The Times (02/Oct/2007) - Obituary: George Tabori
(c) The Times (02/Oct/2007)
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, George Tabori
Obituary: George Tabori
George Tabori was in many ways an unlikely star of postwar German and Austrian theatre. A Hungarian Jew who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, emigrated to Britain and then spent many years working as a scriptwriter and novelist in Hollywood, he was always more at home speaking English rather than German.
But while in the US he had met and been much impressed by the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht. And the career Tabori subsequently began in European theatre, when already in his fifties, blossomed. He became one of the most performed and popular figures on the German stage, and enjoyed a successful spell in Vienna too. He was renowned for using a combination of challenging theatrical technique and black humour to confront some of the most sensitive memories of the Nazi period.
Tabori was born, as he enjoyed recalling, in a portentous year, 1914, into a prosperous family in Budapest. The family was highly assimilated into Hungarian society -- he was baptised a Roman Catholic -- and his father worked as a political journalist. Only as a result of the Holocaust, Tabori confessed later, was his Jewish identity "really restored".
Sent while still a teenager to Berlin in 1932 to learn the hotel trade, Tabori had a ringside seat as Hitler took power and was forced to return to Hungary soon afterwards -"Berlin was too small for the two of us," was how he joked about it later.
He followed his father into journalism and emigrated to Britain in the mid 1930s, took British citizenship, changed his Hungarian name, Gyorgy, to George, and worked as a BBC foreign correspondent in Sofia and Istanbul and also, during the war, as a British secret service agent in the Middle East.
He used these and other experiences to begin writing, and in 1947 his first novel was published, as a result of which he was invited to Hollywood as a potential scriptwriter. He lived in the US for almost 25 years.
Tabori worked on screenplays for Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Losey among others, and continued to publish novels. But he remained drawn to the German exile community in particular, collaborating with Thomas Mann and then, after a fateful meeting with Bertolt Brecht, deciding that theatre was his future. "He changed my life," Tabori recalled later, "made me give up writing novels and seduced me into the theatre, for which I thank and curse him."
The cursing may have been more prominent during Tabori's early years in the theatre in the US. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 with Flight into Egypt, but worked mainly with experimental groups to limited acclaim, and was banned from working in TV and radio under the McCarthyite persecution of those deemed guilty of "un- American activities". He translated Brecht plays and devised a production, Brecht on Brecht, a theatrical compilation of extracts from Brecht's poems, songs and dramas.
A visit in 1968 to the Berliner Ensemble, which Brecht had founded, fired Tabori's enthusiasm for its kind of theatre and European drama, an enthusiasm reinforced by the success in West Berlin soon afterwards of his own play, The Cannibals, about a group of concentration camp prisoners faced with the alternative of eating one of their number rather than be sent into the gas chambers. The play, dedicated to his father who had been murdered at Auschwitz, was typical of Tabori's determination to engage with this darkest of subjects in a way that some found grotesque but which certainly challenged its audience to break through the taboos still affecting much of German society at that time.
As a result of this success Tabori moved to Germany, establishing an experimental group based in Bremen, the Theaterlab. As well as Brecht, he was particularly interested in the work of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. He continued his very personal engagement with the Holocaust by staging My Mother's Courage, based on his mother's escape from deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 when she persuaded an SS guard that she should be allowed off the train to recover documents she had left behind. The play (made into a film starring the British actress Pauline Collins) conveyed the pathos of individuals who believed to the last in the fundamental decency of officialdom, but suggested, too, the absurdity and banality of individual moments amid the greater horror of the deportations, and was even presented as a "comedy".
Quipping that his favourite critic was "God", Tabori was fond of suggesting what he saw as the close link between holiness and humour, perhaps the two greatest Jewish contributions to civilisation. Actors praised the wit with which he urged them to explore different styles, in stark contrast to the more authoritarian directing style traditional in much German theatre. When he was awarded the Buchner Prize in 1992, the citation praised his "courage in using irony and humour to explain to Germans the grim history of relations between Germans and Jews".
Other projects in this vein included Jubilee, in which Holocaust victims engage in a macabre dialogue with a neo-Nazi who is vandalising their cemetery, and Mein Kampf, a play Tabori directed during a successful spell in Vienna, portraying the young Hitler living in a Viennese doss house where he is counselled by a Jewish bookseller and preserved from oblivion to be delivered to a grateful Mrs Death.
This play was performed all over Germany and also abroad. In The Goldberg Variations, Tabori experimented further with irony and disturbing imagery in a play about a concentration camp survivor staging biblical scenes in Jerusalem.
Tabori never seemed likely to retire, but his final theatrical base was perhaps the logical end point of his long dramatic journey -- the Berliner Ensemble itself in a Berlin then the capital of a newly reunified Germany, where he directed Brecht's Antigone among other projects and held court amid many admirers, an imposing figure even in his nineties. But a kind of ironic detachment was always evident too. Tabori, never fully at home in the German language, remained a Hungarian-born British citizen, a stranger everywhere, as he put it -- "a writer has to be a stranger, no matter where he lives". But a stranger, in Tabori's case, with a gift for using theatre to make those around him think in new ways about themselves.
He is survived by his fourth wife, the actress Ursula Hopfner, and three adopted children.
