Letter From Vienna: A monkey's old tricks

HE WRITES in English, holds a British passport, and has just won the top award for German literature. He was born in Budapest in 1914, educated in Berlin till 1935 and worked with Hitchcock and Brecht in Hollywood in 1947. He taught classical drama to Marilyn Monroe. He lives in Vienna. He's Jewish, yet he loves Germany. Who is he?

For Germany's leading actress Hanna Schygulla he is 'the orient and the occident, age and youth. He can be very wise, distant and laid back, or crazily screwed-up'. For his parents in inter-war Budapest he always had 'too many ideas'. In the paranoid Hollywood of the McCarthy era he was a suspected communist. For the BBC he was a war correspondent. For the British public, whose passport he shares, he is completely unknown. His name is George Tabori.

According to the German Academy that awards the Buchner Prize, Germany's richest literary award, he won it for 'his theatre pieces, his enlightening prose and his committed work in the theatre'. The academy also applauded the fact that 'with humour and irony, but also with the passion of the victim and the distance of the sage, he has presented the painful common history of the Germans and the Jews'.

In Germany, where persons unknown have recently burnt down the Jewish barracks at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, preserved as a memorial to the Jews who died there, the irony of Tabori's award has not been lost. In his introduction, last year's winner and fellow Jewish writer Wolf Biermann found it 'a heart-refreshing scandal that in these hard times for the well-fed German people, the Darmstadt Academy has doled out 60,000 marks tax free to a particularly impudent foreigner'.

Until 1947, Tabori wrote prose. Then he met Charles Laughton and Bertolt Brecht. Tabori recalls: 'These two wonderful dropouts sat together translating The Life of Galileo surrounded by inestimable pre-Colombian sculptures, mostly of tiny men with enormous penises. I helped a bit with the famous self-defence speech, and the experience changed my life. These two drinking buddies turned me away from prose to drama, not by any argument, but just by their presence.' His writings and plays have the Holocaust, the tragic fate of his own family, and the guilt felt by survivors, as their constant theme. His first play Cannibals, premiered in New York in 1968, deals with the death of his father Cornelius in Auschwitz. For Tabori history is tragedy and tragedy is farce. In My Mother's Courage (1978), his mother is rescued from a concentration camp train, and returns to Budapest relieved to have made it in time for her bridge circle. His most popular piece, Mein Kampf, is a farce based on Hitler's time as a struggling artist. It opened in Vienna in 1987 and still plays to full houses in Germany. In all his pieces, the black humour supports Hannah Arendt's famous thesis of the banality of evil.

When I met him he was just preparing his latest piece, Troubled Dreams, for Vienna's Burgtheater where he now works. It is woven together out of Kafka texts and formed the centrepiece of central Europe's premier cultural festival 'Mittelfest' ealier this year. He told me: 'Kafka is crucial if you want to understand what's happening now in central Europe.'

In Serbia, confronted with ethnic cleansing, his words came back to me. Here was Kafka's classic premonition of the Holocaust, The Metamorphosis; people again were waking to find themselves insects, from which some felt the need to rid themselves.

Further up the Danube, in Tabori's home town of Budapest, anti-Semitism is growing again. At the end of August, Istvan Caurka, the deputy leader of the ruling Hungarian Democratic Forum claimed that Hungary is threatened by the 'hegemony of the Jews'.

For Tabori 'the deepest reason for anti-Semitism is neither economic nor xenophobia, but the hated feeling of failure. The presence of even only one Jew reminds us that our history is criminal, and so we project our crimes onto the one who, so we believe, labels us as criminal'.

In his acceptance speech in Darmstadt, the 78-year-old Tabori was back with Kafka, comparing himself with the Monkey in the famous short story of the Monkey addressing the academy. In his mumbling, good but not perfect German he declared himself 'a Jew openly declaring his love to Germany'. Love was spelt out letter by letter. Did he mean it, or was the monkey up to his old tricks again?