6 - Marxism and the Holocaust

Summary

Although The Diary of Anne Frank was written by Goodrich and Hackett as an anti-fascist response to the Holocaust, its explicit commercialization for Broadway consumption masked the tacit Marxism. Two artists who make their Marxist message of primary importance in responding to the Holocaust are Swedish playwright Peter Weiss and American dramatist Tony Kushner. Both are strict disciples of Bertolt Brecht, the most influential Marxist playwright/theoretician of the twentieth century, and they modeled their Holocaust dramas, The Investigation and A Bright Room Called Day, respectively, upon Brecht's Marxist vision.

Peter Weiss's father was a Slovak Jew who converted to Protestantism when he married a German Christian. Peter grew up in Nowawes (Potsdam today), Bremen, and Berlin, but because his father was originally from Czechoslovakia and was not a German citizen, he was not allowed to salute Hitler in school. Although Weiss was baptized and, according to Jewish custom, would not be considered Jewish because his mother was Protestant (Jewishness defined as matrilineal), Nazi law designated him as non-Aryan. Weiss admitted, “I never particularly thought of myself as a Jew. I was simply a Berliner and a German.” To avoid Nazi persecution, the family emigrated to England in 1935, moved to the Czech town of Warnsdorf in 1936 (where Weiss learned for the first time that his father was Jewish), and after a brief sojourn in Switzerland, Peter rejoined his family in Sweden in January 1939.