MUTTERS COURAGE

Play by George Tabori, 1994

In Mutters Courage ("My Mother's Courage," 1994), first produced in Munich in 1979, playwright George Tabori subverted traditional narrative form while deconstructing conventional notions of heroism. Tabori wrote, "Certainly this anecdote is an exception. But my mother's rescue by a German is just as true as it is true that my father was killed at Auschwitz." But the way in which Tabori relayed this "truth" is through the use of deliberately contradictory and constantly shifting perspectives: the story of his mother's deportation and escape, based on real life incidents, is relayed by a son/storyteller who beautifies the tale in an attempt both to validate his mother's unconventional courage and to illustrate the tension between a neat narrative and an unwieldy and horrible reality. In this way Tabori recognized the difficulty of articulating experiences of atrocity while validating a more nuanced notion of resistance.

The play, "a fairy tale in which no one was saved from baking in the oven except one," opens with the tape-recorded voice of the storyteller (Tabori himself): "A summer day in January '44, an outstanding harvest year for death, my mother put on her good black suit with the lace collar that she, as is appropriate for a lady, was accustomed to wearing to the weekly game of rummy at her sister Martha's." So begins the tale of one day in Elsa Tabori's life. She is arrested on the way to her sister's. When her bumbling captors accidentally lose track of her, she obediently turns herself in again. She is then placed on a train to Auschwitz; along the way she tells a German officer a mistake has been made, whereupon she is allowed to go back, arriving at her sister's late in the evening to play rummy, seemingly unscathed by her adventures. But the suggestion of the darker fate of many Jews remains despite Elsa's fortunate escape.

Throughout the son's narration the mother interrupts occasionally to correct him. Often Elsa praises him for his poetic descriptions of her experiences, though she reminds him that his version is not entirely accurate. But later she claims she has forgotten what happened. Thus, the playwright's emphasis is as much on the discrepancies between the son's story and his mother's memory as on the actual experience.

One way Tabori foregrounded the "produced" nature of representation was through his mockery of traditional narrative form, such as one finds in fairy tales. This "fairy tale" includes stock formulas such as a "love affair," a thrilling chase scene, and heroic struggles against obstacles, but always with an ironic twist. For example, the sequence the son entitles "the love story" involves an unseen male on the train to Auschwitz who begs Elsa to allow him to have anal intercourse with her because this would be his last time. Elsa grants the man's request and even experiences a certain pleasure from it, according to her son. Before the story can be fully told, however, the mother protests. She asks permission to leave the stage, too embarrassed to listen. Meanwhile the "past Elsa" (played by the same actress) remains onstage, pantomiming the son's version. Of course it is ironic and macabre to call this incident a "love story." The audience is also left wondering exactly what the real story is. These discrepancies between the son's tale and the mother's untold memory serve to distance the audience's identification with the characters, disrupting and at times even refuting the son's well-made narrative.

Tabori also deconstructed traditional notions of courage, as Bertolt Brecht did in his play Mother Courage. Elsa's conception of herself is a far cry from the traditional hero she is familiar with from her afternoons at the cinema. At one point Elsa confesses she lacks the skills required for such adventures and would do better if she were "her idol, Douglas Fairbanks, who could … swing from roof to roof and fence with a horde of crooks." Swept away from her "woman's world" of domestic cares, she behaves passively, and her destiny is constantly being determined by the men around her, just as her story is by her son's narration. The kind of courage she demonstrates seems small in comparison with the more dramatic and clear-cut moral stance exhibited by a traditional hero such as Uncle in Tabori's earlier play The Cannibals. But Tabori nonetheless validated his mother's courage by depicting her less dramatic but perhaps more realistic resistance.

By presenting narrators who are at times unreliable (as he also did in his plays The Cannibals, Jubiläum, and Mein Kampf ), Tabori has dramatized the problematic stance of the Holocaust writer. He realized that no representation of the Holocaust could adequately portray the "objective" truth. In this play, as well as in his other Holocaust plays, Tabori therefore has attempted through black humor, irony, and theatricality to avoid sentimentality but still focus on the horrible realities of the Holocaust.

—Susan Russell