“But Auschwitz was not Hell, It Was a German Concentration Camp.” On Remembering and Representing Auschwitz in Martin Walser and Peter Weiss

Abstract In the spring 1964, while taking part in the rehearsals of his play Marat/Sade (1964) at the Schiller-Theater in Berlin, Peter Weiss attended several sessions of the so-called Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963–1965). In the trial, 22 former functionaries in the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps were tried for murder and accessory to murder. The experience of attending the hearings in Frankfurt and closely following the media reports of the trial would have a major impact on his work, most concretely in his play The Investigation ( Die Ermittlung , 1965), which restaged the trial in the form of documentary drama. Many other writers were strongly affected by the trial, among them was Martin Walser, who wrote an essay entitled “Our Auschwitz” (“Unser Auschwitz”, 1965), critical of how the focus on individual criminal acts produced a mystification obscuring “the real Auschwitz”. He was also critical of the media reporting of the trial, in which the defendants were often described as “devils” and “beasts of prey” and where Auschwitz was described as “hell” and where references to Dante’s Inferno were common. For Walser, this prevented contemporary Germans from understanding and accepting the realities of the camps and the Nazi extermination programme. My essay describes how Walser’s critique of the Auschwitz trial and the media representation appears to interact – directly or indirectly – with the development of Weiss’s dramatic representation of the trial.