“The Grey and the Coloured Truth”: Memory and Post-memory in George Tabori’s Holocaust Plays

The essay discusses George Tabori's plays The Cannibals and My Mother's Courage as works of post-memory, works that mediate memories of Tabori's parents' experience of the Holocaust through imaginative investment and creation. Referring to Tabori's notion of lying as an imaginative and subversive act, the discussion focuses on the representation of his mother and father in these plays and on the aesthetic and dramaturgical choices through which their experience is mediated. Tabori reimagines his parents as heroes but situates this idealized representation within a context that represents processes of memory as unreliable and difficult. He deliberately employs his parents' experiences in order to subvert prescribed feelings and attitudes towards Holocaust commemoration and to create a space that enables the attempted therapeutic of memory work.