Peter Weiss
L'istruttoria

"And I saw

something moving among the dead

It was a little girl

I took her out onto the street

and asked

Who are you

How long have you been here

I don't know

she said

Why are you here among the dead

I asked

And she said

I cannot stay among the living anymore"

The words spoken by this innocent creature would be enough to represent the atrocious physical and psychic annihilation to which thousands of deportees in Auschwitz were subjected.

A German of Jewish origin, Peter Weiss assembles some important testimonies retrieved from the trial held in Frankfurt in 1963-64 against war crimes into an oratorio in eleven cantos, "The Investigation" (Die Ermittlung. Oratorium in 11 Gesängen), a theatrical text published in 1965 and still widely performed. The judge, the prosecutor, and the defendant's lawyer handle the interrogation, where eighteen defendants (real people) are judged using the depositions of nine anonymous witnesses, who alternately embody the many anonymous testimonies given during the Frankfurt trial. The first two witnesses were officials inside the camp but are not indicted; they answer exhaustively only regarding the bureaucratic aspects of the administration they were part of and hide behind the wall of silence when more leading questions are posed or when simply asked to take a stance. Yet, as they are without a criminal record, they are granted the privilege of anonymity like the remaining witnesses, the true war victims, the "Häftlinge" (meaning "detainees, prisoners," thanks to an extensive use, "deportees"): seven people who were subjected to slavery, harassment, and every kind of atrocity; people stripped of their identity and their sense of belonging to a culture, a people, a religion; people without the desire to start over or even to live (consider Paul Celan and Primo Levi, just to name two illustrious examples). Among these seven Häftlinge, two are women, witnesses 4 and 5, who experienced the dramas of the female section of Auschwitz, where the inmates often succumbed to the selfish necessity of overpowering each other even just slightly to fuel the hope of survival. The only Häftlinge who is not unknown is deceased, Lili Tofler, who was executed on charges of sabotage and to whom the fifth canto is dedicated. On the other side, the defendants reject the accusations with contempt and sarcasm, and when they rarely admit to even a minimal part of the charges, they attribute responsibility to the higher-ups, who, they claim, forced them to kill and torture under threat of death or severe disciplinary sanctions. The reality undoubtedly corresponds to the prosecutor's thesis, which states that those who adhered to the mass extermination program did so voluntarily, because "At the front / they would have had a life in danger / So they stayed / where they had only unarmed enemies". The defendants are not anonymous, and each of them holds a strong symbolic value. Among them, we recall the security officer Boger, who tortured and nearly beat deportees to death with methods of unimaginable brutality and sadism, Stark, who was only a high school student at the time but participated in the executions with terrible efficiency, doctors Klehr and Capesius, responsible for introducing methods of killing based on the use of phenol and Zyklon B gas into the camp.

Weiss transforms the testimonies of the investigation into a poetic text that structurally roots itself in the Inferno of the Divine Comedy: divided into cantos, set in an escalating climax of drama and dismay as in the Dantean reference, it also follows almost chronologically the tragic events of the deportees, from their arrival in trains where they were packed to their cremation, and the increasingly inhumane cruelty of their tormentors, who with time prove to be bloodthirsty institutionalized executioners. The author transforms the dialogues into poetry, dividing them into very short sentences, sometimes consisting of a single word, and refusing punctuation, thus giving the writing a cold and disconcerting laconicism. The description of the horrors of the camp flows relentlessly and torrentially, the reader is drawn into a reading that offers no respite, such is the emotional charge that even a single word can unleash. An undoubtedly meritorious work, not only for its effective documentary contribution, but also for its form, for the original and priceless lyrical guise with which it was conceived. A slap in the face to the Germany of the "economic miracle" led by Konrad Adenauer, whose centrist and reactionary government made a whole nation cowardly evade its historical responsibilities and quickly forget a cumbersome and uncomfortable past. A perfect work, to never forget and to raise awareness.

I exited the camp

But the camp always exists