'It's crass to deny the existence of the gas chambers'. Hotel Modern portrays Auschwitz with thousands of tiny puppets (interview)

The theatre group Hotel Modern depicts the suffering in Auschwitz using puppets made of clay and wire. ‘The reality can’t be recreated, but the enormity can.’

Above the entrance gate, in bold letters, are the words Arbeit macht frei (Freedom through work). The Rotterdam-based theatre company Hotel Modern created a replica of Auschwitz for the performance Kamp. The hundred square metre scale model covers the floor of the group’s rehearsal studio. Herman Helle, Arlene Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker crawl on hands and knees through the miniature concentration camp, among barracks and barbed wire, watchtowers and an arriving train. ‘Play the swallows,’ calls Kalker to the sound technician. Against a quiet aural backdrop, the gentle warbling of birds can be heard. Kalker nods, thinking. ‘Touching – those sweet sounds while you see people being driven into the sheds.’

The sounds were recorded at Auschwitz while the makers were walking around there. There is no speech in the performance: sounds such as these are all one hears. And the people are not the actors on the stage but only puppets made of wire, fabric and clay. Puppets as small as a finger and almost as slender. A hundred guards and almost four thousand prisoners. Some are lying white and naked in a heap: these have already died. Others are standing for roll call in long, drab rows. They are pinned in their tens to sheets of cardboard, and these are pushed quickly from place to place. Tiny cameras zoom in on the puppets or glide like aeroplanes over the scale model, making these tiny mortals creatures seem even more insignificant.

The actors operate the cameras themselves. They follow the victims until their very last moments. ‘After the camera’s gone to black in the gas chamber,’ explains Kalker to Helle and Hoornweg, ‘you go to the SS officer looking through the peephole.’ Cautious hands manoeuvre through the vaulted space of a kneehigh building and stop at a door. The SS officer who has just spied on the dying people looks into the camera. Impudently and a little hazily, as if intoxicated.

Few theatre performances have been made about the camp that was built specifically to destroy its inhabitants. At least about the horrors that took place in the camp rather than before or after. ‘Auschwitz is still suppressed,’ says Kalker when the rehearsal is over. ‘Of course that’s understandable. But if you truly want to understand mankind you have to look at the grim reality at some point. I don’t think it’s crass to depict the gas chambers. I think it’s crass to deny them. You do the victims an injustice if you don’t show the whole truth.’ Kalker, whose grandfather died in Auschwitz, says, ‘He will never know of my existence. But I still have to do this for him. I have to know what it was like there.’ Of course, a representation on stage will always fall short of reality. ‘On the one hand you have two stay as realistic as possible,’ says visual artist Helle, ‘You can’t just invent things. But on the other hand that realism should avoid the finickiness of a model train set. That’s why we use a lot of course materials like cardboard boxes and grey wrapping paper.’ Hoornweg interjects suddenly, ‘The reality can’t be recreated, but the enormity can. Because the audience has an overview of the entire grounds from their seat, sees how the murder is organised. It sees the death factory. ‘

Are there, then, absolutely no characters in Kamp, no individual adventures? ‘Yes, there are,’ says Kalker, ‘A man commits suicide in the barbed wire. A woman being driven into the gas chamber resists. You need to identify with them otherwise you wouldn’t be able to make them convincing. You even have to identify with a peeping SS officer, otherwise it loses credibility.’ ‘How did the perpetrators see the Jews?,’ asks Helle, ‘The same way I see a street whore? With instinctive repugnance? They were sick, they were lousy, they stank. That creates indifference straight away. And if you can’t empathise, and you drink, you can murder.’

Hotel Modern does not only present ugliness though. ‘If you pile horror upon horror,’ says Kalker, ‘you break the audience’s spirit. There must also be a place for beauty.’ Is there not a danger that this will be tasteless? Hoornweg explains, ‘It’s the extras in films like Schindler’s List that are tasteless. The makeup is so obvious, and the costumes. Our puppets are so obviously fake that they actually become more real than those extras. They’re not in the least bit glamorous. There’s something naked about them, something vulnerable.’ They don’t speak because then it would be too much like a puppet show. ‘They all have their own aura, and that makes them believable. If you let them speak they lose their credibility.’ Pauline Kalker hares across the scale model and picks up one of the cardboard sheets. ‘Here, the Auschwitz orchestra, it really existed.’ One figure is playing violin, the other clarinet, one looks glum, the other cheerful: each puppet is different. ‘Because they were all made with love, all these puppets of ours, we avoid the trap of cynicism. Cynicism obstructs feelings. But I hope that the audience will understand what genocide is, not only one a rational level but also on an instinctive level. We’ve got nothing new to tell people who were in Auschwitz. But perhaps we’ll be able to tell something new to people who weren’t in Auschwitz.’

12-11-2005