The Holocaust on Broadway

Tom Stoppard’s new play takes on the gravity of history

The show poster for Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.”

History has been particularly noticeable on Broadway lately. The most famous example was Hamilton, which we discussed last year in History Club and which I reviewed in this newsletter. Hamilton, I argued, was not really about history, or even the past; rather, it was largely about the present. The historical Alexander Hamilton was, by all evidence, an abrasive, elitist, nativist, nationalist politico who punished his enemies, attempted to have his rivals murdered, and was so xenophobic against the French, Swiss and Irish that he tried to have them deported. None of that appeared in the musical. Lin Manuel Miranda reimagined Hamilton as a modern-day hip-hop immigrant story of pluck and determination—which, not coincidentally, were themes of the Obama White House that helped make the show famous. Hamilton: An American Musical had everything to do with the 21st century, and very little to do with the 18th century. History on Broadway must sell tickets, after all.

As we’ve talked about in History Club, this newsletter, and in my book, whether it is on Broadway, in Hollywood, in journalism or in video games, history continues to be a useful well from which to extract compelling stories. But as a video game designer told me quoting a movie director he once met, “Historical accuracy is something that will be accommodated, if possible. But if necessary for the success of the overall operation, it must be sacrificed.” We’re not meant to learn accurate history from creative works—and we shouldn’t expect to. History adapted to fit commercial storytelling imperatives can produce blockbusters, but it does not often produce serious history. It’s noteworthy, then, when a creative work strives for accuracy and does not shy away from the gravitas of history—even if it is an imperfect dramatization. Such is the case with Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt, an imperfect new play that nonetheless has the courage to put serious history in front of a Broadway audience, daring us to reckon with it.

I saw Leopoldstadt with my family on the final day of my recent trip to New York. (You can see highlights from that trip on Twitter and LinkedIn). Non-theatrical types will know Stoppard as the writer of the Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love, but my family have been avid Stoppard fans for decades. His earlier plays The Real Thing, Travesties, Jumpers, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are masterpieces. In his recent works he has tackled the broad sweep of history head-on, with particular attention to the intellectual debates that animated the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 2000’s, Stoppard penned a trilogy called Coast of Utopia that followed the lives of Russian intellectuals through the mid-1800s. (The cast included Ethan Hawke as the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and Billy Crudup as the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, a role for which Crudup won a Tony Award.) Stoppard has an affinity for intellectuals of prior eras who, like him, attempted to navigate the choppy and uncertain sea of history at the same time they tried to shape it. In Leopoldstadt, it is a family of Austrian Jewish intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, hurling quickly through a moment they do not understand—a classic Stoppardian plot device.

Leopoldstadt is the name of a Jewish neighborhood in Vienna, Austria, though it is not the neighborhood where the play takes place. Named for Leopold I (1640-1705), who was born and died in Vienna and was an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the Leopoldstadt section of Vienna had been a Jewish ghetto before Leopold was born. Leopold actually expelled Jews from Austria in 1669, and one hundred years later there were still only 520 Jews in Vienna, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. While that number slowly climbed in the 18th century, the situation changed in the mid-19th century when Jews were granted full citizenship rights. That led to an influx of Jewish immigrants and a blossoming of Jewish life that included Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schonberg, Franz Kafka, and four Nobel Prize winners. In Vienna, Jews comprised a significant number of doctors, lawyers, university professors and successful businessmen. The wealthy Jews lived amid other citizens; the less well-off immigrants lived in Leopoldstadt.

Stoppard’s characters are among the well-off and assimilating Jewish families. But there is a debate about the Jewish future in the city, sparked by the presence of Zionist Theodor Herzl. Should there be a Jewish homeland in Palestine? Will assimilation and acceptance ever be possible in Europe? Act I foregrounds this debate that, while a bit forced and incomplete, is accurate for the time period. The central character of the play, Hermann, has optimism that Jews will be better off in the coming century, finally accepted as equals. He does not mention that only half a century earlier he and his family would not have been allowed to own land or be citizens.

While these questions of assimilation and belonging re-appear throughout the play, they are not actually what the play is about. It is also not about the Leopoldstadt district, despite the name. The show’s poster features a child playing cat’s cradle, a scene that occurs in Act III, but the play is not really about the string or the child, either. There are two other artifacts in the show that feature more prominently: a painting and a family photo album. So, what is the play about? It’s not altogether clear, which is why me and my family agreed that the script was not Stoppard’s finest. But after some reflection, I’ve come to think that the family photo album actually provides the best clues. [note: spoilers for Leopoldstadt ahead]

Group portrait of friends in prewar Vienna, Austria, ca. 1918 - 1925. Credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Monique Goss.

There is a scene early in the play where the matriarch of the family, Grandma Emilia, takes out the family album and flips through its pages with her children and grandchildren. She remarks how, at one point, it seemed laughable to write down the names of the people in the pictures. Everyone knows this aunt or that cousin, she says. But inevitably we forget, and when we look at the album years later, we can’t recall who’s who. Which cousin is that? What was that woman’s name? Emilia laments that it’s as though the people in the pictures have died twice. First, they die; then they are forgotten.

That moment seemed to hold the essence of the play—and why, even as a fictional dramatization, Stoppard’s approach to history hits the mark more than Miranda’s. History is about documentation and sources, and it is also about remembering, forgetting, unlabeled faces in countless anonymous albums, those who have died and those who have been forgotten—or who were never known at all. As historians we are constantly attempting to assemble the scattered pieces into some discernible narrative, to write in those who have been written out, to rediscover the names that were lost, or that, perhaps, were never known. Such are the core themes of Stoppard’s play, perhaps not even articulable to Stoppard himself. In the exchange between Grandma Emilia and her children and grandchildren, we get a glimpse into history’s cyclical motion: remembering, forgetting, then never knowing at all.

Later, in Act II, the family participates in a Passover Seder and sing the four questions on stage. A few pages later in the Haggadah, not depicted in the play, are the Four Sons. The Four Sons represent four different character traits: (1) the wise son, (2) the wicked son, (3) the simple son, and (4) the son who does not know how to ask. There’s a debate on what the Four Sons mean in the context of the Seder. Some speculate they depict four generations: the first generation passes on the knowledge and traditions of their parents; the second generation rebels against those traditions; the third generation knows only enough to ask basic questions; and the fourth generation knows so little that it cannot even formulate a question. The family in Leopoldstadt also has four generations, and given the reference to Passover, I could not help but think of the four sons, even if the parallel is inexact. There is a wise generation that knows everyone in the photos; a next generation that has no interest in the photos or wants to give the album away; a third generation that knows so little about the family that they can only ask basic questions; and, finally, a generation that cannot even formulate a question. Remembering, forgetting, not knowing in the first place.

This dynamic re-emerges throughout the play. Hermann is a wealthy Vienna Jew, a businessman who is confident his non-Jewish sponsors will welcome him into a private gentleman’s club. Yet, Hermann has forgotten that it would only have been very recently that his life would have been impossible. Act I is set in 1899; Jews only gained full citizenship rights in Vienna in 1867. Hermann has forgotten that his grandparents would have been excluded from certain professions and would have had to obtain special marriage licenses. Does that make Hermann the wicked son? Or the simple son? Or the one unable to ask? Hermann’s optimism for the new Jewish century derives from his lack of knowledge of history. By not knowing his ancestors, he radically miscalculates his prospects for the future.

Predictably, Hermann and his family become Holocaust victims. In March 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, an event that was welcomed with exuberance by many Austrians. That was followed by public acts of violence and humiliation against Jews, particularly Jewish bankers and intellectuals. By May, the Nuremberg Laws had been adopted in Austria. That summer, the National Socialists began a campaign to remove Jews from public life, stripping their assets and businesses, barring entry to schools and higher education, and passing anti-Jewish legislation. Wealthy Viennese Jews became bankrupt overnight, faced with the prospect of trying to leave Austria without the money to do so. On November 9th, Kristallnacht, 42 synagogues and prayer rooms in Vienna were burned and 88 Jews were murdered. Jewish houses were seized and a new ghetto formed in Leopoldstadt. Jewish families began to be deported to Dachau. Prior to the war, the Jewish population of Vienna had reached as high as 200,000 people. By the close of the war, it was 5,700.

Act III, set in 1938, shows us Hermann and his family being stripped of their business and possessions, replete with Nazis on stage. The script does not offer any new insights into National Socialism that any casual observer of history will not already know. Yet it is still striking to see a Nazi armband on a Broadway stage, not presented ironically or comedically. It is intended to be historically sincere, played well by the actor Corey Brill. It challenges the audience to not see the theater as an escape from the seriousness of history—a sanitized romp through the past a la Miranda’s Hamilton—but to be confronted with history in its brutal forms. Stoppard challenges the audience to accept accuracy at the expense of comfort and amusement, rejecting the premise that it must be sacrificed for the success of the overall operation.

The final scene of the play takes place in 1955. Most of the family has been murdered. Left are only Rosa, a daughter who made it to America before the war; Leo, a son who had been taken to England under the guardianship of a British journalist; and Nathan, who managed to survive the Holocaust as a child and is now a young man. The three of them return to Vienna. Leo is an avatar, of sorts, for Stoppard, a man with European Jewish roots who has fully adopted a non-Jewish British identity. He knows next-to-nothing about his family. He does not even know enough to ask the right questions. He has only a flimsy memory of his pre-war life. What he knows about himself has seemingly been told to him by others. He narrates in the first person as if he is speaking in the third person, reciting someone else’s script. He recognizes no one in the family album; he has killed them a second time. Nathan, meanwhile, is both wise and wicked. Scarred from the war, he struggles to show any empathy or sympathy. Rosa is simple. She remembers some, forgets others, and reveals that visas could have gotten some of the family out, if only they had arrived earlier. She opens the family album and they recount the members lost. Some people remember; some people forget; some people never know.

Leopoldstadt is not a groundbreaking script. Yet for all its deficiencies, what stands out is its courage. To put the validity of a Jewish homeland on a Broadway stage in 2022 feels like a courageous act. To put Nazis in front of a Broadway audience—with their cruelty, hatred and antisemitism intact—feels like a courageous act. To treat history with gravitas when a playwright could easily do the opposite in order to maximize profits, ticket sales, merchandise and press feels like a courageous act. In all his recent plays, Stoppard reminds us that in difficult times, intellectuals are not removed from the dangers of history, but rather right at the heart of them, confronting them head-on. That is one thing that a good historian and a good playwright have in common.

Have a good week.

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