Volume 7, Number 7 · November 3, 1966
Auschwitz in New York
By Elizabeth Hardwick
The Investigation
by Peter Weiss
Peter Weiss has said about The Investigation that it could be recited or sung, but could not be acted. At one time, when the work was in progress, he called it 'Auschwitz Oratorio,' and actually the text is a sort of counterpoint of voices, uttering an inexpressibly awful libretto. All except a few lines of the text is taken from the testimony in the 1964 trial, in Frankfurt, of the SS men attached to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. No attempt has been made to shape the testimony dramatically, although certain things are included, such as the mention of German industrial firms, to support Weiss's idea that the camps were an economic advantage to Germany and are a product of capitalism and a possibility for every capitalist society. 'The Camp is still here,' one of the survivors says. It lives on, according to a recent interview with Weiss, in the prisons in Spain and Portugal, in the killing of hundreds of thousands of Communists in Indonesia (bringing that dubious nation to 'our side'), in Vietnam, in South Africa. For the most part, however, The Investigation is a recitation and remembrance of torture and murder and gas pellets and crematoria and individual acts of sadism. The stage is just a bare court room. The witnesses and defendants face us. The witnesses produce their ghastly memories and then turn to point to the defendant, in his business clothes, who some twenty years before had done the dreadful acts.
Review, 1904 words
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