Signs of Life's lyricist, Len Schiff, just wrote on this very subject on his own blog. So, I'll put in my two cents not so much on the subject of singing Nazis, but, rather, the choices involved in creating characters on stage who are Nazi soldiers.
Writing any type of narrative fiction in which Nazis are characters is, of course, a challenge. You don't want to create obvious, goose-stepping archetypes, even if it sometimes seems as if the historical Nazis were intent upon turning themselves into just that. If you are to be true to yourself as a dramatist, you need to make an effort to find out what makes a person tick, no matter how repulsive that person may be. The Nazis were evil, let's not wiggle around that essential truth -- if "evil" has any meaning, the Nazis were its embodiment. The challenge to the dramatist is to recognize they were evil human beings, not evil cartoon characters; they were monstrous, but they were monstrous people, not monstrous melodrama villains. They had hopes and desires. They had families. They loved their children and their pets. And they perpetrated one of the greatest crimes in human history.
How do you reconcile these two realities? How do you get inside the head of such people? Is it possible to understand them? And if you understand them, does that mean, on some level, you sympathize with them? Are you asking the audience to sympathize them? Do you want them to?
Well, my answer is no. I do not want anyone to sympathize with the Nazi characters in Signs of Life. Even fictional Nazis do not deserve our sympathy.
But I do want those characters in our show to be compelling, to be worth the audience's time, and to feel like real people, not stereotypes.
So, how do you get there?
While undoubtedly volumes can be written on the various personality types who made up the Nazi Party, two types of people intrigued me the most, perhaps because they were the two types I felt I best understood, having seen less extreme versions of them in our own day and age: the cynic and the true believer. The cynic embraces the Nazi ideology for personal gain, to advance his career, to seize power, and to maintain a secure place for himself in society. The true believer actually believes in the Nazi ideology. He is, in a very disturbing way, an idealist.
In our show, Commandant Rahm is the cynic. Officer Heindel is the true believer. I still ask myself which one is the more reprehensible, more truly evil. I don't think there is ultimately any answer to that question.
This focus on these two characters got me started, but I need to dig deeper. I had some insight into why some of the Nazis did what they did, but I still had a hard time figuring out how they could possible have done it.
Joel Derfner, Signs of Life's composer, and I visited Terezin in 2002, when my son, Alexander, was less than two years old. I remember walking around Terezin, and looking at the wall upon which is written the names of all the children who passed through that "model" ghetto: 15,000, of whom only 132 survived.
I just couldn't understand it. It's one thing to convince oneself that a group of people are deserving of hatred. I thought I could imagine that. But how could anyone actually look at a living, breathing child and treat him or her with such disregard of their common humanity? People say that the Nazis didn't view Jewish children as human. True. But how often have you seen people treat animals with the kind of capricious cruelty with which the Nazis treated the Jews? There's a special kind of cruelty that people reserve for other people.
The epiphany that opened the door for me was a small item I encountered in my research:
Suicide rates were high among the SS Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis death squads whose job in the early years of the Shoah was to murder Jews by hand. The reason the Nazis invented the gas chambers was to try to put some distance between the victims and their executioners, in the hope of bringing down the suicide among the SS.
One is first struck by the horrific irony of this. It did not seem to occur to the Nazis that what they were doing violated all standards of human decency. Instead, they decided a more efficient means of slaughter was required.
But upon reflection, I wondered, why was the SS suicide rate high? Why were people who acted without conscience troubled enough to take their own lives? If the actions they were engaged in were so objectionable, why did they willingly take those actions in the first place, and continue to do so?
My conclusion was that, at least for some, while they could not possiblly have had any conscious qualms about what they were doing (or else they could not have continued to do it), on an unconscious level something deeply human inside of them was rebelling, something that they were not fully aware of.
This I found to be cold comfort. On the one hand, it's good to know that some form of human decency exists on an instinctual level. On the other hand, it's horrifying to think that this instinct can be so successfully tamped down as to result in the murder of millions.
It's this contradiction we've tried to explore in the character of Heindel in Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin. We are not seeking sympathy or "understanding." But we have endeavored to treat our audience with enough respect to offer them portraits of human beings rather than caricatures.
To order tickets to Signs of Life: A Tale of Terezin, click here.
To visit the Signs of Life website, click here.
To find out more about Signs of Life off-Broadway, click here.
To find Peter Ullian's "Fan" Page on Facebook, click here.
To visit the Signs of Life Facebook page, click here.
To read Signs of Life Lyricist Len Schiff's blog, click here.
To visit Signs of Life composer Joel Derfner's website, click here.
