Heinar Kipphardt's "Bruder Eichmann" in East and West: A contribution to "Bergangenheits-und Gegenwartsbewaeltigung"

Heinar Kipphardt was one of West Germany's foremost documentary dramatists in the 1960's, and spent over fifteen years researching and writing what was to be his last play, Bruder Eichmann. The play is a condensation of over three thousand pages of testimony given by Adolf Eichmann during interviews from 1960 to 1961 while he was a prisoner in Jerusalem. Interspersed into the text are "analogy scenes" that point to the continuance of the Eichmann-Haltung in Western society. Due partially to the inordinate length of Kipphardt's text, the theatre productions of Bruder Eichmann differed significantly in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. This study examines approaches to Vergangenheits-und Gegenwartsbewaltigung in each country by analyzing the performance scripts and press reviews of the Munich and East Berlin productions.