We sat down for an exclusive interview with Charlotte Pickering, writer of Kittel: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich.
This show runs from 23-24th January at Unity Theatre, Liverpool – Tickets here.
KITTEL tells a real historical story, but you frame it as a Faustian deal with the devil. Why was that theatrical lens important for reaching contemporary audiences?
As soon as I started thinking about Kittel’s spectacular fall from grace, I realised that he was the real-life Doktor Faustus.
Today’s audience has a sophisticated understanding of human psychology that makes it receptive to the Faustian deal with the devil.
In previous times, human evil was framed in religious terms such as the Fall of Man, temptation, the devil, and sin. By the end of the twentieth century, the Freudian idea of the human shadow, as popularised in novels such as Jekyll and Hyde and Frankenstein and the non-fictional writings of Carl Jung, Erich Fromm and Hannah Arendt, was embedded in our self-understanding. Twenty-first-century people have even greater scientific understanding and articulacy to frame aberrant thinking and behaviour in terms of, for example, compulsion, addiction and obsession. This moves the modern person’s appreciation beyond the more limited conception of human error as sin. So, I think that Gerhard Kittel’s spectacular moral collapse is one which the modern viewer will appreciate, potentially, on a number of levels: as a product of his time, his place, his ideology, other people’s ideology, his psychological makeup… There are many ways in which the human shadow can be articulated. Perpetual damnation for Kittel, remember, is not the fires of Hell (a construct the modern person probably refutes, anyway). For him, perpetual damnation is being forgotten, being erased from history, from the theological canon. It is shame and disgrace. The modern person gets that, I think.
How do you find the balance between the seriousness of the themes and the need to make the show entertaining for audiences?
This is a clever question. Goethe and Marlowe recognised the need to light relief in their interpretations of the Faust legend. Rather like Shakespeare’s drunken Porter interfaces the terrible events (regicide, infanticide, suicide) catalogued in Macbeth, so clowns and daft peasants feature there. Humour is an important moral signpost in even the most tragic drama and is certainly deployed in KITTEL.
Tell us about the research that went into the play?
The story is inspired by a real-life, historical figure. Quite by chance, I came across Robert P Eriksen’s research into Gerhard Kittel. Eriksen was picking up the trail from German researcher Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz. Leonore’s research into Kittel was crushed by post-WW2 German academia. Hers is a key voice in the play.
KITTEL is the result of extensive background research into the intellectual history of WW1 and WW2, German antisemitism, and the Holocaust. I also looked at the historiography of German theology and German 19th and 20th century politics. I spent many hours thinking and writing in the Liverpool Hope University Library, and in the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. I travelled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, as well as archives in Tübingen and Cuxhaven, to look at documents — letters, memos, papers. Many of the digital resources came from the DNB (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek). The primary sources are Kittel’s own writings. Several of the original editions — which I own because buying them was the easiest and cheapest way of accessing them — are props in the stage show.
When representing real-life characters, how do you decide what to portray and what to leave out?
As with plays of this type (Bolt’s “Man for All Seasons” and Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, for instance) the coordinates of the story are historical facts. In the fictive mapping of these facts, the human tragedy that emerges is a function of authorial imagination and deep reflection.
You’ve described the play as a warning for “our own time”. What conversations do you hope audiences have as they leave the theatre?
The lessons to be drawn from Gerhard Kittel’s story transcend antisemitism. One key parallel between the 1920s and today that the play brings out concerns narratives. Today, just as in the period after WW1, originally extremist views are becoming increasingly mainstream until they are no longer questioned at all. KITTEL is a historical play, not a political manifesto, but its relevance for the present cannot be overstated.