The Investigation premiered with simultaneous productions in 16 German cities in 1965. It is a dramatic reconstruction of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, held in 1963-65, when 22 defendants were tried under German, not international, law, for war crimes committed in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps. The testimony was edited and condensed by Weiss into a five-hour play. The characters include three members of the court, nine nameless Witnesses, and 18 Accused, who have the names of distinct historical figures from the trial. According to Weiss, the Witnesses are anonymous in order to “sum up what hundreds expressed,” and the Accused “have lent their names” but “exist as symbols of a system that implicated in its guilt many others who never appeared in court.”

Auschwitz today

The representation of the Holocaust through art has been an area of much debate. Weiss’s contribution, which uses only historical language yet removes some details including any mention of Jews, has been both praised for giving room to our imaginations in the nearly impassable landscape of Auschwitz, and condemned as entirely misguided.

As Documentary Theater, The Investigation uses documents of history and facts rather than imagined characters and events. However, the play is not a condensation of the trials, and does not attempt to recreate reality. Nor does it ask the spectator to identify with the characters. Rather, Weiss structured the play in 11 cantos, with a minimalist, non-dramatic, surrealist aesthetic designed to intervene in the construction of the social and political reality of the day. The theatrical experimentation of the ‘60s included many similar works, and recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in these ideas, including Tectonic Theater Project’s The Laramie Project, about the murder of openly gay university student Matthew Shepard, and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, based on Ensler’s interviews with women about their bodies.

Urwintore’s adaptation is an 80-minute cutting of Weiss’s five-hour script performed in French with English supertitles, and one scene in Kinyarwanda. The power of the piece resides in the juxtaposition of their restrained and dignified performances, the horror of the events described, and the knowledge that we have once more stood by, allowing genocide to be perpetrated. In October 2005, Urwintore presented The Investigation in Butare and Kigali, Rwanda. It subsequently toured to Liege and Ans, Belgium, to Peter Brook’s Theatre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris and the Young Vic in London.

– Contributed by the CST Education Department