“Autoda-fé”: George Tabori talks about his life

I“I’m a Jew,” admits a noble traveler at the end of Lessing’s early comedy “The Jews.” He had previously saved a noble landowner from the hands of his fraudulent steward and is now supposed to receive the baron’s daughter as a thank you. But that’s not possible, so he has to come out. In his 2003 production at the Berliner Ensemble, the then 89-year-old playmaker George Tabori sat on the stage with all the other actors at the edge of the playing area, a piece of artificial turf. With the words, the light suddenly goes out, the seemingly innocent rococo picnic flies apart accompanied by loud noise, and everyone understands: Lessing’s play from 1749 becomes a foreshadowing of the later catastrophe in German history. The playmaker at the edge of the stage also looked back on his own life. He didn’t just lose his father Cornelius Tábori in Auschwitz.

He gives himself over to the stream of memories

Tabori’s memoirs “Autoda-fé”, which were published as a book by Wagenbach more than twenty years ago, end with the search for his father in the extermination camp memorial. They tell of a life that began on May 24, 1914 in Budapest, took place in Berlin until the exile in London and ended there in 2007 after two decades in America. It’s not just the title that is reminiscent of Elias Canetti, whose novel “The Blinding” was published in French in 1946 as “Auto-da-Fé”. The two also share a sense of grotesque life stories. Just as Canetti links together in three extensive volumes such characteristic episodes as the attempt in the “Saved Tongue” to silence him, Tabori succeeds in presenting scenes from his life in the most pointed form in just eighty pages.

He reads parts of the book out loud in a 2002 Deutschlandfunk Kultur production. But even more beautiful in this audio book are the passages in which he freely retells the scenes in response to questions from Jörg Jannings. The voice is that of an old man, which becomes more and more alive the more Tabori surrenders to the stream of memories. He is particularly moved by the story of the mother who called for help after a stroke, was then driven to the wrong hospital and died before she got to the right one. Or he laughs up his sleeve at his father’s well-intentioned attempt to let him have an important life experience at the “Chez Madame Claire” establishment. When Tabori finally decides to go with the last of the girls strutting past to get the matter over with, he confesses to her in the private room that he is not as innocent as the father waiting outside believes. He just shouldn’t find out about it under any circumstances.

Readers know from the first chapter that George had his first experiences with the nanny Alma. Now he gives the father the joy of giving his mother, who is waiting in the café, a meaningful look, saying that the mission to make a man out of his son has been successfully completed.

Such picaresque pieces dominate memories and betray the later theater maker. When he drove from Budapest to Berlin with his father in 1932, he eventually retired for a coffee. The conductor comes and asks for the tickets. You are shocked to discover that the train has been divided along the way and the dining car is now heading to Vienna. A telegraph is sent and George has to wait a long time at a station until his father, who is following him in shame, finally shows up again.

In Berlin, the apprenticeship begins at the Hotel Hessler at the Ufa Palace. Tabori’s theatrical debut as a waiter is an orange juice, which he surprises by pouring onto the lap of the leading actress from the film “Two Hearts in Three Quarter Time”. But the director always has his back. When the head waiter denounces him as a “Jewish boy”, he is thrown out, not Tabori – as are a few Nazi henchmen who order coffee and cake without wanting to pay for it.

Rendezvous via desk phone

What at first glance seems like a series of funny sketches is almost always characterized by sharp observation and grotesque humor. A rendezvous with a somewhat bookish lady, arranged over a desk telephone in the Delphi Dance Palace at the Zoo, ends in Rankestrasse on a bedspread embroidered with the head of Kaiser Wilhelm. Most of the memorabilia leads to a turning point like that experienced in the production of Lessing’s “The Jews”.

Tabori is a master of the turning point, he also proved this in the Auschwitz play “The Cannibals”. After visiting the memorial, he has a strange encounter with a man in riding boots at the hotel. He interprets the insult “you bastard” as a linguistically nonsensical duplication. Then the father appears in concentration camp clothing. He can finally ask him whether he really politely gave way to a fellow prisoner named Mandelbaum in front of the gas chamber.

Instead of an answer, the riding boot boy intervenes violently. George Tabori falls for his father, the eternal wanderer. The tipping point has been reached and the dream is over. On the flight back to Vienna, Tabori vomits his grief into the paper bag, “screaming like a wounded donkey.”