TO FORGIVE, DIVINE
Hannah and Martin is a Holocaust love story too good to not be true
By Pat Launer

If it were fiction, you’d have a hard time believing it. A torrid affair between a German Jewish intellectual and a staunch Nazi sympathizer.

But they weren’t just everyday folks. They were towering figures of 20th century thought: political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and brilliant philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The story was too good to resist for first-time playwright Kate Fodor, who created the sensual drama of ideas, Hannah and Martin, which won the 2002 Kennedy Center Award for New American Plays. The Off-Broadway production starred David Strathairn as Martin Heidegger. Now, the drama is receiving its Southern California premiere in San Diego, just in time for the centennial of Arendt’s birth.

“I’d been obsessing about this theme of forgiveness,” says Fodor from her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. “Is the ability to forgive admirable, even saintly? Or is it a form of complicity or weakness? These are issues I’ve confronted in my own personality. Writing the play didn’t give me any answers, but it helped me put the questions to rest.”

Fodor, an editor/journalist, spent more than five years researching and working on the provocative story, which she distilled down to a collision of passion and principle, responsibility and forgiveness, set in the shadow of unspeakable violence (World War II). She admits to taking liberties, large and small, for dramatic purposes. But the central facts and themes are based on historical accounts.

Arendt was a spellbound student of the great Heidegger when they began their relationship in 1924. She was 18; he was 35. As the war began, Heidegger became a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, supported Hitler’s theories and stood by while his Jewish colleagues were summarily dismissed from the University. By the end of the war, Arendt was struggling to come to terms with her enduring feelings for him. Fodor’s intelligent, thought-provoking play is primarily a love story; but it’s also a contemplation of evil, guilt and the limits of loyalty.

Set in various locations in Germany, the drama jumps back and forward in time. When the action begins, it is 1946, and Hannah is dictating a letter to the Rector of Freiberg University, begging him to reinstate Heidegger in his teaching position, rescinding her forceful earlier request to remove him from the faculty at all costs. At the same time, however, she’s pondering deep, disturbing questions: If Hitler has blood on his hands, and he shook hands with someone who shook hands with someone else, who shook hands with Heidegger, who shook hands with her, was she, too, bloodied and culpable?

This is just one of many intricacies and ambiguities in the play -- and in the real lives of these great thinkers. Arendt retracted her condemnation, but Heidegger never repudiated the Nazi Party. “I’ll apologize when Hitler apologizes to me,” he says in the play.

Hannah’s willingness to forgive remains enigmatic. “She was a fierce, difficult, judgmental person by nature,” says Fodor. “Either she judged differently than most people, or she wasn’t able to judge in this case. Was her reconciliation with him based on pity, or on being bewitched? A fondness or an intellectual decision? I only guess at what happened in 1946. They did meet after the War, they did resume a friendship, but no one knows why or how. The whole second act climax, their post-war meeting, is imaginary. I leave it up to the audience to decide why each of them made the decisions and choices they did. These are, after all, complicated issues about the human heart.”

These kinds of complicated issues – both personal and political -- are right up the alley of former SDSU academics Fred Moramarco and Kathy Jones, co-producers of Hannah and Martin. Moramarco, an English Literature professor, is founder/artistic director of the show’s producing organization, Laterthanever Productions, whose mission is “to provide theatrical events that foster public dialogue and debate… [and] address important social and cultural issues.”

“It’s a wonderful blend,” says Moramarco. “A love story set in the context of the Holocaust and World War II. It shows a connection of that time to our own time. I like the way Fodor deals with time; moving back and forth reinforces the idea that the past is always present, especially the traumatic past that people carry with them forever. Hannah doesn’t excuse what Martin did, but she reconciles. The message, I think, is that we have to find a way to get beyond hatred.”

The play has special meaning to retired Women’s Studies professor (an recent convert to Judaism) Jones, an Arendt scholar who’s following up a series of academic writings with a memoir/personal narrative about Arendt’s influence on her life. And under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, she’s about to teach a Summer Seminar at SDSU on the political thought of Hannah Arendt.

“I’ve always been interested in her work on authority, power and politics,” says Jones, who’s serving as dramaturge for this production. “She believed in the power of story to unsettle us enough to stop and think and act differently. The play uses a romantic relationship to confront issues of forgiveness while still maintaining the need for responsibility.”

Arendt’s controversial positions on violence, moral judgment and the role of forgiveness and love in human affairs make her powerful prose as well known in literary and political circles as her philosophical arguments are among academics. But when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, some Jews considered her anti-Semitic, because she considered him to be “terrifyingly normal” and she talked about the “banality of evil.” So in some ways, to some people, both these influential intellectuals were part hero, part demon.

“What explains when ordinary people do horrible things?,” Jones asks rhetorically. “What became ordinary in Germany was the capacity to do awful things. So in the play, how does Hannah react to this man? Both the one who committed the heinous act and the one it was done to must be released, or they’re forever locked in the same dynamic.”

One of the literary liberties Fodor has taken in the play is placing Arendt at the Nuremberg Trials in Germany. Arendt had fled Germany and established herself as a respected public figure in America; she was a writer and teacher at the New School for Social Research in New York, and was hired by The New Yorker to cover the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel. But Fodor made use of a seminal figure at the Nuremberg Trials, Baldur von Schirach, Hitler’s Youth Organizer, to pose a crucial question: “Are you more culpable if your role in life is teaching others? Both von Schirach and Heidegger were teachers and shapers of minds.” And that, says Fodor, “makes their crime worse.”

But Hannah’s is the predominant voice in the play; her recollections drive the action. “A lot of the structure and language of the play,” explains Fodor, “is about thought and memory, and the way the inside of your head works when you’re obsessed with a question, circling and returning, replaying scenes in a new way. It’s stylistically eccentric,” she says of her non-linear structure, “written out of naiveté. But because of that, it being my first play, I took risks. It’s probably the bravest thing I’ll ever write.”

Her ‘bravery’ prompted the New York Times to select her as one of eight talented theatermakers to watch. She also received a Joseph Jefferson Citation, an After Dark Award, the Kennedy Center’s Roger L. Stevens Award and was a finalist for the international Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Critics considered the play to be “stunningly written and sharply lacerating.. [a] soul-stirring, argumentative, deeply questioning drama” (Chicago Sun-Times). It was said to “mark the emergence of an important new voice in American theater. If this first play is any indication, Fodor will eventually take her place alongside some of this country’s best dramatists… [The play} challenges, entertains, enlightens. It is a nearly flawless theatrical experience” (The Windy City Times). And, in a lighter vein, Variety said it was “an impressive accomplishment – and something of a gift for audiences who would rather leave the theater thinking long thoughts than scratching their bellies.”
Writing in The New York Times about the Off Broadway production at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater in SoHo, Margo Jefferson said she “admired Fodor’s “ambition…giving flesh and blood to politics and philosophy.”

Now, the challenge of Hannah and Martin is making all those ideas, and time-and-place shifts clear for the audience. That responsibility rests with the director, Francine Chemnick, founder/artistic director of the Muse Theatre.

“It’s a very passionate play,” Chemnick, who is Jewish, says. “Totally engaging. The structure keeps audiences involved. It’s filled with heady ideas, but it’s not at all preachy or didactic. I like that it takes you on this circuitous journey, because that does reflect their relationship. It breaks the fourth wall frequently. Hannah lectures facing the audience, talks to herself, to the universe. The production will be simple. There won’t be costume or makeup changes with the rapid shifts in time. Just an action or gesture; within a moment, Hannah has to change from 18 to 40 years old. I’ve found that, if actors say it’s so and commit to it, storytelling magic happens. With a realistic, linear format, the play would be deadly; it needs a dynamic structure.

“And the story will resonate with people for myriad reasons. Anyone can relate to meeting someone you click with, especially on an intellectual level, who ignites something you didn’t you know had in you. It’s like making love on an intellectual level. He was married; she’d drop everything for their secret rendezvous. Their letters, which were only very recently published in English, would make you blush. He’s writing poetry like a schoolboy, so enamored of her. But passion also makes you do wild and unpredictable things.”

Everyone involved in this production is passionate about the casting. There are ten characters (including Martin’s wife, Hannah’s first husband and philosopher Karl Jaspers) played by eight actors. Center-stage are Stan Madruga (a veteran of plays in New York and San Diego – most memorably, I Hate Hamlet at North Coast Repertory Theatre) and Christina Barsi, who’s new to town, but trained with Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Second City improv in Chicago.

“They were instantly amazing,” crows director Chemnick. “Too good to be true when they were together. He was so powerful, physically and vocally; he had the sense of owning her. She seemed overpowered. But the more aggressive he got, the more she stood up. It was very exciting from the very beginning.

“It’s so rare to find a play that provocative and also thought-provoking,” Chemnick continues. “We’re hoping it will engender a great deal of dialogue. I feel like it’s a really dark period in our own history. And this play is all about taking responsibility. The whole point is to not be thought-less, not just accept or go along with things you’ve been told. As Hannah puts it, ‘Ideas have weight and consequences.’ What you don’t do is as critical as what you do. You have to think. And you have to forgive.”

Hannah and Martin runs June 15-July 2 at the Lyceum Space in Horton Plaza. Performances are Thursday-Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 2 and 7pm. All tickets are $25. 619-544-1000; www.laterthanever.com.

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