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| 'Defying Hitler' Asks All
the Key Questions |
| One man, one act play now
on stage in New York City |
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Jay Hauben
(jhauben)  |
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Published on 2006-05-12
14:41 (KST) |
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After taking the stage in London and
touring England, the one man, one act play "Defying
Hitler" is now on at 59/59 Theater in New York City,
through May 21.
It is a dramatization of a memoir
by Sebastian Haffner (pen name of Raimund Prezel)
written when he was in exile in England having fled Nazi
Germany in 1938. The setting is Haffner's London office
where he tells the audience his memories of the years
from 1914 to 1934 which he spent in Berlin. He was born
there in 1907 to German-Christian
parents.
Haffner, played by the British actor
Rupert Wickham, begins the play by asking why are we
there to hear an average person tell events from his not
very significant life? He answers his own question,
saying history is made not by a few "leaders" or
important people but that:
"the decisive historical events take place
among us, the anonymous masses. The most powerful
dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless
against the simultaneous mass decisions taken
individually and almost unconsciously by the
population at large... Decisions that influence the
course of history arise out of the individual
experiences of thousands or millions of
individuals." He is writing these memoirs to
help tell the history of the German people during a very
hard time for them.
Haffner's earliest set of
memories begin with the start of World War I. His family
was on summer vacation when the war broke out toward the
end of July 1914. As a child and far from the action,
there being no bombing as part of warfare yet, the war
to him was somehow a big game. He remembers going
everyday to look at the War Bulletin posted outside his
neighborhood police station. There were some food
shortages and occasional reports of the wounding or
death of someone his family knew at the front, but the
bulletin was always upbeat.
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'Defying Hitler' by Sebastian
Haffner |
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Adapted for the stage by
Rupert Wickham,
Directed by Peter
Symonds
Developed at London's Royal National
Theatre
Premiered at the National Theatre in
2003
A Theatre Unlimited
Presentation
Starring Rupert
Wickham
Performed at the 59/59 Theater, 59
East 59th Street, New York, New York
May 2 to
May 21, 2006
Part of The Brits Off Broadway
Festival
Runs 75 minutes, no intermission
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| Even when there
were setbacks, the War Bulletin and the press showed
confidence of victory. Then on Nov. 11, 1918, there was
no bulletin. Searching for the bulletin elsewhere, he
saw a crowd reading in amazement that an armistice had
been signed. Germany had lost the war. What was this,
thought the child? Did the war game have some hidden
rules he had not known? There had been no clue that
Germany might lose. His life seemed somehow shattered
and confused.
He then takes us through the very
short-lived December 1918 revolution which resulted in
the abdication of the Kaiser and the police murder of
the Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg. He tells us about Walter Rethenau, who had
gained respect among large numbers of Germans and was
trying to lead Germany in a moderate direction as its
foreign minister but was assassinated by two or three
right wing army officers in 1922.
Haffner
remembers that hundreds of thousands of Germans took to
the streets on the day of Rathenau's funeral and marched
all day long to show support for what Rathenau had been
doing. He next tells us how his family lived through the
hyper inflation of 1923. His father was a civil servant.
The family spent his father's entire monthly salary
within two days of receiving it. They went to a market
and bought all the food they could with that money. In
that way, the family had a month's food just before the
rapidly rising prices reduced the money the father had
been paid to uselessness.
With similar reminders
of history, Haffner takes us through the 1920s in
Berlin. He tells of an obscure ex-army officer staging
in Munich an almost comical effort at a coup d'etat, of
his own decision to study law and of the disappointments
and frustration of many Germans in this period. Among
his friends are Jews and people who have come to Berlin
from abroad. They discuss the confusions of the time. As
the 1930s begin, they see things that amaze them.
How come such right wing thuggish activity and
the Nazi Party seem to be growing? Surely, this will
pass? Germany has a long history of civilization and
civility. Then they see Hitler is being asked to the
Chancellery. He is being asked to lead the government.
Surely this can not last? Hitler is a buffoon. But
people seem to accept that the Reichstag fire is the
work of communists requiring them to give up more of
their rights, to allow their mail to be read and their
phone calls listened to. And all the beatings and
indignities that Jews are suffering. Something is
wrong.
It is now 1933. Hitler is chancellor. One
time Haffner is working on his law papers in the library
of the Appellate Court (Kammergericht) which he thought
was strong enough to survive the creeping Nazi
dominance. Suddenly, a clerk enters and says the SA
(Brown Shirts) are in the building. A few Jewish lawyers
quickly leave. An SA officer comes up to Haffner and
asks, "Are you an Aryan (Pure German)?" Without
thinking, Haffner answers "yes," thereby saving himself
from the beating another lawyer was just then having. He
is amazed and ashamed of his weakness. He comments, he
knew he had failed his first test. To allow the question
to be asked unchallenged was for him a further
deterioration of the German civilization that he
treasured.
The story tells how, some time later,
Haffner's father faced a similar dilemma. His father had
for 40 years served in the Prussian civil service. He
had helped craft significant social legislation after
careful study. Now he was retired. A questionnaire
arrived in the mail asking him to account for his long
years of service and his personal life. It included a
pledge of support for the Nazi regime and its
activities. He was appalled. But non-compliance would
lead to an automatic end to his pension.
The
family said they would support him not to sign. He
agonized for two days, answered all the questions,
signed the pledge and quickly mailed it before he might
change his mind, arguing his family need the money from
his pension. Haffner says in the play that his father
died two years later from a stomach disorder that began
the day he signed the pledge of support for the Nazi
regime.
With vignettes like these, the play
conveys some of the horrors in Germany during the Nazi
period, the creeping deterioration of a civilized
Germany and the great difficulty faced by millions of
people in Germany. In the play Haffner says that in the
last election in that period, the Nazi Party was the
only party but still only got 44 percent of the vote.
The majority of Germans were opposed to Nazism. Millions
who were offended by the deterioration of their society
could not find more public and meaningful ways to resist
and defy the Nazi rule.
The
story ends around 1934. He tried then to emigrate to
Paris but could not find work. Only in 1938, when he
manages to go from Berlin into exile in England does he
find a way to more publicly oppose Hitler. He changes
his name to protect his family still in Germany and
writes books trying to explain the Hitler regime and how
to deal with it.
The real life Sebastian Haffner
returned to Germany in 1954 and spent the rest of his
life trying to analyze and understand what happened to
his civilized Germany. The memoir on which the play is
based was not published until after his death in 1999.
His son found it and published
it, first in German as "Geschichte Eines Deutschen"
and then in English with the same title as the play,
"Defying Hitler."
By the end of the play, this
reviewer was left with the impression that Haffner's
memoir was his quest to understand if tiny acts by
millions of people make history what happened in his
Germany? He says in the play millions of people like him
resisted. There is in Berlin a German
Resistance Memorial Center which documents thousands
of acts of resistance during the Nazi period. But
somehow still they failed to convert their individual
resistance into a big enough force to counter state
supported terror. History and this play raise the
question, can individuals and a people do more? Must
they do more, earlier, in order to be able to save
themselves from a similar horror? |
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| ©2006 OhmyNews |
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