Clare Finburgh
Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies
University of Essex
TH343 Political Theatre
Peter Weiss (1916-1982), The Investigation [Die Ermittlung) (1965). First presented
simultaneously in 13 theatres in both East and West Germany on 19 October 1965. Peter
Brook conducted a public reading the same night at the Aldwych Theatre, London.
The following notes provide background information to our seminar session. They are intended
as a starting point from which you can conduct further and more detailed research. They include
questions (in BLUE) that encourage you to explore themes and issues in greater detail. If you
refer to the notes in essays or examinations, please ensure that you quote your source clearly.
Peter Weiss
For further information on Weiss’s life and for his views on literature, drama, and politics, see the
Marat/Sade notes on the CMR. Many of the points raised there are relevant to The Investigation.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
 The play dramatizes the trial, that was held over a period of twenty months between 1963 and
1965, in Frankfurt am Main in West Germany.
Dock in the Frankfurt trial, 1965.
 The trial was of twenty officers and administrative staff of the Nazi extermination camp at
Auschwitz, Poland.
 To date, the Auschwitz trial is the most extensive attempt to bring to justice those who participated
in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Preparations for the trial lasted several years; over 1300
statements from witnesses were collected, and during the trial itself, 359 witnesses from 19 countries
were heard, 248 of which were survivors of the camp.
 The trial took place almost 20 years after the liberation of the camp by the Russian Red Army on
27 January 1945. Sentences were finally passed on 19 and 20 August 1965.
 6 of the accused were given life sentence; 11 received sentences of between 3 and 14 years; 3
were acquitted altogether. The court came up against the difficulty that, legally, only those who acted
in “excess” of their orders could be convicted of murder. Those who simply followed Nazi orders,
could not be found guilty. The necessary hard evidence was, however, almost impossible to obtain,
given the nature of the case and the conditions in the camp (many witnesses had been killed, so their
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testimonies went with them to the grave; it was a long time ago; it was one person’s word against
another’s).
Defendant and former Gestapo staff sergeant Wilhelm Boger, 56, before a diagram of
Auschwitz, 1965
 During the twenty months of the trial, the world watched in horror as the defendants refused to
acknowledge the enormity of their crimes, claiming instead that they had only been obeying their
orders.
 Within Germany, the response to the trial was divided: many were shocked as more and more of
the gruesome details of the reality in the camp were revealed; others only wished to put the country’s
Nazi past behind them – a sentiment echoed by Mulka (Defendant 1) in the closing lines of the play.
 This outcome painfully exposed the inability of the legal process to come to terms with the reality
of the Nazi past and the industrialised mass murder machine operating in Auschwitz. These mild
sentences caused outrage around the world. W. wrote that he was “represent[ing] a reaction against
the state of things as they are” with his documentary theatre (in George W. Brandt, Modern Theories
of Drama, p. 249).
 The play was premiered on 19 October 1965, on 15 stages simultaneously (including the Aldwych
Theatre in London), just two months after the conclusion of the trial.
 What do you think about the fact that defendants could only be found guilty if they had
acted in excess of their orders?
 Do you think the defendants in the play show remorse for their actions?
 What would you have done? Would you have followed orders, or resisted? What might the
consequences have been?
The 1965 premiere, a staged reading at the German Academy of the Arts, East Berlin. The use
of documentary-style visuals is evocative of Brecht’s and Piscator’s political theatre.
VERBATIM THEATRE
 Verbatim theatre derives from practices of documentary theatre developed by Erwin Piscator and
Bertolt Brecht. Records from history were re-enacted in a theatre, in an attempt to provide
documentary information for the audience.
 Reality is prioritised over representation:
“The documentary genre bases its claims on showing reality (rather than fiction), the truth
(rather than artifice), authenticity (rather than pretence)” (John Corner and Alan Rosenthal,
New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 342).
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Documentary drama presents and re-enacts records from history. Unlike traditional drama, it
is not founded upon freely imagined plot. Historically, documentary drama is still in its
infancy, dating from Erwin Piscator’s production of Trotz Alledem in 1925. (Gregory Mason,
“Documentary Drama from Revue to Tribunal”, Modern Drama, vol. 20, no. 3, Sept. 1977, p.
263).
 W. says of documentary drama:
Documentary theatre refrains from all invention, it takes authentic material and reproduces it
on stage without altering the content but by adapting the form (quoted in Michael Patterson,
German Theatre Today, p. 80).
 Documentary drama relies on the compilation of material from historical sources. It sometimes
includes witness statements or speeches, which are quoted word-for-word, or verbatim. Theatre that
is constructed from witness statements is called verbatim theatre.
 During the rise of Hitler and after the Second World War, this type of theatre enjoyed a certain
popularity, because it was a means of grappling with contemporary events and recent history.
In verbatim theatre, the emphasis is on witness testimony, which is quoted from word-for-word. W.’s
contemporaries also wrote verbatim plays: Heiner Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer
(In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964), examined the 1954 American hearing that accused
this scientist of delaying progress in the development of the hydrogen bomb; Rolf Hochhuth’s
Soldaten (The Soldiers, 1967) suggested that Winston Churchill was complicit in the death of the
World War II Polish leader General Sikorsky.
 This kind of theatre is enjoying a renaissance in the UK at the moment. Recent examples include
Alecky Blythe’s Come Out Eli (Arcola Theatre, London, 2003): a chronicle of what it was like to live in
Hackney when Eli Hall took neighbours hostage, barricaded himself in his flat and held out for 16
days; Richard Gregory's White Trash (2004, Contact Theatre, Manchester): 7 lads playing pool,
dancing and making speeches about their lives that they themselves wrote; Richard Norton-Taylor’s
The Colour of Justice (1999): a recreation of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry; Victoria Brittain’s and
Gillian Slovo’s Guantanamo (2003): about the treatment of prisoners at Camp Delta.
 Indeed, one London theatre, the Tricycle, has produced around 10 verbatim plays recently,
concerning the aftermath of 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 Why has there been a return to verbatim theatre:
 Playwright and academic David Edgar states that “Verbatim theatre fills the hole left by the current
inadequacy of TV documentary.”
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1292931,00.html)
 In a Guardian article (17 March 2004), journalist Peter Preston states that detailed studies of
particular political cases are being pushed out of newspaper supplements by lifestyle features.
 Therefore, according to both Edgar and Preston, the merit of this kind of theatre is that it provides a
forum in which to voice what’s usually edited out by the TV and press. Both censorship and selfcensorship in the mass media mean that news is constructed according to what government and the
general public want to hear. This compromises representation of the actual truth of a news story.
 It’s notable that several verbatim plays have been written by journalists, rather than conventional
playwrights, in particular since 9/11. Journalist Richard Norton-Taylor created Justifying War: Scenes
from the Hutton Enquiry (2004). And Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo wrote Guantanamo (2003), about
the treatment of prisoners at Camp Delta. None of these are playwrights; they’re all journalists.
Guantanamo: Honour Bound, by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Tricycle Theatre, 2004.
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 So, verbatim and documentary theatre are often perceived by the public as providing some kind of
alternative truth, that political rhetoric and the mass media might resist.
 This was also the case in Nazi and post-war Germany.
 W., whose father was Jewish and whose family had been forced to flee from Germany in 1934,
was present in the Frankfurt courtroom during some of the hearings of the Auschwitz trial.
 The Investigation is based partly on W.’s own notes, and partly on the extensive press coverage
of these hearings (official transcripts were not available, so he had to use transcripts from daily
newspaper reports in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).
 Therefore, this play can be described as verbatim theatre.
 Have you seen a documentary drama or verbatim play? What are the merits or uses of this
kind of theatre?
 What are the possible disadvantages of this dramatic form?
IS THE INVESTIGATION A PLAY ABOUT JEWS AND AUSCHWITZ?
 W. never mentions either the word “Jew”, or “Auschwitz” in the play. Therefore, whilst it’s clear it
alludes to a Nazi extermination camp, it could also present a general symbol of universal suffering
and exploitation, about the suppression of people because of their race or religion or political view.
W. states that he “wanted not to specify exactly on the Jews and have it more as a human tragedy”
(in Walter Wager, The Playwrights Speak (London: Longman, 1969), p. 164).
 W. himself states that his intention with this play is to treat a range of themes that transcend the
specificity of Auschwitz:
My intention is to expose capitalism as having sunk to trade with the gas chambers” (Weiss,
quoted by Hanne Castein, “German Social Drama in the 1960s”, in James Redmond, ed.,
Drama and Society (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1979), p. 203).
Here, he shows how the concerns of the play go beyond the Frankfurt trials, and show that economic
forces determined the behaviour of the defendants.
 The Urwintore production at the Young Vic in 2007, was staged by a Rwandan theatre company
comprising Rwandan and Congolese actors.
The Investigation, Urwintore Theatre Company (Young Vic, 2007), directed by Dorcy Rugamba
and Isabelle Gyselinx.
The Investigation, Urwintore Theatre Company (Young Vic, 2007), directed by Dorcy Rugamba
and Isabelle Gyselinx.
 Many themes in the play are universal.
 Which universal themes do you think are represented by the play, and how?
 What other instances of human suffering could the play be used to represent and explore?
IS THE INVESTIGATION A TRUE REPRESENTATION OF AUSCHWITZ?
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 Whilst the play doesn’t directly mention Auschwitz, and whilst it has universal resonances, it still
constitutes an accurate description of conditions inside the camp.
 Were one to compare the play with historical accounts or other witness statements, then it would
be clear that the witness statements in The Investigation are a true representation of camp victims’
experiences, and that W. has rendered them faithfully. E.g. survivor Olga Lengyel recounts how the
men, women and children were separated upon arrival at the camp (Five Chimneys, p. 25); historian
Peter Neville describes how the doctors at the camp divided prisoners into those who were fit to
work, and those who were to be exterminated (The Holocaust, p. 49); survivor Jan Sehn describes
the food rations (Auschwitz-Birkenau, p. 49).
 Have you visited Auschwitz or another extermination camp? How does the play compare
with your experiences?
 Have you read historical accounts of the Holocaust? How does the play compare?
THE PROBLEMATIC NARRATIVISATION OF TRAUMA
 Much contemporary literature and film-making attempts to represent massive social and political
traumas experienced in history: the Holocaust, Vietnam, apartheid, the refugee crisis, etc. Holocaust
survivor and novelist Elie Wiesel writes that post-Holocaust literature is a literature of testimony:
If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our
generation invented a new literature, that of testimony. We have all been witnesses and we feel
we have to bear testimony for the future (“The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration”, in
Dimensions of the Holocaust, p. 9).
For Wiesel, contemporary arts concern themselves with the attempt to make sense of the contemporary
world.
 Wiesel says today’s literature is one of testimony. The main problem is how to turn testimony into
literature. Witnessing into narration. Memory into art. History into story. The question of how to
represent trauma is keenly debated.
 Shoshana Felman explains how reports and accounts of historical events always have a complex
relationship with that event. The relationship of reality to narrative to is never direct or unproblematic.
Seeing and telling can’t be conflated. Narrative—storytelling, playwriting, historical account, novel,
film—isn’t the same as the experience of the event. Testimony can never be simply referential.
Language and image don’t causally transmit direct the experience of eye witnessing. The narrator-aseyewitness isn’t a testimonial bridge, a mediator between history and narrative. History can’t speak for
itself; it needs to be mediated and this mediation is always partial, subjective. There’s no transparent
mediation between seeing and telling, private experience and public testimony (see Shoshana Felman
and Dori Laub, Testimony, p. 93).
 When traumatic experiences are transposed into easily accessible images and a simple,
comprehensible story, perhaps the real agony of these true experiences might be betrayed.
 Testimony theorist Cathy Caruth writes, “the transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory
that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated into one’s own, and others’,
knowledge of the past, may lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall”
(Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 153).
 The field of Holocaust studies devotes much attention to whether deep trauma can be represented
in art form, and how it might be represented. One Holocaust survivor encapsulates how the narration of
trauma is almost impossible:
People have said that only survivors themselves understand what happened. I’ll go a step further.
We don’t… I know I don’t…
So there is a dilemma. What do we do? Do we not talk about it? Elie Wiesel has said many times
that silence is the only proper response but then most of us, including him, feel that not to speak is
impossible.
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To speak is impossible, and not to speak is impossible (Sonia Schreiber Weitz, videotaped
interview in a film entitled Understanding Psychological Trauma, prod. David G. Doepel and Mark
Braverman, 1990). In Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 154).
 Adorno famously said in 1949 that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.
 Many writers after the war, especially Jewish writers, felt that language and art were incapable of
representing the events of the Holocaust, which was an “experience impossible to communicate”
(Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 33).
 Michael Rothberg explains that the reason for this is that poetry embodies free individual
expression, whilst Auschwitz as a metonymy for the Holocaust, totally annihilated the individual
(Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe”, p. 58).
 Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary on Holocaust victim testimony (recommended
viewing) questions the relationship between historical events and their narration, traumatic memories
and their representation in art. Lanzmann’s film, comprising Holocaust survivors’ witness testimonies, is
full of awkward silences, disjointed scenes, inconclusive conversations that are elliptical and hard to
understand. He disrupts chronology, even though he deals with history. These techniques convey the
incomprehensibility of horror and trauma. He resists providing an easily comprehensible portrait of the
Holocaust’s horrific events. This is because for Lanzmann, the Holocaust is incomprehensible. There
can be no logical, rational, accessible explanation for it; it’s an affront to understanding. Understanding
too much or trying to make sense can be a form of sacrilege to the traumatic experience. Lanzmann
calls it “an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding” (“The Obscenity of Understanding:
An Evening with Claude Lanzmann”, in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory, p. 204).
Lanzmann explores the possibilities, and more importantly, the impossibilities of a dialogue between
fact and film, history and narrative. He shows the radical failure of representation to account for the
horrors of the Holocaust; the fact that any representation fails to speak faithfully on behalf of the victims,
whose voicelessness no voice can represent. He therefore leaves gaps in his film, or silences, instead
of trying to provide explanations for the atrocities committed by Nazis.
 Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has been criticised for the fact that it represented the
Holocaust experience as something accessible, that can be easily comprehended and represented. He
makes the Holocaust into a commodified product of mass-culture, fit for mass consumption.
Ester Lurie (1942).
Fernand van Horen, Kommando. Some critics argue that realism as shown in these 2 paintings,
can’t depict the true horror of the Holocaust.
Thomas Hart Benton The Sowers (1942).
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Hans Hofmann, Holocaust (1953). These 2 paintings are much more stylised, and therefore
perhaps refuse easy comprehension.
 In the case of W.’s narrative structure, the Cantos lead us from “The Loading Ramp” to “The FireOvens”, step by step. Up to “The Fire Ovens”, Witnesses have related their first-hand experiences of
violence, beatings, sexual abuse, etc. However, in this final Canto, there is a noticeable jump in the
continuity. The 11th Canto is primarily taken up with reports by those who had to clear the gas
chambers and load the crematoria. It is not voiced by witnesses. Why not? Because they are now
dead.
 The real witnesses cannot speak or related their experie3nces, which are utterly central to
Auschwitz, namely death by Cyclone B gas, because they have died.
 Therefore, the unknowability and the unrepresentability of the genocide at the heart of the camp
must be recounted by the survivors.
 There is therefore a hole in understanding, in the ability to represent.
 In your opinion, does the aesthetic treatment of an atrocity like the Holocaust run the risk
of minimizing the reality of the atrocity by turning it, through its expression in verse, painting,
or music, into an object of beauty?
 Or is it perhaps only in art that terror and atrocity can be adequately represented?
 Think about alternative forms of writing about—or remembering—the Holocaust:
historiography, public monuments, museum, poetry (see Paul Celan’s Deathfugue, 1946), film,
TV documentary, national holiday, etc. How do these and other forms of cultural memory
relate to The Investigation? Which is the most “effective”? (And how would you define
“effective” in this context?)
 In your opinion, does W. represent or betray the violence of the victims’ experiences?
DRAMATIC STYLE IN THE INVESTIGATION
 On the one hand, W, appears to claim to detached objectivity: “I collected this material and
brought it into dramatic shape” (Walter Wager, The Playwrights Speak, p. 159).
 At the same time, W. appears to be aware that all discourses, whether artistic, historical,
journalistic or other, are constructed via artificial processes. His is no exception.
 His processes of dramatic aestheticisation are clear.
 W. lifted statements from actual witness and defendant testimonies, but it’s very clear that he
heavily edited these statements. He condensed 359 witnesses’ statements into only nine voices.
These witnesses are not real people. In addition, particular speech patterns – individual diction,
hesitation in speech, foreign accents (many of the witnesses were Polish but spoke German),
weeping or other emotional reactions, and silences – are lost and replaced by a stylistic homogeneity
which could be said to lend the play the authority of an impersonal testimony.
 W. imposes on the witness statement a rhythm of very poetic quality, giving the impression that
the play is written in verse. The removal of punctuation adds to this.
 He also condensed and rearranged the material in order to extend the dramatic impact of his
theatre. He rearranged the material in order to introduce a kind of dramatic plot into the play. The
way the material is arranged into the sequence of eleven cantos follows the pathway of the individual
victims through the camp: it begins at the “loading ramp”, continues into the life of the camp, follows
on through various forms of death and execution, and ends in the “fire-ovens”. The basic pattern of
the play is thus spatial; it follows the topography of the camp, rather than the sequence of the
hearings. In addition, the fact that it is arranged in cantos, that progress further and further towards
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the ovens, intertextually evokes another great literary work, Dante’s Inferno, with its 34 Cantos, each
describing the different stages and people who Dante encounters on his journey through hell. Author
W.G. Sebald writes, “Like Dante, Weiss learned, in exile, to understand the fate he had escaped.
This is the justification for the sado-masochistic preoccupation, the repeated and virtuoso
representation of suffering, manifest in the literary work of two poets.” (W.G. Sebald, On the Natural
History of Destruction, p. 193).
 W. also modified and aestheticised the witness statements with his use of montage. In the actual
court hearings, the defendants were first questioned on their own, and the witnesses heard later;
there was no direct communication between them. The defendants were, however, present in the
courtroom when the witnesses were questioned, so reactions such as laughter, that Weiss includes
in the play, most likely did occur (Fritz Bauer was the German state prosecutor who made the trial
possible. The Fritz-Bauer-Institut website provides links, references, and supporting material:
http://www.fritz-bauer-institut.de/auschwitz-prozess.htm). In the play, W. deliberately confronts
defendants and witnesses by juxtaposing their statements, thus enabling more dramatic conflict and
impact. By juxtaposing both perspectives in a continuous interchange, the horror is reinforced
through its double articulation: first in the detailed accounts of the victims, then in the obscene
indifference to these accounts on the part of the defendants.
 Instead of representing the camps, a trial is set up, where we can become the ultimate judges.
 What is the impact of this on the reader/spectator?
 W. clearly selected, edited and cut testimonies, in order to construct his play.
 Unlike the mass media, who also conduct these same editorial processes, W. self-consciously
points to his writing processes. He states that the material is “divided rhythmically into carefully timed
sections. Brief moments, consisting of just one fact … are relieved by longer, more complicated
units.” (George W. Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama, p. 252).
 Whilst aestheticising the material, W. was careful not to over-dramatise or to sensationalise it.
Characters’ names are removed – they’re simply called “Witness 1” or “Defendant 1”. Moreover, their
characters aren’t psychologically developed as the play progresses. W. therefore avoids
emotionalism and melodrama, that might swing the audience’s reactions. The style is more sober
and detached in comparison with more sensationalist depictions like Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s
List (1993).
 However, W. has been criticised for his sober, detached, objective treatment:
The result on the stage is singularly undramatic, notwithstanding the loose verse form of the
monologues and dialogues of the characters – the chilling evidence in its pages rarely rises
above the cold, harsh surface of mere actual fact. ... The result is not a new aesthetic
distance, but an aesthetical indifference, a failure of the artist’s imagination to seduce the
spectator into a feeling of complicity with the material of his drama.” (Lawrence Langer, The
Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, p. 31).
 W. called his play an “oratorio”, which is a large-scale and usually narrative musical work
for orchestra and voices, typically on a sacred theme. What does this unusual generic
identification imply?
 How would you analyse the language of the play in the light of this musical reference?
 What other devices does W. use in order to highlight the artifice of his play?
 Does this play contain the witnesses’ words, or W.’s words? Is it important?
 How did you react emotionally to this play, and why?
CONCLUSION
 W. appears to be aware of the ethical implications of treating so sensitive a subject. He seems
conscious of the fact that the truth can never fully be represented.
 It’s perhaps for this reason that he stylises his play by integrating a narrative thread and by
poeticising the dialogue, in order to point self-consciously and honestly to his own reconstruction of
the victims’ and survivors’ experiences.
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FURTHER READING
Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? (California: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Olaf Berwald, An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss (Ontario: Hushion House, 2003).
Michal Bodemann, “Eclipse of Memory: German Representations of Auschwitz in the Early Post-war
Period”, New German Critique, 75 (Autumn 1998), 57-89.
George W. Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama (Oxford: O.U.P., 1999).
Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995).
Robert Cohen, Understanding Peter Weiss (University of South Carolina, 1993).
John Corner and Alan Rosenthal, New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005).
Roger Ellis, Peter Weiss in Exile: A Critical Study of His Works (Michigan: UMI Research Press,
1987).
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, “Camus’ The Plague, or a Monument to Witnessing”, in Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, London:
Routledge, 1992).
Theo Girshausen, in Ralph Yarrow, ed., European Theatre 1960-1990 (London: Routledge, 1992).
Susan Gubar, Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003).
Ian Hilton, Peter Weiss: A Search for Affinities (London: Wolff, 1970).
C.D. Innes, Modern German Drama: A Study in Form (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1979).
Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven, London: Yale
University Press, 1975).
Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys (London: Panther, 1972).
Peter Neville, The Holocaust (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).
Michael Patterson, German Theatre Today (London: Pitman, 1976).
James Redmond, ed., Drama and Society (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1979).
Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe”, New German Critique, 72
(Autumn 1997).
Jan Sehn, Auschwitz-Birkenau (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo, 1961).
W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, 2003).
Peter Weiss, “Interview”, in Walter Wager, ed., The Playwrights Speak (London: Longmans, 1969), pp.
150-168.
“Avantgarde Film”, Akzente 10 (April 1955).
“The Material and the Models: Notes Towards a Definition of Documentary Theatre” [1968], in
George W. Brandt, Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre,
1840-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).
Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as a Literary Inspiration”, in Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1977).
When looking for materials in the university library, think laterally: search not only under the
author’s and text’s names, but also under key words related to the text. E.g. for Bertolt Brecht,
you could search under “German drama”; “twentieth-century German theatre”; “art and war in
Nazi Germany”; “political theatre”, etc. You can also conduct online searches for materials
using Literature Online and Jstor (available via the university library website – click
“Databases”). Again, think laterally if you don’t immediately find relevant resources.
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