Leopoldstadt Invites Memory
From the lens of a multigenerational family of bourgeois Jews in Vienna, Austria, Leopoldstadt provides an intimate examination of the horrors of the Holocaust and invites viewers to engage in historical memory.
Photo Courtesy of Liza Voll
Leopoldstadt
Written by Tom Stoppard
Directed by Carey Perloff
Produced in association with Shakespeare Theatre Company
The Huntington Theatre (264 Huntington Ave. Boston, MA 02115)
September 12 – October 13, 2024
The play Leopoldstadt is the story of a multigenerational family of highly educated, bourgeois Jews in Vienna, Austria. A talented cast delivered a beautifully acted and emotionally resonant performance at the Huntington Theatre. The play is segmented into five acts, each representing a different year: 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938, and 1955. Leopoldstadt gives due attention to the horrors of the Nazis’ rise and the Holocaust, while also expanding the timeline of Jewish history beyond narratives that exclusively center the Shoah. The story begins in the Merz family home, an elegantly furnished space made vibrant by three generations coming together to celebrate Christmas as a cosmopolitan, wealthy, and intermarried Jewish family. Playwright Tom Stoppard, whose Leopoldstadt is not autobiographical but reflects aspects of his own family’s history, holds the setting constant while letting time pass. The family home, once the site of domestic pleasures and rich family ties, becomes the backdrop to political changes and violence that eventually break into this most intimate of spaces.
Depicting a family of more than a dozen members, Stoppard focuses more on the relationships and dialogues among family rather than individual personalities. The breaking of these kinship ties personifies the unfathomable scale of pogroms, the Anschluss, and the Holocaust as ominous signs and absences haunting earlier scenes of the family laughing at Christmas and Seder, children playing cats cradle, and adults discussing math and politics.
Premiered in 2020, Leopoldstadt shown today in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict brings up complex questions regarding historical memory and what the responsibility of “never again” demands. The play faithfully portrays the horrors of genocide, its elimination of entire family lines and the burden of trauma and at times, guilt, of those who survive. At the same time, Leopoldstadt makes an implicit argument that the state of Israel is an inevitable historical progression from centuries of antisemitism and Jewish statelessness, and made necessary by the Shoah.
Leopoldstadt invites the audience to tie together the central issue of Jews’ lack of full citizenship in Europe with Zionism. In the first act set in 1899, one of the Merz patriarchs lambasts Theodor Herzl’s newly published treatise, the foundation of modern Zionism. Rejecting Herzl, the father proudly asserts his Austrian identity, confident in his social status among Vienna’s bourgeois. The audience, with the advantage of foresight of the Holocaust to come, thus waits with bated breath for the Merz family to abandon their faith in Austrian citizenship and society. They silently urge the Merzs to leave as the Anschluss—Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938—takes place and things worsen. The father seems naive in his affirmation of his claims to Austria, vowing that Vienna is his home and urging his family to forget the “Judenstaat nonsense.” The play’s building tension culminates in him being proven wrong in the most fatal way.
Much of the play before the Anschluss focuses on the paradox of how integral Jews were to European intellectual life and society, yet how anti-Semitism still excluded them from full social and civil equality. The Merz family, contributing to Viennese intellectual life, conducts both baptisms and brises on their children. In the eyes of the Austrian state, they are as close to ideal Jewish citizens as one could get. The Merz family affirms their place in Vienna, the city where “Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven overlapped, and Brahms used to come to our house,” and not “the desert,” referring to Palestine. Yet, no amount of integration and societal contribution could overcome what the play presents as the historical determinacy of European denial of Jewish belonging. Leopoldstadt implicitly argues that Jews were wrong to ever claim Austria, and perhaps Europe more broadly, as home.
Leopoldstadt leaves the viewer with the heaviness of the Shoah, inviting the audience to engage with the imperatives of historical memory, critically needed today. However, the play’s framing also encourages adoption of a view that there is no real home for Jews outside of a designated Jewish state, a perspective bolstered by the historical realities of the Shoah. Leopoldstadt portrays the Merz family’s integral contributions to 19th and early 20th century Vienna as misplaced and naive feelings of belonging overshadowed by a longer, more dominant historical trajectory of European anti-Semitism. Stoppard’s play thus downplays the ways in which Jewish families did indeed make full homes of and rightfully asserted their claims to places they lived in before and beyond the state of Israel.