to dramatize the traumatic
division in Austria's postwar generation. (As a Strindbergian phantas–
magoria of a radically fueled sadomasochistic relationship, between the
son of a survivor and the daughter of a former camp commander, it is
much more interesting in its concept than in its somewhat strained exe–
cution.) From Sichrovsky's very specific perspective and expectations,
Bernhard failed to concern himself with the immediate needs of the sec–
ond Holocaust generation in their struggle to rediscover their heritage
and redefine their identity as Viennese Jews. The majority ofJewish critics
applauded the playwright and the theater for exposing Waldheim's Vi–
enna in all its monstrous crassness.
In the aftermath of the prolongued
H eldel1plat z
drama, the
Burgtheater published a two-hundred ninety-five-page book:
Heldel1platz
- A DOCllrnentation,
compiled by Peymann's brainy dramaturges who are
also his longtime codirectors. It co ntains all the responses to the play,
from the early, gossip-based preproduction scandals to reviews and com–
ments from all over Europe, and includes fan mail as welI as sanguine
letters in blatant Nazi jargon addressed to Peymann. Its clegant format,
an oversized version of Peymann's Burgtheater programs, which usually
contain the playscript, suggests that this is also a playtext of the drama
surrounding the drama. As such it offers a mind-boggling look at the
national psyche as released by the play, while foreign critics watched
dumbfounded, and a little jealously, the kind of feverish passion theater
could stilI elicit in Vienna .
Some might question the volume as the self-dramatization of the
Burgtheater's leaders' (inflated) sense of historic mission. One can't quite
help the suspicion that with all the best intentions they bask in the
