Knittel, Susanne. “Memory and Repetition: Reenactment as an Affirmative Critical Practice”

In this article, Susanne Knittel discusses the reenactments of perpetrator-related historical events as affirmative critical practice in contemporary theater. Knittel starts with briefly introducing Milo Rau’s Breivik’s Statement, a reenactment of the speech delivered by Anders B. Breivik during his trial. Because it is free from “an overdetermined critical framework” (173), it exemplifies a particular form of reenactment which “literally perform[s] the archive” and facilitates a critical engagement with the past. This kind of reenactment resonates with “post-hermeneutic criticism” and epitomizes what Knittel terms “affirmative critical practice”.
Reenactment as affirmative critical practice “interpolates the past and the present”; “by repeating a past event in the present, it produces a difference” (177). This difference cannot be fully determined or controlled ahead of time and lies in every reenactment which generates various interpretations of the event. Another component of affirmative critique is that, in contrast with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” which places the critic above the object and leaves his or her position unscrutinized, it brings the critic’s own subject position into question. Questioning the critic’s position is especially necessary in the case of “perpetrators of political, genocidal, or mass violence” (174).
In light of this conceptual framework, Knittel discusses two examples of affirmative critical practice in contemporary theatre. The first is Romuald Karmakar’s Das Himmler-Projekt (2000), a reenactment of Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speech, which places the audience in the position of addressees, and prompts a reevaluation of the audience’s “own subject position in relation to a collective past” (183). The Himmler-Projekt, and the aforementioned Breivik’s Statement follow the German tradition of documentary theater in that they involve perpetrators and address “current political and social issues as well as the recent past” (184). But they differ from previous works which feature a “high degree of artifice” and a director as hermeneutic authority (185).
The second example is Milo Rau’s Die letzten Tage der Ceaușescus (2009–10), a reenactment of the Ceaușescu trial. Rau makes use of the original transcript of the trial and reenacts it without interruption or commentary (188). The audience are thus asked to implicate themselves as witnesses to the execution of Ceaușescus, facilitating “a critical engagement with both the representation and the event” (190).
This article contributes to Perpetrator Studies by drawing attention to a recent type of reenactment neglected by previous scholarship, that is, reenactments that center on the figure of the perpetrator and that demand “political and civic engagement” with the past and the present from their audience (174).

Author of this entry: Runcong Liu.

Knittel, Susanne. “Memory and Repetition: Reenactment as an Affirmative Critical Practice.” New German Critique 46, no. 2 (January 2019): 171–95.