TEMPLE – George Bartenieff didn’t set out to write a play about problems in 21st century America when he and his wife, Karen Malpede, began editing Holocaust survivor Viktor Klemperer’s diaries into play form in the late 1990s.
But when he performed his play before an audience of about 100 at the Temple Stream Theater on Saturday night, the question and answer session afterwards dealt not with his own experiences as a German-born Holocaust escapee, life under the Nazis or Klemperer’s life, but with parallels some in the audience drew between Hitler’s rise to power and the growing conservative movement in the United States today.
According to John Sytsma of Farmington, Bartenieff’s play, “I Will Bear Witness,” is very important. “It’s shed so much light on we need to be doing today to combat the forces that manipulate us with fear.”
“I Will Bear Witness,” is an edited version of Klemperer’s diaries from 1933 until 1938. Klemperer was a German Jewish professor born in the 1800s, who lived in Dresden with his “Aryan” wife throughout the Third Reich. Because of his mixed marriage, he was kept relatively safe from deportation to the concentration camps, but he was subject to many of the other laws restricting even the most mundane aspects of daily life for Jews. Eventually forbidden to buy clothes, keep pets or borrow books, Klemperer recorded his daily life in a series of diaries eventually published in the 1990s.
The play, “I Will Bear Witness,” takes place entirely at a desk. Bartenieff as Klemperer read excerpts from the professor’s diaries in a German-accented voice, ranging in subject from his wife’s many medical complaints to his financial and professional struggles under the Nuremberg Laws. But most excerpts dealt with Klemperer’s reactions to the growing restrictions of freedom under the Nazi regime and those of his friends, his colleagues and even his grocer and librarian.
During an hour-long question and answer session afterward, Bartenieff explained his play is not really about the Holocaust, at all.
“I’m really not interested in the Holocaust,” Bartenieff said. “I am only interested in similarities,” he said. The play is about how Klemperer and his German compatriots responded to their country’s transformation under the Nazis, he said.
Bartenieff said Klemperer’s diaries are exceptional. No other writing survives that details the day-to-day reality in Nazi Germany for both Germans and Jews, he said, and no other record exists telling of German kindness toward Jews on a day-to-day basis.
The diaries’ focus on people’s reactions to the growing Nazi power is what makes the story powerful for Bartenieff, the actor said.
“When we started this piece,” Bartenieff said, “we never thought it would have any relevancy to today and then people started saying, Uh oh when was this written?'”
Bartenieff said the most striking similarity between the United States today and Nazi Germany is peoples’ failure to react to political events that worried them. Many Germans abhorred their loss of freedom, he said, but believed the Nazi system too bizarre to remain in power for long. Many liberally minded Americans, he said, have reacted similarly to the rise of conservatism and the lead-up to the Iraq war, staying passive and praying silently for a regime change, assuming the government will change hands before long.
For Weld-based poet Henry Braun, the dialogue after the production was one of the best parts of the evening. Bartenieff, “was first rate, but the audience was too. This was one of the best question and answer sessions I’ve ever heard,” he said.
Steve Bien of Jay said the opportunity for dialogue is easier to come by in rural communities and that even the discussion afterward, engaged in by most of the audience, wouldn’t be possible on a larger scale. “Here we are in Temple, Maine, and this is happening. We can talk to each other afterwards, and during. This would be hard to do in New York City. I liked scale of (the production) and how it connects to making rural living vital.”
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