Judith (Hochhuth)
Judith is a play by Rolf Hochhuth which premiered on November 9, 1984 at the Citizens Theater Glasgow . Based on the apocryphal Old Testament book Judit , the drama transfers the ancient theme of tyrannicide to the present of the 20th century and the Vietnam War . The German-language premiere of the play took place on June 28, 1985 on the stages of the state capital Kiel .
The “Prologue Minsk 1943” preceding the play deals with the eve of the murder of the Nazi functionary and general commissioner for Belarus Wilhelm Kube (whose name is not mentioned with regard to relatives, in contrast to that of his murderer, the Belarusian partisan Jelena Masanik). Despite reservations about Hitler's regime (an analogy to the biblical figure of the general Holofernes or the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar ), Kube was jointly responsible for the murder of 55,000 Jews. Similar to the beheading of Holofernes in Hebbel's drama Judith , Jelena's bombing of the Nazi functionary can be seen as an act of revenge for the humiliation he suffered. Like the biblical Judith , Jelena endured sexual assaults by the warlord in order to carry out her murder plan, the liberation of her people from a violent criminal.
After this prelude, the first act of the drama begins. Judith here is an American journalist who 40 years later researched the historical attack in Belarus. Judith's brother is a US citizen severely injured by the defoliant Agent Orange , a fate he shares with many thousands of former comrades in the Vietnam War . In 1983, the US President still viewed the provision and potential use of toxic chemicals and other weapons of mass destruction as effective means of warfare. Against this background, the play focuses in the sense of the tyrannicide theme of its literary models on the lifting of a threat to peace through the elimination of the supreme warlord - in 1983 this is Ronald Reagan .
The verbal argument between the siblings who are developing their plans for assassination and their friends and acquaintances who are loyal to the government is dramaturgically effective. As in Hebbel's drama, sexuality plays an important role in the preparation of the murder.
literature
expenditure
- Rolf Hochhuth: Judith. Tragedy . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1984 (Rowohlt Taschenbuch 5866)
- Rolf Hochhuth: Judith. Tragedy . With an essay by Margarete Mitscherlich- Nielsen and an interview with Jost Nolte . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988 (Rowohlt Taschenbuch 5866)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Der SPIEGEL, No. 47, 1984