YFAAT WEISS
The Faint Echoes of German Discourse In
Israel
A
T THE BEGINNING
of the 1990S. , jerusalem's Khan Theater chose
to stage George Tabori's adaptation of Peter Sichrovsky's play
"Born Guilty."
In
the last few years, Sichrovsky, who is acting
the Jewish fig leaf for Austrian anti-Semitism, has been somewhat thrust
into the limelight: he is the representative of Austria's Jorgen Haider's
"Freedom Party" in the European Parliament. But in 1986, Sichrovsky
was a Viennese Jewish journalist who chose to deal with issues relating
to the "second generation." Sichrovsky divided the issues into two sep–
arate areas: the Jewish and the Nazi spheres. He documented the doubts
of the Jewish second generation in his book
Strangers in Their Own
Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today
and, two years later,
turned to the children of active Nazis in his book
Born Guilty: Children
of Nazi Families.
Now that Sichrovsky has come such a long way,
addressing the two sets of experiences can be depicted as a sign of things
to come. But at the end of the J980s, these were two interesting books,
candid and revealing, about the identity dilemmas of young people who
were born into a complex, biographical reality.
Writing about "echoes" is bound to be impressionistic. But I recall
that when watching young Israeli actors at the Khan Theater, who tried
to be a "second generation" of Nazis, I was unable to suppress my
temptation to giggle. Although these professional actors had learned to
play their parts convincingly, the combination of the Hebrew language
complete with native "Sabra" slang and Israeli body language made it
impossible to convey any kind of foreign atmosphere, let alone a Ger–
man or Austrian one. The alienation between actors and text was con–
spicuous throughout the entire performance. The evening was one of
recitation, and if anything of the agonizing of the Nazi second genera–
tion in Germany and Austria came over to the Israeli audience, it was
on the level of the text rather than of acting.
In
this context, the Khan's
actors were functioning like "readers."
The Reader,
by Bernhard Schlink, was published in Germany in
1995, and reached the Hebrew reading public in 1998. Its topic, too, is
