SOURCE: Berghahn, Klaus L. “‘Our Auschwitz’: Peter Weiss's The Investigation Thirty Years Later.” In Rethinking Peter Weiss, edited by Jost Hermand and Marc Silberman, pp. 93-118. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

In the following essay, Berghahn regards The Investigation as “one of the best representations of the Holocaust for the stage” and chronicles the critical controversy surrounding the play.

A living man has come and what happened here hides itself from him.¹

Preface

My reflections on Peter Weiss are tinged with the subjective memories of how I received the message of the Holocaust. As was typical for my generation, I heard nothing about it in high school. The Holocaust was the best kept secret of postwar Germany until the German translation of The Diary of Anne Frank was published in 1955. I saw the theater production in 1956 and read the book afterwards, but the full extent of the Holocaust was...