Performing Guilt

How the Theater of the 1960s Challenged German Memory Culture

verfasst von

Saskia Fischer

Abstract

Peter Weiss’s controversial play The Investigation (1965) can be understood as an attempt to bring “the question of German guilt,” to quote the philosopher Karl Jaspers, to the center of public discourse. Weiss’s play confronted the entire society with collective guilt and compelled a wide-ranging social and political rethinking and re-examining of guilt and complicity in the 1960s. Weiss’s piece illustrates a process-oriented understanding of guilt that shows guilt as a temporal phenomenon with lasting and even devastating consequences in the present as long as atrocities remain unresolved. His differentiated, self-referential, dynamic, and politically provocative depiction of guilt has lost none of its fascination to this day and is still performed to deal with current war crimes and genocides.

Organisationseinheit(en)

Deutsches Seminar

Typ

Beitrag in Buch/Sammelwerk

Seiten

205-222

Anzahl der Seiten

18

Publikationsdatum

2022

Publikationsstatus

Veröffentlicht

Peer-reviewed

Ja

Ziele für nachhaltige Entwicklung

SDG 16 – Frieden, Gerechtigkeit und starke Institutionen

Elektronische Version(en)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197557433.003.0011 (Zugang: Geschlossen)