Leopoldstadt

[psocoptera]

Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard play at the Huntington Theatre (which seems to be going by The Huntington these days in their programs, perhaps to avoid the whole theater/theatre issue). I like Tom Stoppard, and I knew this would be heavy (it's about a Jewish family in Vienna in the first half of the 20th century, so you know how that's going to go) but I wanted to see what Stoppard would do with it. It's a very personal work - he's trying to imagine some of his own heritage and come to terms with his own family history - and it was powerful in exactly the way you'd expect. (While also sometimes pretty funny in the leadup, as Stoppard does.)

We had an interesting conversation afterwards about Holocaust art, about which I have many mixed feelings - in wanting to see this play, knowing it would be emotional and I would cry about it, is that, like, atrocity tourism of real historical suffering; does Holocaust art get used for justification of the modern state of Israel feeling they have infinite license to do supervillain shit you would normally spend two hours watching Batman or James Bond thwart (yes, I am talking about the pager attacks on Lebanon, which is not the only bad thing the state of Israel has done but is a recent and particularly shocking one); given that in the US one of our two major parties has high-office candidates who have called themselves Nazis or who are calling for the forcible deportation of 20 million people, do we conclude that Holocaust art is a failure at convincing people that holocausts are bad and we don't want any or would this shit be even worse if we weren't constantly turning off at least some potential fascists from fascism with timely application of Number the Stars or Maus or Diary of Anne Frank or Devil's Arithmetic or Schindler's List or or or. Probably nobody goes to see something like Leopoldstadt unless they're already anti antisemitism? Probably they are not going to generalize to "displacing and persecuting groups of people is bad in general" unless they already think that? I don't know.

Comments

Art

[vardibidian]

I don't know. I don't think that preventing another Holocaust is the point of Holocaust art, and obviously if it is the point, it's not working. But what is the point? Is it just turning suffering into art? Is it making a community where people can process history, or the world, or whatever? Is it explaining the inexplicable? Is it just that it's a way of raising the stakes in a situation?

Or, you know, is it just Stoppard writing a play that is set in a particular time and place, the way he has written plays set in Eastern Europe at the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in Edwardian-era Prague, and on an Atlantic liner in the 1930s?

Because it can't be right that the Holocaust is uniquely _disallowed_ from being the subject of art, either. But it still feels like if a play or a novel or a painting is connected to the Holocaust that is has to be Holocaust Art, and has that responsibility to, you know, prevent more Holocausts.

Thanks,
-V.

Re: Art

[psocoptera]

I don't think Stoppard wrote it thinking about it preventing more holocausts - like I said, I think he wrote it for intensely personal reasons of grappling with his own family history. There's a character in the last act who seems like a pretty direct author avatar, a man who, like Stoppard, got out of Europe with his mother while very young and became a British schoolboy and did not remember the relatives who did not get out and who died in the Holocaust, and I think Stoppard is trying to communicate what that story is like, and maybe to let that character have the kind of Big Conversations it's easier to have in fiction than in real life. And also bring to life a little bit of turn-of-the-century Jewish Vienna, and get to do a somebody-else-is-mistaken-for-the-mohel gag, etc... always lots of motivations for art, especially as something as big as a play. And I'll assume that the Huntington's motivations in staging it are similarly complex, probably including factors like "the director thought it would be interesting to direct" and "they thought they could sell all the seats" (which is a good motive! I like theater companies existing and actors getting paid!). But I feel like it can't get *received* as anything other than Holocaust Art? Or maybe I mean *I personally* can't see it as anything else, which I guess is a criticism of me and not the play, but that's fine. :) I mean, I definitely do come to the theater with really different preexisting feelings about an Atlantic liner in the 1930s vs, like, Kristallnacht. I would love to be able to run the experiment of what it would feel like to see this play at a time when I was not so personally freaked out about the safety of Haitian-Americans and families in Gaza and is democracy ending in six weeks - maybe if people are still putting on plays in a hundred years, it can all feel as safely historical to them as Richard III or something, which I suppose must have been life-or-death stuff for the people involved, in the 15th century...

[belecrivain]

Re “the pager attacks on Lebanon”: is there any evidence so far that the people killed/hurt weren’t existing members of Hezbollah (or family members thereof)? I mean, I’m side-eyeing the attack myself — I’m not quite sure what the long-term strategy is, since I am obviously a military expert — but these are people who are already committed to combat against Israel, no? If it had gone the other way, and Hezbollah had infiltrated IDF equipment, wouldn’t that have been regarded as a just and precise strike?

[psocoptera]

If Hezbollah had boobytrapped thousands of IDF devices and then detonated them wherever they happened to be, in homes and public places, taking out random bystanders and some people's kids, I would definitely consider that some extremely fucked up supervillain shit. As also not a military or law person I don't feel like I can say "act of war" or "war crime" or anything that might have some complicated official definition but I do feel like I can say "this is twisted and the kind of thing I thought only happened in action movies with unrealistically evil antagonists". (And honestly I'm not sure whether anything "just and precise" has happened anywhere in Israel or Palestine in the past hundred years. Probably something somewhere but those are not the words that come to mind.)

[belecrivain]

Fair enough!