Heinar Kipphardt (1922–1982)

This play takes the transcript from the hearings on Oppenheimer's security clearance and creates a stage presence. As such, it has a lot of drama, but lacks a lot of what standard playgoers expect. The subjects dealt with are complex and timely even today, investigating the intersection of science and politics, and which would win in the battle over how science is to be used (I won't give away the ending; most of us know who won that battle, anyway). This case, at least according to the characters, will decide whether science will become a tool of government, business, and military interests, or whether it would remain independent. It is a play written during the period of time that the nuclear question was truly on everyone's mind, and not in the abstract fear of today, but the very visceral fear that led to duck-and-cover drills in grade schools. The author does a good job with the material, and one real strength is that he doesn't answer the questions he asks; he leaves them dangling in the air for the audience to chew over when they leave the theatre. That is the surest guarantee of writing a play that everyone will remember.… (meer)

The thread in the oeuvre of Kipphardt is the relationship of commands to obedience, of loyalty and conscience. He intends to destroy the myth of Eichmann as the ‘incarnation of the powers of darkness’ as the ‘personification of evil’ as the monster who kills sitting at his desk. He calls it a comfortable myth: He who is seen as a monster becomes the ‘Other’, the convenient recipient of one’s own responsibility and guilt. Extensive document research leads him to present Eichmann growing up to become a law-abiding German lower-bourgeois who wants to ‘fit in’ and be accepted by his social superiors, for whom it is the duty to do what his superiors expect him to do, to obey and not to ask questions: exactly what is required of modern employees to guarantee the function of business and state institutions, the attitude that is fostered in the education system, that every well adjusted person has learned to possess. Kipphardt wants the spectator to recognise in himself the ‘brother Eichmann’. So he intersperses the play with scenes that introduce persons of similar functional behaviour that leads them to treat human beings as dispensable objects: interviews with an U.S. general planning nuclear war, with a B-52 commander about bombing missions in Vietnam, a geneticist who dreams of cloning humans … (XI-11)… (meer)