Introduction

IN THE EARLY 1990S, plays by Hungarian-German-Jewish author George Tabori (1914–2007) ranked among those most performed on the German stage. At the time, it seems fair to say, Tabori had reached the pinnacle of his long career, which took him from Hungary to England and the United States, and from there to Germany and Austria. In 1992, the playwright, who had previously twice won the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis (1983, 1990), was awarded the Georg-Büchner-Preis, Germany's highest distinction in literature, and this, even though he did not write in German and did not hold a German passport (in fact, he had only lived in Germany since 1971)—“a scandal,” as East German poet Wolf Biermann wryly put it in his laudatio. When Tabori turned ninety in May 2004, the Berliner Ensemble put on a two-hour gala, broadcast live on German national television, which featured many well-known artists, writers, and politicians as well-wishers, including the German federal president Johannes Rau. Then, when Tabori died three years later, his ashes were buried in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery on Berlin's Chausseestrasse, a graveyard known as the final resting place for many prominent Germans, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Bertolt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Anna Seghers, and Heiner Müller. It seemed a fitting location for someone so foreign and yet so central to German culture of the second half of the twentieth century. An incarnation of Georg Simmel's perennial stranger who comes and stays, “whose membership within the group involved both being outside it and confronting it,” Tabori held a special place in German society, not just as a playwright and director whose work deserves continued scholarly attention, but also as a prominent Jewish author, a remigrant whose writings focus on the Holocaust and its representation on stage, and who, as a public figure, embodied the possibility of German-Jewish reconciliation.

George Tabori was born in Budapest in May 1914 on the eve of World War I, when Hungary was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His mother, Elsa Tabori, née Ziffer, came from a well-to-do German-speaking family of Slovenian descent, his father, Cornelius Tabori, was Hungarian, a journalist by profession.