Good?
Who or what is acceptable, moral, capable, proficient, healthy, talented, accomplished, fit, wholesome, healthful, beneficial, appropriate, fitting in the declining Weimar Republic and increasingly Nazified 1930s Germany?
David Tennant’s academic, culturally refined German character Professor John Halder is given the power to decide. As he feels himself more and more ‘good’ and ‘liberal’, the choices he makes and the society he creates becomes less and less good for certain characteristics and ethnicities of society, certain cultural groups and ultimately nations. C P Taylor’s play explores how a seemingly regular person can become radicalised and deceived by their their own thoughts, hearts, choices, behaviour and deeds. And yet still in denial that they are any more than good, just going along with what has been dictated from the top and somehow presenting their own morality and righteousness in still being loving, romantic, kind.
John Halder is a sensitive Goethe loving poet, a writer and academic. He juggles an ordinary life of an urbanite academic, supporting a wife who seems not to be coping with domestic duties, of being a hausfrau; of being a father to his children; of doing the cooking and organising the cleaning of their home; of writing fictionalised accounts of euthanasia as he visits his struggling visually impaired mother. He isn’t a hater of people, an anti-semite, and yet the choices he makes, the decisions he follows through…
We hear his inner monologue, intercut with conversations with his wife, friend and increasingly something which will become the Nazi Party. He falls in love with one of his own students, a pretty young girl; just as his wife begins to fall in love with him. His wife can’t explain why she can’t concentrate, organise herself or others, why she creates a home which is messy and not a peaceful ‘living space’. Utilising his friend’s connections (and increasing social pressure) John Halder gains a beautiful country retreat for himself and his love, where he hopes he can bury his head in the sand from all the things going on around. Yet he keeps being asked to do things and forced to choose. Disquietingly his friend stops coming to the shared garden gate and disappears. They don’t mention him any more.
Truly exploring the banality of evil, is (the play asks us) this a person drifting or sleepwalking towards involvement in an evil system or is it inevitable? How much does he really know? John Halder’s friend Maurice (Elliot Levey) is a wealthy and culturally Jewish, actively and vocally rejecting other Jewish people, and yet John Halder can’t or won’t help him and his family escape to Switzerland.
Halder starts with being asked to join the Nazi Party — yet if he wants to stay teaching and working as an academic, this is what he has to do. He doesn’t identify personally as a Nazi and thinks they’re a flash in the pan — they won’t last, they’re here for now, but they will go. They can’t last. Plus he and his wife are still listening to banned music — jazz! He then starts having matey chats with a local Party official (foul of mouth and yet not inhuman) who thinks John is a good bloke. They share their lives, socialise, (and although one sided to begin with), there is a kind of friendship. The Nazi Party official isn’t inhuman — he enjoys All Quiet on the Western Front — can’t see why it’s on a banned list. Halder is soon banning books and authors at University that he hasn’t even read, like Einstein. Does it matter the play asks pointedly? It isn’t affecting me so should I be bothered? So long as I protect myself and in my inner being am loving and loved, isn’t that ok, enough?
The stage is a small concretey and plywood box, making the action intense. Three actors switch between all the parts. Shockingly books swoosh out of a shute, thumping in an ungainly way down onto the stage and then are chucked into an incinerator which appears on the the other side, like rubbish. Our refined professor is now burning books. But they aren’t his works — so this is ok? Or just something he has to do for now, for a time?…
John Halder seeks to leave his wife, embrace a rural retreat with his new love, and yet there are still lists to deal with. His lover doesn’t believe in evil — their love is pure and enough, just as they are spiraling into evil acts and intent. All the way through John Halder distances himself from others around him — he isn’t like them, he isn’t a spouter of hate against the Jews; it’s the government, the Party, not him as an individual — not who he is. He loves his children after all. Yet he is cruelly and wickedly fooling himself.
From burning and banning books to Kristallnacht, when suddenly he’s tenderly being helped into a uniform to ‘support’ the police and stop people being killed. Somehow he’s still the good guy?!!! The stage plunges into darkness as we hear the smashes and screams of ordinary people being persecuted, arrested, attacked just for being who they are and suddenly judged not good by immoral and evil standards, carried out by apparently ‘good’ people. Somehow David Tennant’s character is just doing his job, his citizen duty, the right and good thing. Yet his tone has begun to change — proper social appearances are more important than using his social capital to purchase tickets for his friend to escape to Switzerland. He even begins to blame the Jewish people for their own dilemma — it’s their own fault, they should have left ages ago, seen how things were going. But he’s still ok because he’s not harsh and foul mouthed like the local Party official who he now calls friend.
His lectures have also begun to change in tone, impenetrable social evolutionary biology spiel with a Nazi spin. (Party pleasing!) Yet he is just doing what the government told him to. He’s not choosing this — he’s just doing what he’s told. At the same time he’s also looking to have his mother’s life ended (and others who are similarly ‘afflicted’ or a burden to society and culture — inspired by his book, he’s being involved in official research to create a euthanasia programme. In kindness, he wants the room where life will be exterminated to feel homely, welcoming — like a bathroom, something which won’t cause panic or alarm to those who are about to die. But it’s for their good.
Worse still he suddenly is draped in a leather jack as a letter and a new uniform send him to Auschwitz to check up on the processes and procedures there. He’s not like the Komandant, Hoss, who he describes as mentally unstable. This is just another administrative task for him to carry out.
Much of the horror in it comes from seemingly everyday activities and choices — letters, administration, doing your civic duty; in seeing charming, debonair, affable David Tennant dressed as a brownshirt and in Nazi regalia. It is horrific and it should be — the Nazi regime was run by ordinary people. Ordinary people betrayed, shipped out, profited, murdered their neighbours and friends, othered them, took over their property and possessions and denied that these communities were good. The willful looking askance at self-knowledge, to acknowledge actual truth and to see the humanity, the goodness of others, the social and cultural value of others in just existing and being and the true evil in the society and empire they were trying to create. Thank God they were stopped.
At the end, David Tennant enters the camp in full Nazi pomp. He’s surprised that a prison orchestra is playing to greet him — Schubert (a banned, suspect musician). He can still appreciate gardening and the beauty of music, even as he prepares to sort the figures and processes and procedures out (and no doubt maximise production). I’m weeping, the horror, the pain — the lack of normal emotional reaction, the cold acceptance of this normalcy is overwhelming. At every turn, I’m wanting to scream — say ‘no’, do something! But he doesn’t — he keeps on being ‘good’ in his own eyes and doing the ‘right’ ‘law abiding’ thing.
The play ends focused on the orchestra playing in their scrappy, thin prison pajama uniforms — it is an immense tribute to the individuals, generations slaughtered in the Shoah (and those who survived and thrived afterwards); of the resilience of beauty in the face of evil and horror. And also how contradictory the alleged ‘good’ citizens were — they could both admire and wipe out in the same thought. Perhaps John Halder will continue to be ‘good’ and stop the music as ‘inappropriate’.
In all of this, my admiration for those who resisted (especially people like Oskar Schindler) grew in my admiration — those who resisted the administration, the ‘goodness’ being urged on them by the law and the government, the party and social reforms. We really need to think about who we say is ‘good’ and what we follow claiming to be and do ‘good’ today.
Overall the stage and words are very much Sharon Small’s play — she blasted everyone off the stage — jumping between multiple, opposed parts as struggling wife who has grown to love her husband as he chooses to no longer love her; as delightful student lover who chooses not to see evil; as the struggling mother — fighting her own mental health and visual impairment and the restrictions of her life; as the local Party official who enrolls Halder to the Nazis and then shares a vulnerable moment — they can’t be a potent man for the fatherland, they cannot father children and it is a problem for them (and the Nazis); as someone who coolly dispatches books into a furnace, as though they’re rubbish for a bin. She blazes in each character and should get all the accolades not Tennant! He remains annoyingly likable and suave throughout, showing the humanity (rather than banality) of evil and evildoers, and how we face this. It is horrific to see Doctor Who becoming a Nazi — and it should horrify all of us, as loving fathers, grandfathers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles, daughters and sons, families become ‘good’ in the eyes of the Nazi state by behaving, thinking and speaking viciously.
In watching this, all I could think of was this:
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me”.
— Martin Niemöller
Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Socialists…” | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)
