Borowski is often considered one of the most tragic figures in Poland’s Columbus 20 generation. In Miłosz’s book-length essay The Captive Mind, Borowski is presented as one of the “captive” types.434 Borowski is Beta, the unhappy lover who survives Auschwitz and becomes zealously entangled in the Soviet regime, believing wholeheartedly that it is the only way to protect humanity from fascism. disappointed and disillusioned, realizing he has become a part of the regime he sought to fight, Beta takes his own life. Like Beta, Borowski survived Auschwitz and eventually reunited with his fiancée Maria, who survived the women’s camp. during their stay at Auschwitz, Maria was seriously ill and Borowski repeatedly risked his own life to smuggle medicine, food, and his letters to her. After the war, Borowski stayed at various prisoner camps, searching for Maria. He eventually found her in a Swedish hospital and they both returned to Poland. This was the time when Soviets began using the fear of fascism as their primary propaganda tactic, and Borowski, like many intellectuals who survived the war, came to sympathize with the Soviet regime.435 His former colleagues instantly accused him of betrayal and, once his stories were published, of distorting the reality of camp life and writing “amoral” prose.436
Borowski wrote about Auschwitz with nonchalant distance. There is none of elie Wiesel’s moral outrage or Primo Levi’s philosophical outrage in his writing.437 Raymonde Temkine describes Borowski’s work as “one of the most gripping novels that an escapee from the fields of death ever consecrated to the hell in which he lived and because of which Borowski finally died, committing suicide some years after his liberation.”438 Borowski describes daily life in Auschwitz in a casual, deadpan tone, embedding himself completely in its reality: there are no heroes here. The line between victim and perpetrator blurs, and survival means acceptance and normalization of horror. no one is without guilt, and Borowski implicates himself as much as anyone else. Andrzej Wirth, in the Polish Review (1967), notes that “In the Auschwitz cycle the narrators […][are] […] victim[s] collaborating in crime. Within the system of extermination he [finds] a comparatively comfortable position of a mediator between victims and their tormentors and plays this role with relish.”439 After his stories were published, many readers confused Borowski the man with his literary alter-ego, and accused him of perpetrating the acts his alter-ego commits. Actual witness accounts contradict Borowski’s story.440 He was reportedly one of the rare few who retained their human impulses, regularly helping his fellow inmates. For example, Borowski gave up his job as an Auschwitz orderly, a privileged position in the camp’s hierarchy. Although the post offered a greater chance of survival, Borowski felt obliged to “share the common
lot of the other prisoners.”441 eventually, the lack of heroics in Borowski’s writing ran counter to both communist propaganda and the long-standing national mythology, as Wirth writes: “Borowski’s conscious anti-heroism displayed in his attitude to the occupation and the concentration camps represents a ruthless revision of the romantic sentimental myth then prevalent in Polish literature.”442 Thus, Borowski became the subject of criticism from both camps: the regime and the opposition. Both communists and Catholics accused him of nihilism, decadence, “cynicism, moral indifference and uncontrollable ‘moral insanity.’”443 For Borowski, though, sheer survival was enough to implicate the survivors, and he challenged them to tell the truth:
The first duty of Auschwitzers is to make clear just what a camp is […] But let them not forget that the reader will unfailingly ask: But how did it happen that you survived?
[…] Tell, then, how you bought places in the hospital, easy posts, how you shoved the
‘Mussulmans’ [prisoners who had lost the will to live] into the oven, how you bought women, men, what you did in the barracks, unloading the transport s[…] tell about the daily life of the camp […] But write that you, you were the ones who did this. That a portion of the sad fame of Auschwitz belongs to you as well.444
Through his Auschwitz experience, Borowski came to believe that the human being is a fundamentally cruel and merciless creature, capable, with a slight shift in circumstances, of the most appalling acts,445 and his writing, with its normalization of camp ethics, makes this realization intolerably pervasive: “One is shocked into an awareness of the unnaturalness of mass extermination because it is presented as natural.”446 The result is the “alienation effect […] brought about by the description of unimaginable crimes as if they were something almost natural, [something normal and ordinary].”447
Borowski writes about Auschwitz as though he were writing about summer camp, with a chilling distance. Irving Howe, in the New Republic, summarizes Borowski’s style: “Borowski writes in a cold, harsh, even coarse style, heavy with flaunted cynicism, and offering no reliefs of the heroic.”448 One is astounded by
“his absolute refusal to strike any note of redemptive nobility.”449 Jan Kott adds,
“The most terrifying thing in Borowski’s stories is the icy detachment of the author.”450 Wirth points out that Borowski’s “tone is one of apparent cynicism, moral indifference and uncontrollable ‘moral insanity.’”451 Bogdan Wojdowski calls it “tragic cynicism.”452 But stylistically Borowski’s writing is not just a skillful use of dark humor. There is some Swiftian irony in its self-incrimination, but the style is also fully steeped in the tradition of the Polish grotesque, following the likes of Witold Gombrowicz and Bruno Schulz. It has a particularly Polish je ne sais quoi detachment in the face of utter despair and the overwhelming, brutal force of history. Borowski’s hero is not faced with any moral choice simply because, to quote Wirth again, he is “deprived of all choice. He finds himself in a situation without a choice because every choice is base. The tragedy lies not in the necessity of choosing but in the impossibility of making a choice.”453 For Borowski’s heroes, every choice is laughable.
In Akropolis, Grotowski transposes Borowski’s writing style into theatrical language.
In his interview with Margaret Croyden, Grotowski said about Auschwitz:
It is true that in the extermination camps many who survived found solidarity. For many, this produced a sense of absolution and nobility. But if we really want to confront the Auschwitz experience, we must confront its darkest aspects: the mechanics of the camp. For instance, the air itself was limited for one. To live meant to breathe the air that another one lacked. If we want the truth, we must show Auschwitz as a giant mechanism with all its cruelty. The mechanics of the camp were arranged for a specific goal and they worked. We cannot avoid this reality. It is a choice we made: the mechanism of Auschwitz in confrontation with past values.454
Like Borowski, Grotowski frames the violence in the cool detachment of the mundane, the absurd and the poetic. But in theatrical space, the detachment is threefold: it is the detachment of the spectators from the actors, of the actors from their roles as prisoners, and of the prisoners from the mythical roles they reenact. Grotowski plays with three planes: the reality of spectators, the reality of the concentration camps, and the reality of Wyspiański’s drama, which the prisoners reenact. There is also a fourth layer: Wyspiański’s own skepticism about the national ideals of Polish martyrology, a kind of ad absurdum, double remove that is both ironic and quixotic in light of Auschwitz.
Thus, Grotowski’s Akropolis is not just metatheatrical; the structure of the performance is that of a Russian matryoshka doll – a play within the play within the play within the play – that nonetheless leaves the actors on the outside, beyond any of the structural frames, in a reality untouched by text, context, or historical memory. The distancing is accomplished by the textual framing, the setting of the audience, the acting and the structure of the play.
Chapter 14
RePReSenTInG THe UnRePReSenTABLe
In “essay on Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), Theodore Adorno puts forth a dramatic thesis: “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”455 Adorno’s statement implies that the experience of Auschwitz altered our relationship to language. In a way, Adorno argues, the Holocaust leaves us speechless. Following Adorno, artists, writers, poets, painters and filmmakers, as well as literary critics, have struggled with the issue of representation: how, if at all, should the Holocaust be represented? What does representing it mean if every representation is connected to the european project of enlightenment, the very idea of humanism, its failure and aftermath? Among other things, the Holocaust reduced death from a unique experience that defines our humanity to mass production. Jean Améry, for example, argues that Auschwitz altered the european aesthetic of death and dying. After the Holocaust, death could no longer be seen through the prism of art:
The first result was always the total collapse of the esthetic view of death. What I am saying is familiar. The intellectual, and especially the intellectual of German education and culture, bears this esthetic view of death within him. It was his legacy from the distant past, at the very latest from the time of German romanticism. It can be more or less characterized by the names novalis, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Thomas Mann. For death in its literary, philosophic, or musical form there was no place in Auschwitz. no bridge led from death in Auschwitz to Death in Venice. every poetic evocation of death became intolerable, whether it was Hesse’s Dear Brother Death or that of Rilke, who sang: “Oh Lord, give each his own death.” The esthetic view of death had revealed itself to the intellectual as part of an esthetic mode of life;
where the latter had been all but forgotten, the former was nothing but an elegant trifle.456
How to aestheticize Auschwitz, and to what ends? A significant number of scholars and writers agree with Adorno and “view the Holocaust as virtually unrepresentable in language.”457 Some, such as Claude Lanzmann, suggest that trying to represent, or even to understand, the Shoah is in itself an act of “obscenity.” The Shoah is beyond human understanding: “There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding,”
Lanzmann famously claimed.458 Others, such as Michael Bernstein, wonder whether anything “about human nature or values can be learned from a situation in extremis
except the virtual tautology that extreme pressure brings out extreme and extremely diverse behavior.”459 Bernstein argues that,
because so much of our culture is still strongly bound to the belief that the truth lies in the extreme moments which “ordinary bourgeois life” covers over and that it is only at the (appropriately named) “cutting edge” of the unthinkable that the most valuable insights remain hidden, it has become possible, by a truly grotesque inversion, to interpret the ruthlessness of the Shoah as offering the most authentic – because most horrendous – image of the underlying reality of our world.460
Thus, in representing the Holocaust, Bernstein implies, one runs into the risk of sensationalizing it without revealing anything profound about the human condition.
When faced with the decision of how to commemorate Auschwitz, a committee formed by former prisoners, under the leadership of Tadeusz Wąsowicz, decided to simply leave the site as it was – as no artistic representation, no work of art, seemed adequate, seemed able to capture the horror of the place.461 When Grotowski chose Borowski’s stories to frame his interpretation of Akropolis, he was faced with the same problem of representing the Holocaust, which dominated postwar literary discourse.
But in this respect, theatre is even more problematic than film or literature: how does one represent “a reality that is too strong to be expressed theatrically?”462 It is no accident that Polish postwar theatre generally avoided the topic and that, with the exception of the 1949 drama Germans (a collection of moral vignettes by Leon Kruczkowski about “ordinary” Germans and their mindless, self-interested collaboration with the nazi regime) and Szajna’s 1965 adaptation of Empty Field, there were no major plays that dealt directly with either the war or the Holocaust.
When in 1962 Grotowski tackled the subject of Auschwitz, he knew the challenges that such a project entailed, but he also knew one thing for sure: he wanted “no realistic illusions.”463 The representation had to be nondirect because, as he pointed out, “We cannot play prisoners, we cannot create such images in the theatre. Any documentary film is stronger. We looked for something else. What is Auschwitz? Is it something we could play today? Auschwitz is a world which functions inside us.
In the performance the SS men were not visible, only prisoners.”464 In many ways, Grotowski’s solution was simple; he used the same strategy that Borowski used in literature:
Grotowski submitted the facts of Auschwitz itself to the tests of mockery and blasphemy. His prisoners of the death camp were pitiful yet somehow beyond pity;
they were simply there – an objective fact for the audience to ponder. They were hardly the noble victims our culture has raised nearly to a level of sainthood. Rather, they were human beings simply confronted with the ultimate in inhumanity. Like the unsentimentalized characters in the death-camp stories of Tadeusz Borowski, Grotowski’s actors presented figures submitted to “the din of an extreme world” […]
who had cracked and become living dead.465
In the introduction to MacTaggart’s recording of the play, Peter Brook argues that Grotowski was able to actually capture the spirit of the concentration camp:
The horror that is at root of the very notion of [a] concentration camp actually emerged. Akropolis has something of the dangerous nature of a Black Mass. […] In a Black Mass […] there comes a point when all the showy and theatrical things, people dressed up in bizarre ways, becomes unimportant, and what actually happens is that a certain quality of pure evil actually manifests itself. […] In Akropolis, by the same sincerity and mastery of deep rhythmic elements, the pulse of life in a concentration camp actually came out in the open, and I had a feeling of something truly nasty, truly repellent, and one that stops speech.
At certain moments in Akropolis, because a nameless horror was not described, was not referred to, was not brought into our imagination as something that once happened in a place called Auschwitz, it actually was brought into being there. […] One takes the greatest nightmare, the incomprehensible nightmare of our times, which is the concentration camp, and one is tempted to think that the greatest reality that you can find about [a] concentration camp is its own reality. In other words, a documentary approach: what can go beyond the statistics, the books that tell us the facts about the concentration camp? […] Trying to be more artistic would have been cheap. you can’t do more than that. […] Grotowski, through Akropolis, proves that there is an exception that defies this rule. He has made an imaginative work of art, which at first sight has the trappings of art. [you can say:] this is art theatre, it takes place with a lot of actors doing stylized semi-balletic movements, chanting in ritualistic ways and one could say, this is turning the naked reality of a concentration camp into something inferior, an attempt of an artist to make a beautiful work of art. [But] gradually, as one enters into [Grotowski’s] intentions, and into what is achieved by his actors, one sees that this is not what happens. What [the actors] are doing is making the spirit of that concentration camp live again for a moment, so in a sense, their work is more realistic, because even the statistics refer to the past, the man describing in the courtroom what happened refers to the past. Grotowski does something that no film can do. (The film also refers to the past.) He actually makes the sense of concentration camp for a moment reappear, and it is there. And you can taste it, sense it, touch it and feel it, and you can’t say that doesn’t exist anymore in this world, that has nothing to do with the mankind, that it is a terrible Hitlerian dream, something we mustn’t forget because it happened then. There it is again. A group of men makes it come back, and it that sense, it is like a Black Mass.466
As mentioned earlier, when Grotowski’s troupe eventually came to the USA, the director chose to perform Akropolis at the Washington Square Methodist Church. In the opening paragraph of his New York Times review, Clive Barnes wrote about the effect that such a setting evoked: “It is a room, except it isn’t a room, it’s a church. And inside the room, which is the concentration camp Auschwitz, are prisoners. And inside the church are spectators. The spectators are mixed up with the prisoners, so that the actors and the audience are in a constant position of emotional confrontation.”467 The choice
of a church as a staging venue captured the multilayered subtleties of Grotowski’s adaptation. However, Grotowski never intended to represent the concentration camp literally. On the contrary, as Flaszen puts it in his notes: “The spectacle was supposed to be a poetic paraphrase of the concentration camp. Literalness and metaphor intertwine like in a dream world.”468 Literal representation was impossible formally, conceptually and ethically.