Performing Guilt

How the Theater of the 1960s Challenged German Memory Culture

authored by

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.

Organisation(s)

German Department

Type

Contribution to book/anthology

Pages

205-222

No. of pages

18

Publication date

2022

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197557433.003.0011 (Access: Closed)