'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 4

 

Critical Reception

[I’ve covered the development, or “devising,” as the Tectonic people would characterize the process, of Here There Are Blueberries, the verbatim play generated by the unveiling by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum of the Höcker Album of photographs of the staff and SS officers of Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. 

[That process was the subject of Parts 2 and 3 (posted on Rick On Theater on 29 May and 1 June 2024).  That followed Part 1 (26 May) in which I posted the 60 Minutes segment on the play by Anderson Cooper that recounted the origin of the play and the appearance at USHMM of the Höcker Album, as well as its curation and interpretation, which became the subject matter of Blueberries. 

[Now, in Parts 4 and 5, I will cover the critical reception of the play on stage in the four productions that culminated in its début in an Off-Broadway mounting in New York City.  That run is also the play’s homecoming, as Tectonic Theater Project’s home base is here.  I’ve compiled the production history of Here There Are Blueberries thus far in its history.

[I’ll repeat here my frequent admonition to readers who are just joining this thread: it would be a good idea to go back and read Parts 1 through 3 before tackling Parts 4 and 5—not just for the background, some of which is repeated in the reviews posted below and in the final installment (coming on Friday, 7 June), but for the explanations and identifications that I’ve included (but which I won’t repeat consistently).

[Tectonic Theater Project’s Here There Are Blueberries, under its original working title The Album, had its first workshop production, an excerpt of the work in progress, at Miami New Drama’s Colony Theater in Miami Beach from 31 May to 3 June 2018.  Tectonic founder and artistic director, who co-wrote and directed the play, presented the first hour of material as part of Miami New Drama’s Works in Progress series.

[On 3 November 2021, Theater J, a prominent Jewish theater that’s part of the Edlavitch Jewish Community Center of Washington, D.C., announced that Here There Are Blueberries had won the Trish Vradenburg Jewish Play Prize.  The Vradenburg Prize “recognizes a new play that celebrates, explores, and/or struggles with the complexities and nuances of the Jewish experience.”

[The prize was awarded at a reception on 7 December 2021, at which a reading of an excerpt of the play was presented.  “Here There Are Blueberries,” said Theater J artistic director, Adam Immerwahr, “is an astonishing and unforgettable piece of theater.”

[The world première of Here There Are Blueberries, now a 90-minute, one-act play, was co-produced by La Jolla Playhouse with preview performances starting on 26 July 2022 in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre at the University of California-San Diego in La Jolla.  The première opened on 31 July and ran to 21 August 2022. 

[Starting with previews on 7 May 2023 and opening on 12 May, the play was presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at its Sidney Harman Hall in the Penn Quarter of downtown Washington, D.C.  STC’s production ran until 28 May 2023.

[The New York City début of Blueberries started previews at the New York Theatre Workshop in Manhattan’s East Village on 17 April 2024 and opened on 13 May 2024.  It’s currently scheduled to run until 30 June (extended twice from 2 and 16 June).

[On 6 May 2024, the winners and finalists of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes were announced—the same day as this year’s Yom Hashoah, the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Here There Are Blueberries had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.  On the Pulitzer site, the play is described as “An elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.”

[For the immediate future, at least three productions have been announced.  At present, first up will be the McCarter Theatre at Princeton University in New Jersey, with scheduled dates of 24 January-9 February 2025.  The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Arts in Beverly Hills, California, follows with a prospective run of 13-30 March 2025.  Then California’s Berkeley Repertory Theatre in the San Francisco Bay Area has announced it will mount a production from 5 April to 11 May 2025.]

“A PLAY INSPIRED BY A PHOTO ALBUM”
by Aaron Krause 

[The Album, the title under which the 2018 Miami Beach workshop of Tectonic’s Here There Are Blueberries was presented, was considered a workshop production.  For that reason, I surmise, there were no reviews published (that I could find).  Aside from Miami New Drama’s own website, the only report of the try-out that was published on the Internet was from miamiartzine, an online publication serving South Florida’s arts community and arts lovers with original feature stories about arts and entertainment, professional reviews, and photo galleries covering Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. 

[Aaron Krause’s MAZ article was posted on the website on the first day of the four-day workshop, 31 May 2018.  I presume that it was composed at least in part from MND press releases.]

Miami New Drama Presents Excerpts From New Production

Moises Kaufman’s father survived the Holocaust. [There is a short biographical sketch of Kaufman in the afterword to Part 1 of this series, posted on 26 May.]

So you can imagine what Moises thought when he saw photos of Nazis partying at a resort near an infamous concentration [camp].

“When I saw these pictures, something very personal happened,” said the renown [sic] Jewish theater artist and founder of the bold Tectonic Theater Project.

“When this album came to light . . . the fact that it was a new finding made me want to look at it again.”

Kaufman is referring to The Hoecker Album. [Hoecker is the same as Höcker; sometimes an umlaut (the two dots, or diaresis) is denoted in written German by adding an e to the umlauted vowel after the letter.] It’s a book of photographs showing the Nazi officers “singing, picnicking and flirting with young women,” at a pastoral resort near Aus[c]hwitz. Within that death camp, Nazis killed more than one million people.

The Hoecker Album is the subject of a new play in progress, titled “The Album.” Kaufman wrote it in collaboration with the Tectonic Theater Project in New York City.

The Miami Beach-based theater company Miami New Drama is presenting excerpts from the new play through Sunday at The Colony Theater. MND is the theater’s resident company.

Kaufman said this marks the first time he and Tectonic have examined the Holocaust – the worst genocide in history.

“There has been so much written and said about the Holocaust that it’s hard to think what else we can say about it that is interesting or new or insightful,” he says. “When this album came to light . . . the fact that it was a new finding made me want to look at it again.”

The multiple Tony award nominee, National Medal of the Arts winning playwright and director spent “days” talking to  Rebecca Erbelding, a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archivist, and her colleagues. Erbelding led research into the photographs.

“What proceeds is a journey into discovering who owned the album, whose it was, why were these photos taken, who are the people in the photos, when in the Holocaust were they taken and what is the story the photos tell,” Kaufman says. “People talk about the banality of evil. This is evidence of what they were doing in the middle of the Holocaust – having a vacation, relaxing, singing. There’s something about that that begs the question: How can you do that? What does it take to make those photos?”

[Historian, philosopher, and political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-75) introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1906-62), one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.

[The book’s subtitle refers to Eichmann's demeanor at his trial for crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and membership in a criminal organization, as Eichmann displayed no guilt for his actions, claiming he was simply following orders and doing his job. He was tried by the State of Israel in 1961, found guilty, and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed in 1962, and his body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Mediterranean, outside Israeli territorial waters.

[Arendt’s sense is that Eichmann was not a monster, fanatic, or sociopath, but an ordinary, bland bureaucrat who relied on simplistic explanations for his deeds rather than thinking for himself. He was motivated by career advancement rather than ideology. Banality, in Arendt’s use, doesn’t mean that Eichmann’s actions were in any way ordinary, but that they were motivated by a complacency which was wholly unremarkable.

[A number of articles about and reviews of Here There Are Blueberries made reference to Arendt’s phrase, usually without explanation or source, but surprisingly few.  It was, however, one of the first ideas that occurred to me when I started reading about Tectonic’s play.]

“The Album” is “in keeping with Miami New Drama’s commitment to locally resonant, nationally significant drama,” according to press material. The play is, according to the release, “particularly relevant to Miami, whose extensive, multi-national Jewish community has welcomed many Holocaust survivors. The play comes as Antisemitism and white nationalism are on the rise.”

Kaufman is the co-founder of Miami New Drama. Its artistic director is Michel Hausmann, who is also Jewish. The Venezuela native’s three grandparents lived through the Holocaust.

“This play could not be more timely,” Hausmann says.

He praised Kaufman’s collaboration with Tectonic.

“The work that Moises and Tectonic have done in the past two decades has changed the landscape of American theater. Moises has been a friend, mentor and teacher. Much of the original work we (Miami New Drama) are creating for next season is inspired by their process. What an amazing honor it is for a young company like ours to have a partnership with such an established, nationally recognized company.”

Kaufman and Tectonic rose to fame with “The Laramie Project,” a [2000] play “which examined the homophobia-driven torture and murder of Matthew Shepard (a gay University of Wyoming student).” On Oct. 12, 1998, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson pistol whipped Shepard with a gun, tied him to a fence in freezing weather, set him on fire and left him to die. A jury convicted both defendants of first-degree murder and a judge sentenced them to two life sentences. Prosecutors, however, didn’t charge McKinney and Henderson with a hate crime; that wasn’t possible under Wyoming’s criminal law. In 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act into law. It defined certain attacks motivated by victim identity as hate crimes.

[Shepard (1976-98) was actually beaten, tortured, and left to die on the night of 6 October 1998. He was found alive and taken to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later, on 12 October, from the head injuries he received during the attack.]

The Matthew Shepherd murder was turned into a film for HBO.

[Krause may be referring to the 2002 HBO film adaptation of The Laramie Project. There have been other television versions of the tragedy, but they weren’t made by or aired on HBO.]

Eventually, Tectonic turned the case into material for the stage. Kaufman frequently addresses issues such as identity, outsiders and intolerance in his work. It includes multiple Broadway directing credits, such as the Tony Award-winning I Am My Own Wife [2003], about a trans gender woman who survived Nazi and Soviet rule in East Berlin. Its transfer to Broadway established Kaufman’s track record of developing work that gains national attention.

But for now, “The Album” is in the developmental stage. It opened Thursday and runs through Sunday, totaling just four performances.

The collaboration, according to a press release from MND, represents a new stage in Miami New Drama’s development and its dedication to original theater.

[Aaron Krause is a freelance theater critic and feature writer based in South Florida.  He reviews theater productions and writes arts- and entertainment-related stories for his own blog theatricalmusings.com, and has written for berkshirefinearts.com, the website of Berkshire Fine Arts, whose mandate is to cover all aspects of the arts in the Massachusetts Berkshire Mountains including the major theater companies and museums; The Parklander magazine in Coral Springs, Florida; theatrecriticism.com, a website for national reviews of theater works, films, and streaming media; and miamiartzine.com. 

[Krause has a bachelor's degree in English within the professional writing track at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida, and a master's in journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington.  He spent 13 years as a staff writer at the Norwalk Reflector, the newspaper of Huron County, Ohio.] 

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“LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE’S ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’
A CHILLING EXAMINATION OF THE ROOTS OF HUMAN CRUELTY”
by Pam Kragen 

[Pam Kragen’s review of the 2022 world première of Here There Are Blueberries in La Jolla was posted on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on 1 August 2022.]

World premiere play is a coproduction with New York’s Tectonic Theater Project

What is the essence of human evil? Surely Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” is on the shortlist.

But what about the German officers, doctors and office workers who ran Hitler’s most efficient death camp, Auschwitz, where more than 1.1 million Jews and others were massacred during World War II? Were they evil, or just regular people swept up in a frenzy of hate and nationalistic propaganda and readily able to emotionally detach themselves from the end results of their work?

Probing the shady areas of human nature is the heart of La Jolla Playhouse’s chilling world-premiere drama “Here There Are Blueberries,” which opened Sunday in a co-production with New York’s Tectonic Theater Project.

The 90-minute play — co-written by Tectonic founder Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, and directed by Kaufman — dissects in a clean, clinical way the seemingly blissful private lives of the Auschwitz staff in their idle hours.

Designed in prisonlike grays by scenic designer Derek McLane, the production is eye-poppingly illustrated with projections of more than 100 images from a photo album anonymously donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2007. The album was created, and later discarded in 1945, by Auschwitz adjutant Karl Höcker, who’s a smiling presence in virtually every photo.

Like “The Laramie Project,” Kaufman’s 2000 play about the murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, “Here There Are Blueberries” is a documentary-style story told from the perspective of dozens of real people in and around the crime.

The excellent and understated ensemble cast, who all play multiple roles, includes Elizabeth Stahlmann, Charlie Thurston Grant James Varjas, Rosina Reynolds, Scott Barrow, Charles Browning, Jeanne Sakata and Frances Uku.

“Blueberries” is set in the archives room at the Holocaust museum, where researcher Rebecca Erbelding talks about receiving the album from a dying U.S. counterintelligence officer, and how she and her colleagues uncovered Höcker’s identity and those of the other officers and doctors in the photos.

The blithe behavior of the officers and young women staffers in the photo is often unsettling, especially when the eight-member ensemble cast add an eerie soundtrack of laughter, accordion music or clattering spoons, as when the women eat fresh blueberries from china bowls.

But the play’s most engrossing part is when it leaves the museum and explores how the exposure of these images in the global press impacts the devastated descendants of these Nazi officers and doctors. Thurston gives a moving performance as Rainer, the grandson of Auschwitz camp-builder Rudolf Höss. Rainer abandoned an adolescence marked by hate and violence toward others to disprove the Nazi belief that evil is an inherited trait.

Like “The Laramie Project,” “Blueberries” probes the thorny question of what drives seemingly ordinary people to commit murder, a timely subject in America where racism and mass shootings are on the rise.

As one character says ominously near the end of “Blueberries”: “Killing is the result of a long process. No genocide starts with the killing. It starts with the words.”

[Pam Kragen is a feature writer and critic who specializes in writing dining, theater, opera, and human interest stories.  She joined the San Diego Union-Tribune staff in October 2012 after 27 years at the North County Times, former newspaper in the North County region of San Diego County (merged with U-T in 2012), where she served as the Arts & Features Editor, as well as the paper’s longtime arts writer and theater and opera reviewer.

[Kragen is the president and co-founder of the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle.  She holds a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from San Diego State University and completed fellowships in theater criticism at the University of Southern California and opera-classical music criticism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.  In 2022, she was chosen as one of the fellows in the National Critics Institute, run by the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut.]

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“DISCARDED PHOTOS OF NAZIS RELAXING
AT AUSCHWITZ LED TO THIS RIVETING PLAY”
by Peter Marks 

[The Washington Post review of the 2023 staging of Here There Are Blueberries, written by Peter Marks, WaPo’s chief theater reviewer at the time, came out on the paper’s website on 18 May 2023.]

‘Here There Are Blueberries,’ a documentary drama about a real photo album sent to the Holocaust museum, gives wrenching context to genocide

A play starring . . . research! Well, that sounds a little dry. Rest assured, though: “Here There Are Blueberries,” the story of a real photo album depicting Nazis at leisure in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killing center, is anything but.

It is, rather, a gripping exposé of the depraved human inclination to convince oneself that nothing is amiss when everything is in fact horrifically, monstrously wrong. Made compellingly theatrical by the virtuosic visual instincts of director Moisés Kaufman, this documentary drama reveals how ephemeral events — the purchase of a camera, the discovery of a discarded keepsake, the mailing of a letter — can align to enlighten the world.

What unfolds in Harman Hall — where Shakespeare Theatre Company is presenting the play by Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project — is a meticulous illumination of the work of historians at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Seventeen years ago, a retired American counterintelligence officer in Virginia offered the museum an extraordinary photo album he had found in a trash bin in Germany at the end of World War II. The 116 pictures were of Nazi officers, soldiers and office workers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, lounging and laughing in the bucolic countryside on their days off. These included the photo that gave the play its title: It is the caption on one of the photographs, showing a group of camp staff members happily gorging on the fruit.

The find was remarkable, the play’s real-life characters explain, because little photographic evidence has survived of the SS men who ran the camp and the young women who staffed the office in which communiqués were sent and received. But the donation also posed a moral dilemma for a museum founded as a repository of information about the victims of unspeakable Nazi atrocities: Should there be a place in the collection for depictions of mass murderers that portrayed them as ordinary humans?

It’s a play, in other words, that Ken Burns fans can love. The ethical thrust of “Here There Are Blueberries” is spelled out in a lucid, straightforward style by Kaufman and co-author Amanda Gronich. The highly polished cast of eight portrays multiple roles, as the story shifts back and forth from the museum to modern-day Germany, where descendants of some of the officers confront the irrefutable facts of their relatives’ crimes.

One such relative, played with compelling gravity by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh, comes forward to identify his grandfather, a camp doctor, in the photographs. Amid the obfuscation and denial of a nation that inflicted so much suffering, his response goes some way to helping us understand the museum’s investment in authenticating the photos. In all its humdrum documentation of daily activity, this album on the flip side of horror somehow makes what was happening just out of camera range seem all the more hideous.

The story is recounted in such reverent tones that sometimes you might wish for a little more about how the stressful work affected the researchers, chiefly Elizabeth Stahlmann’s Rebecca Erbelding, the historian who recognized the value of the album (and still works at the museum). She and her boss, Judy Cohen (played by Kathleen Chalfant), form an alliance of advocacy for the album, which they discover belonged to one Obersturmführer Karl Höcker, an aide to the camp’s last commandant, Richard Baer.

Stahlmann and Chalfant are eloquent embodiments of curatorial objectivity: Perhaps, as the play’s Erbelding explains, subjugating one’s emotions is the only way to carry on such work effectively. That work is also what Kaufman and Gronich animate so vibrantly. Set designer Derek McLane, working with projections designer David Bengali and lighting designer David Lander, has devised a cool, serene mise-en-scène that captures the professional neutrality of the research team. Bengali and McLane find innovative ways to embed the photos in the narrative and, with sound designer Bobby McElver, manage to create a multisensory experience around them.

The first object we glimpse, though, is in three dimensions: a Leica camera, the then-newly invented, portable mechanism that popularized the recreational photography recounted in “Here There Are Blueberries.”

This gives way to a stunning tableau of the researchers, each frozen at an examining table, each station lit from within. It’s a moving, imagistic prologue, a stage picture that stays with you. You’re a witness to history not being made but reclaimed.

I confess I’m the ideal audience for “Here There Are Blueberries,” as a Jewish man who has spent his life obsessed with and endlessly grief-stricken over the play’s concerns. That’s one reason, but not the only reason, that I spent the 90 minutes in Harman Hall with my heart in my mouth.

[Peter Marks was the Washington Post's chief theater critic from 2002 to 2023.  He left the Post in 2024.  Previously, he worked for nine years at the New York Times, on the culture, metropolitan and national desks, and spent about four years as its off-Broadway drama critic.] 

*  *  *  *

[“Here There Are Blueberries, Part 5,” which contains two reviews of the New York Theatre Workshop’s production of the play, will be posted on Friday, 7 June.  I hope readers will return to ROT to read what two local critics said about this unique theatrical work.  To whet ROTters’ appetites for this conclusion to the short series, I’ll say only that one notice is by Vinson Cunningham from the New Yorker and the other is from Vulture/New York by Sara Holdren.]

'Here There Are Blueberries,' Part 2

 

Development

[Anderson Cooper and 60 Minutes didn’t cover much of Here There Are Blueberries in “NAZI’s photo album shows Auschwitz officers singing and socializing as gas chambers operate,” posted in “Here There Are Blueberries, Part 1” (26 May), so I’m adding coverage of the development of the play and its reception by the press.  The post will be a miniseries of several parts, starting with Tectonic Theater Project’s “devising” the production over the 17 years after founder and artistic director Moisés Kaufman first read about the Höcker Album of photographs from Auschwitz.  

[“Devising” in this usage is a special sense of the word for Tectonic’s theater artists.  I gave the company’s own definition of it, along with “Moment Work,” another proprietary Tectonic term, in the introduction to Part 1, but since the concepts are so fundamental to Tectonic’s creative methodology, especially for Here There Are Blueberries, I’ll repeat it here:

Moment Work is the groundbreaking process of devising new work developed by Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project to create works such as Here There Are Blueberries, The Laramie Project, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, and 33 Variations, among others.  Moment Work explores the theatrical potential of all the elements of the stage in order to create strong theatrical and dramatic narratives from the ground up.  Moment Work gives us the freedom to create individual, self-contained theatrical units (Moments) and to sequence these units together into theatrical phrases that eventually become a play.

Devising Theater means creating new work for the stage in a collaborative laboratory setting.  Moment Work begins with the premise that powerful storytelling employs much more than words.  Through a rigorous and thoughtful process, these moments are sequenced and layered to build narratives which lead to the creation of original and innovative new plays.

[The 60 Minutes report in Part 1 describes how Kaufman learned of the photographs and what he did next to begin creating the play.  Though some of that process will be repeated in the following articles, it would be a good idea for readers who haven’t already done so, to go back and read the first installment of this series.  My introduction and afterword to Cooper’s report will also provide useful background to the material here.] 

“IN THE SHADOW OF HORROR, SS GUARDIANS RELAX AND FROLIC”
by Neil A. Lewis 

[“Here There Are Blueberries, Part 1” gives the origin of the Tectonic production.  It mentions a New York Times article that revealed the existence of the album of photos from Auschwitz concentration camp which appeared on the front page of Section E (”The Arts”) on 19 September 2007.  The article Kaufman read is posted below.  (Many of the names in this report are also mentioned in the first part of this series.  I’ve supplied identifications for most of them in that post.)]

Photos that show murderers as ordinary human beings

Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion. [This is the photo, with the hand-written caption “Hier gibt es Blaubeeren,” that gave Kaufman the title for his play: Here There Are Blueberries.]

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

[Known as the “Sonderkommando photographs,” these were taken secretly in August 1944 inside Auschwitz by a member of the Sonderkommando (‘special unit’), Jewish inmates forced to work in and around the gas chambers. The photos are at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum but can be seen online at many sites on the Internet.]

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (www.ushmm.org) that will be available this week [nb: they are available now]. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.

Museum curators have avoided describing the album as something like “monsters at play” or “killers at their leisure.” Ms. Cohen said the photos were instructive in that they showed some sense, people who also behaved as ordinary human beings. “In their self-image, they were good men, good comrades, even civilized,” she said.

Sarah J. Bloomfield, the museum’s director, said she believed that other undiscovered caches of photos or documents concerning the Holocaust existed in attics and might soon be lost to history.

The donor, who had asked to remain anonymous, was in his 90s when he contacted the museum, and he died this summer. He told the museum’s curators that he found the photo album in a Frankfurt apartment where he lived in 1946.

The photos of the Auschwitz Album were discovered by Lili Jacob [1925-99; later Lili Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier; born in Bilke, Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia)], a Hungarian Jew who was deported in May 1944 to Auschwitz, near Krakow in Poland. She was transferred to another camp, Dora-Mittelbau in Germany [near Nordhausen in Thuringia, in the former East Germany; about 20,000 inmates were murdered there between 1943 and 1945], where she discovered the pictures in a bedside table in an abandoned SS barracks.

She was stunned to recognize pictures of herself, her rabbi and her brothers aged 9 and 11, both of whom she later discovered had been gassed immediately after arrival.

Höcker fled Auschwitz before the camp’s liberation. When he was captured by the British he was carrying false documents identifying him as a combat soldier. After the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel, West German authorities tracked down Höcker in Engershausen his hometown [in the Federal Republic state of North Rhine-Westphalia, on the western border of the country], where he was working as a bank official.

He was convicted of war crimes and served seven years before his release in 1970, after which he was rehired by the bank. Höcker died in 2000 at 89.

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“LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE’S ‘HERE THERE ARE BLUEBERRIES’
TO EXAMINE THE SECRET LIVES OF HOLOCAUST PERPETRATORS”
by Pam Kragen 

[Pam Kragen’s article, which includes an excerpt from an interview with Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, was published on the San Diego Union-Tribune website on 24 July 2022.  The world première of Here There Are Blueberries, coproduced with La Jolla Playhouse, opened on 31 July and ran through 21 August 2022 at the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre on the campus of the University of California at San Diego.]

World premiere play by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich is a co-production with Tectonic Theater Project

It’s been 77 years since the first Nazi concentration camps were liberated by Allied troops, exposing to the world the horrors of the Holocaust.

But for all of the camp photos, video footage, mass graves and survivor stories that opened the public’s eyes to the Germans’ systematic extermination of as many as 11 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals and others, one element was always missing from the story: The secret lives of the camps’ administrators, guards and office workers, who fled ahead of the approaching Allied forces and went into hiding.

“Here There Are Blueberries,” a world premiere play opening in previews Tuesday [26 July 2022] at La Jolla Playhouse, will offer a rare snapshot of these men and women who ran the Nazis’ most notorious death camp: Auschwitz in Poland, where as many as 1.1 million people — mostly Jews — were killed between 1940 and January 1945.

Co-written by playwrights Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich, “Here There Are Blueberries” is the true story of how a recently discovered photo album exposed the private lives of the German SS officers and staff who kept the brutal camp humming.

Among the 116 black-and-white photographs kept by Karl-Friedrich Höcker, who was adjutant to the commandant of Auschwitz, are images of him and others laughing, singing, celebrating, sunning themselves on lounge chairs and enjoying bowls of fresh-picked blueberries. Most of the photos were taken in 1944 and early 1945 at a chalet-like recreation center near the camp, where staff relaxed together in their off-hours.

Kaufman said the Germans’ carefree behavior in the photographs show a disturbing side of human nature.

“The purpose of this play is to show in a very specific way that the people who did this were not raised to do this,” Kaufman said. “They were people like you and me, and through a series of very specific things, they learned how to do it. I refuse to believe the Nazis are monsters. The moment you label them as monsters you can separate yourself from them. They were regular human beings, which makes it all the more frightening.”

Kaufman is the founder and artistic director of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, which is co-producing “Here There Are Blueberries.” In years of past, the Playhouse has also produced Kaufman’s Tony-nominated play “33 Variations” and Tectonic‘s “Laramie Project: 10 Years Later,” which Kaufman co-wrote. Kaufman also directed the Playhouse’s pre-Broadway workshop Doug Wright’s Tony-winning play “I Am My Own Wife.”

Like “Here There Are Blueberries,” all of those past projects were based on real people and historical events.

The unbound pages of Höcker’s album were donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2007 by a dying World War II American counterintelligence officer, who chose to remain anonymous. He told museum archivist Rebecca Erbelding that he’d discovered the album in a Frankfurt apartment where he’d lived after the war in 1946 and had kept it hidden for 60 years. In the early 1960s, Höcker was working as a banker in Germany when he was captured and convicted of war crimes. He served seven years in prison was freed. He died in 2000 at age 89.

Kaufman first read about the photo album in a 2007 New York Times article [see above] and said that from the moment he read the story, he knew he wanted to write a play about it. Kaufman’s parents were orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe who survived the war by hiding in a basement. After the war, they immigrated to Caracas, Venezuela, where Moises was born and raised. [A brief biography of Kaufman is in my afterword to the first part of this series.] His “Blueberries” co-writer, Gronich, is also Jewish and a longtime Tectonic collaborator and documentary filmmaker.

Kaufman said that as Jewish writers, he and Gronich can offer a unique perspective on the story.

“An uncle of mine who was from Hungary was in Auschwitz at the same time these photos were taken,” Kaufman said. “I showed him the photographs, and he told me, ‘You are surprised because you have led a pampered life. I lived there. I saw those faces, I saw these things you’re showing me pictures of. I’ve seen this side of man.’ I feel that the play allows us to look into the human condition through very specific glasses.”

In order to help audience members process the heavy issues in the play, the Playhouse, Tectonic and the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Professional Study of Ethics (FASPE) are hosting a series of free, post-show audience talk-back sessions during the run of “Here There Are Blueberries.”

The topics are: “Doctors at Auschwitz: Joseph Mengele and the Role of Medicine in Nazi Germany,” Aug. 2; “The Next Generation: How Do We Deal With the Sins of Our Fathers, Both Literally and Metaphorically?,” Aug. 3; “Ethics in Nazi Germany: Himmler’s Posen Speech,” Aug. 16; “There Were Blueberries: The Transformation of Norms and Complicity as the New Normal,” Aug. 17; and “Nazi Crimes and the Complicity of Business Leaders and Professionals,” Aug. 18. For details, visit lajollaplayhouse.org/show/here-there-are-blueberries.

Here are some excerpts of a recent interview with Kaufman about the play:

Q: How did these photos from the album speak to you when you first saw them in 2007 and, now, today as the play makes its world premiere?

A: Those photos pose questions about culpability and also complicity. Those issues are important in American culture right now. The play is very timely. This is my most American play. It speaks about how do we coexist when tremendous injustices are being committed. And how do we leave our daily lives when everything about our country is in perilous danger?

Q: You did a workshop performance of this play, then titled “The Album,” in Miami in 2018. How has the play changed since then?

A: It has become bigger. Since then I went to Germany with my co-writer Amanda, and we were able to interview some of the children [and grandchildren] of the people who are in the photographs. All of the materials we gathered from that have made it into the play.

Q: Are any of the characters in the play fictional or composites?

A: Everybody in the play is the real person. It’s a story of the people who received the album, the detective work they did to understand what the photos told us and how do we extract all we can from it. And it’s about one of the [grand-]children in one of the photographs.

Q: How do the photos themselves inform the play?

A: The photos depict a side of the concentration camp we hadn’t seen before. A lot of the work in the Holocaust community has been focused on the victims. There’s a shift in the community to focus also on the perpetrators. The thing that’s most shocking about the album to me is there’s not a single prisoner in any of the shots.

Q: It must have been depressing to research and write this play. Did it affect you emotionally?

A: Many times there were moments of great reckoning in the work. But at the same time, being a playwright, my goal is to always find a way to try and bring about “tikkun olam” (the Jewish concept of healing the world). I believe that theater has a realm that is more powerful than politics or religion. It addresses people’s brains, hearts and spiritual life. The purpose of writing plays serves as a great antidote to the subject matter of the play.

*  *  *  *
“HIDDEN IN THIS PICTURE,
THE MURDER OF 1.1 MILLION JEWS”
by PJ Grisar 

[The Jewish newspaper Forward ran PJ Grisar’s article on the Tectonic verbatim play on its website on 23 April 2024.  Here There Are Blueberries should have special impact on a Jewish viewer, so I was especially interested in seeing what a Forward reporter would have to say.  Surprisingly, Grisar’s report isn’t terribly different from, say Pam Kragen’s above.]

Tectonic Theater Project’s ‘Here There Are Blueberries’ shows the SS enjoying life at Auschwitz

In 2006, Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, was paging through a newly submitted photo album from an anonymous donor. The album contained images from Auschwitz, but they were not what she expected.

“I was looking for things that I recognized,” said Erbelding, now the historian for the secondary education team at the museum. “I was looking for trains and prisoners and didn’t see any of that.”

Instead she saw officers picnicking, hunting and celebrating Christmas. The third time she sorted through the dusty pile of pages — many with water damage — she recognized a figure in an SS uniform, laughing, his hand tucked into his jacket. It was Josef Mengele. The image was the first photographic evidence placing the doctor at the camp where he committed his horrific experiments on prisoners.

Erbelding showed the pages to Judy Cohen, the director of the museum’s photographic collection. By the end of the day they had identified six or seven members of Nazi leadership.

The album, first owned by Karl Höcker, adjutant to Auschwitz’s third commandant Richard Baer, captures Nazi command and camp staff in their leisure. The pictures were not limited to the top brass. A series of photographs show young women auxiliaries [Helferinnen – literally, ‘female helpers’] sitting on the deck of the Solahütte, a riverside chalet about 20 miles from the barracks. A handwritten caption reads “Here there are blueberries,” and shows the women smiling and sampling the fruit while a man plays the accordion.

[SS-Helferinnen were female volunteers assigned as concentration camp administrative staff, typists, secretaries, and supply personnel.  They were SS employees, but not fully members of the Waffen-SS as the SS-Aufseherinnen (‘female overseers’), who served as camp guards (including at Auschwitz), were.]

As history, the album was invaluable. There are very few photographs of Auschwitz prior to the camp’s evacuation, and Höcker’s collection contains some of the last images of the camp before the arrival of the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945. But on receiving the Höcker album, museum staff debated whether to display the images, concerned that doing so might elevate Nazis or that these happy snapshots of the camp personnel committing no crimes might even fuel Holocaust denial.

In the end, the decision was made to share the photographs with the press and later the public, advancing the museum’s mission beyond victims to a consideration of the perpetrators and their experience.

Moisés Kaufman, co-founder of Tectonic Theater Project, known for documentary dramas like The Laramie Project, read about the photos on the front page [of the arts section] of The New York Times in September 2007, with a banner image of Höcker resting on the porch of Solahütte.

Kaufman, whose father survived the Shoah as a child in Romania, had long wanted to do a piece about the Holocaust, but struggled with how to tell a new story about it. 

“The images of these people just having a perfectly lovely day, when, outside of the frame, 1.1 million people are being killed, really struck me,” said Kaufman, whose play, Here There Are Blueberries, made its New York debut at New York Theatre Workshop April 17 [the first preview]. The photos posed big questions, like how could one enjoy blueberries outside of Auschwitz and, more searchingly, what is the difference between culpability, complicity and complacency?

When Kaufman and his co-writer Amanda Gronich interviewed Erbelding and her colleagues about receiving the photos, they discovered their archival process had the makings of a detective story they could recreate onstage. The play begins with a primer on the rise of Leica cameras and reveals how the democratized habit of photography paved the way for the images we see in the show — photos that Gronich said behave like scene partners for the cast of 10. 

The actors use dialogue taken from the playwrights’ interview transcripts and archival texts; the Nazis mostly appear in pictures. Erbelding is the central character in the play, working with her colleagues to piece together the faces she recognizes and, by the end, undermining claims that any of the people pictured were truly ignorant of the horrors to which they contributed. (Another album featured in the play, called the Lili Jacob album after the survivor who discovered it [aka: the Auschwitz Album], testifies to this; its images recording the selection of Hungarian Jews for extermination were taken by the same photographer of many of the images in the Höcker album.)

Gronich and Kaufman also interviewed descendants of people in the photographs, including Peter Wirths, the son of SS doctor Eduard Wirths, and Rainer Höss, the grandson of Auschwitz’s founding commandant Rudolf Höss. A number of the photos in the play show Höss’ garden and swimming pool near the camp, recreated in [the] Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.

[2023; directed by Jonathan Glazer, written by Glazer and Martin Amis; co-produced in German, Polish, and Yiddish by the United Kingdom, the United States, and Poland; nominated for five Oscars (including Best Picture), winning for Best International Feature and Best Sound, plus several other awards and nominations; loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis; the term “Zone of Interest” (Interessengebiet) was used by the Nazis to designate the area around Auschwitz reserved for the SS, created on the land confiscated around the camp; it was administered by the camp and patrolled by the SS, Gestapo, and local police.]

But while that film focuses on one family, Blueberries takes a broader view, Kaufman said. It doesn’t just highlight people like Höss, whose crimes were unambiguous, but also depicts the young women secretaries who, while maybe not culpable, were nonetheless complicit. Looking into the record, Gronich and Kaufman found that this complicity was not entered into with reluctance — many later recalled their tenure at Auschwitz as the best time of their lives. 

Kaufman, who has directed the play in La Jolla and Washington, D.C., said working on it is “traumatizing,” but that he is energized by the idea that the carousing pictured in the private album is something the Nazis would never want the world to see.

[Above, I called Here There Are Blueberries a “verbatim play.”  Verbatim theater is a form of documentary theater which is based on the spoken words of real people.  (See my post “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” on Rick On Theater on 9 October 2009; also the American Theatre series “On The Real: Documentary Theatre,” republished on ROT in five parts between 15 and 27 September 2017.  I write about “verbatim theater” in my article and Jules Odendahl-James discusses Moisés Kaufman in “A History of Documentary Theatre in Three Stages,” the first installment of “On The Real,” 15 September 2017.)

[Strictly speaking, a verbatim play such as Here There Are Blueberries is fashioned from words actually spoken by real people in real situations, and reproduced by actors in performance.  Most verbatim scripts are created by interviewing members of a community about a common topic or event to which they are all connected, recording these conversations, and using the resulting stories as the stimulus for the development of the performance.  This is the tactic of Tectonic’s The Laramie Project and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1994).  (I have a performance report on the blog for Fires on 12 December 2019.  I saw Laramie in 2000, but that predates the blog and my pre-ROT reports.)

[The verbatim play is different from the archival documentary, drawn from records and published texts.  The verbatim documentarist creates her or his own documents through interviews and then recreates the personages who’ve been affected by a local event. 

[Thus, while the characters of traditional archival documentary plays are historical figures or prominent people—Pope Pius XII (The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, 1963), Churchill (Hochhuth’s Soldiers, 1967), J. Robert Oppenheimer (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heinar Kipphardt, 1964)—the voices of the verbatim plays are mostly ordinary folks—the citizens of Laramie; the Delaney sisters (Having Our Say by Emily Mann, 1995); the people of Greensboro, North Carolina (Mann’s Greensboro: A Requiem, 1996)—whose testimony would otherwise have been unlikely to be noted.

[The archival documentary plays are, therefore, reexamining recorded history, while the verbatim plays are recording history that often hasn’t been documented yet.  If it weren’t for the plays, in a way, the events on which they’re based might be lost (The Laramie Project) or unrevealed (Here There Are Blueberries).

[There are more articles that cover the devising of Tectonic’s Here There Are Blueberries, several of them interviews with Kaufman and Gronich.  I’ll be posting them in the third installment of this series which will be coming up on Saturday, 1 June.  I hope you will return to Rick On Theater for that continuation, following which, I’ll be posting some of the critical reception of the productions.