" A Jew can be a great composer. He can be the toast of the town. But he can’t not be a Jew. In the end, if it doesn’t catch up on him, it will catch up on his children. Ordinary Jews understand this."
— Ludwig Jakobovicz
A 2020 play by Tom Stoppard about two intermarried Jewish families living in Vienna, with five acts split between 1899, 1924, 1938, and 1955.
This play provides examples of:
- Accents Aren't Hereditary: Played with. In the finale scene, none of the three remaining characters have the plain Austrian accents their family began with: instead, one speaks with a New York accent, one with an upper-class English accent, and the last with an Austrian accent that tilts towards New York whenever he speaks about his time in the States.
- All for Nothing: Hermann officially declares that Jacob is the result of Gretl's affair with Fritz and so legally not a Jew, which means he can still control the family business when the Nazis try to requisition it. This also results in Jacob being spared from the Holocaust — but he ends up committing suicide after the war, as he couldn't live with the guilt of surviving when practically everyone else in his family was murdered.
- All Germans Are Nazis: Or all Austrians, rather.Percy: When the paper sent me here, the man from The Times, said, ‘Percy, let’s go to Graz, there’s an NSP march.’ I said, ‘I thought the Nats were illegal here.’ ‘Oh, they are!’ So we went to Graz and saw twenty thousand National Socialists with swastika buttons marching through Graz, watched by delirious crowds and a few policemen. I said,… ‘What are the Austrians doing about this?’ ‘These are the Austrians,’ he said.
- Black Sheep: Leo. Where almost all of the rest of his family - unbeknownst to him - were Jewish and raised as such, he was raised Christian and English after he and his mother fled from Vienna in 1938 with her new, English husband. His second cousin, Nathan, who survived Auschwitz where his parents and siblings did not, is disdainful of his lack of familial knowledge.Leo: I turned out to be good at cricket... ended up getting my Blue.noteNathan: I don't think he's Jewish!
- Both Sides Have a Point: Percy Chamberlain clashes with several members of the family in 1938 when he keeps urging them to emigrate. Percy can tell that worse things are coming for the Jewish people in Austria very soon and is frustrated by the apparent apathy of the family. Eva retorts that any way out of the country costs exorbitant amounts of money, and to be allowed into another country you need to have family or a job waiting for you; besides which, she doesn't want to abandon Hermann's business and everything they have left, planning to endure in the hope things will get better.
- Cassandra Truth: During the first four acts there are three characters foretelling trouble for the Jewish community, with their fears dismissed. Ludwig counters Hermann's confidence in assimilation into Viennese culture, pointing out that antisemitism is still very present and is actually on the rise. Jacob sourly notes that the Jews get blamed for everything, particularly the outbreak and crushing defeat of WWI and the economy crashing. Percy struggles to get the family to understand that the Nazis have even worse things in store for the Jewish people. Finally in the fifth act, with the tragedy having fully struck, Leo protests that "it can't happen again," with Nathan understandably dubious.
- Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Nellie manages to escape Austria in 1938 with her son Leo, since marrying Percy Chamberlain grants them visas to England, but Leo reveals that she died in the Blitz a few years afterwards.
- Citizenship Marriage: Nellie and Percy are engaged and do genuinely love each other, but when the family are forced out of their home by the Nazis Percy tells Nellie they're going to marry the very next day, so that he can get her and Leo out of Austria while it's still possible.
- Clashing Cousins: Between Nathan, the Jewish Auschwitz survivor, and his second cousin Leo, who escaped Vienna in 1938 and thus was raised Christian and English and escaped the fate of his family in WWII.
- Converting for Love: Discussed. Hermann and Wilma are married to a non-Jewish Catholic and Protestant respectively, and their families celebrate Christmas and Jewish traditions alike. Later, at the end of her life, the Catholic Aunt Gretl finds herself pining for a synagogue.
- Cry Laughing: Nathan begins to laugh when Rosa says the United States let in ten thousand fewer refugees than their quota for Austrian Jews, which then deteriorates into wretched sobbing.Nathan: If you don't think that's funny, you're not close enough.
- Emasculated Cuckold: Hermann's Gentile wife, Gretl, cheats on him with an army officer. He is unable to do anything about it due to his lower-class status as a Jew.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: By the end of the play, and out of a family of twenty three people (that we see on stage), only Rosa, Nathan and Leo survive to meet again in 1955. Pauli is killed in WWI, Emilia dies of old age, Aaron dies during the Austrian Civil War and Gretl succumbs to a brain tumour, while the rest perish either in the fallout of the Anschluss, the Blitz or during the Holocaust; Rosa and Nathan even run down a list of who died when and where.
- Everyone Is Christian at Christmas: The play opens on a scene of the family celebrating Christmas. Though Emilia, the family matriarch, is Jewish, her eldest son Hermann has married a Catholic woman, and her daughter's husband'snote sister has married a Protestant. Includes jokes about Hermann and Gretl's son, Jacob, being baptised and circumcised in the same week, and one of the grandchildren putting a Star of David atop of the Christmas tree.Grandma Emilia: I don’t mind Christmas because baby Jesus had no idea what was going on, but I feel funny about Easter eggs.
- Family Business: One of the principal characters, Hermann, owns a textile business, and come the Anschluss he is so desperate not to let it fall into Nazi hands that he lies that Jacob is not actually his biological son but the product of Gretl's affair, so he can still take control of the business even when it's stripped from the legally Jewish owners.
- Foreshadowing: Hermine asks Rosa, who's over from New York on a visit, if she can take her back to America. Rosa says of course — as long as Hermine has a medical degree and a job waiting for her; calling forward to the difficulties the family face in trying to emigrate when the Nazi persecution really begins.
- Germanic Efficiency: When detailing how his Aunt Gretl's painting was stolen during the Anschluss, Nathan says how the Viennese citizens forced their way into Jewish homes and stole and smashed anything that caught their eye, spitting and calling them filthy names but the Germans put a stop to that after a week or two in order to more efficiently rob and terrorize them.Nathan: It was too anarchic for them. They wanted to rob us in an organized way.
- Gratuitous German: Only used between the Austrian-raised Nathan and Rosa in Act 5 in front of their English-raised cousin/grandnephew Leo - implied to be the only time in the show the characters are speaking English.Nathan: Kannst du das glauben?note
- Hereditary Suicide: Hermann commits suicide in 1938, his son Jacob in 1945.Nathan: You wanted to know why Jacob killed himself. It was because he didn’t think he deserved to be saved when so many died.
- Identical Grandson: Due to
Acting for Two (and depending on the production) Nathan is identical to his great-uncle, Ludwig. - I Have No Son!: Played with. Hermann has his son, Jacob, declared as the product of an affair between his Catholic wife, Gretl, and a Gentile army officer she had an affair with years after his birth so he won't be legally Jewish and the Nazis won't be able to have the family business requisitioned from him.
- Irony: Hermann converted to Catholicism to marry the gentile Gretl and be accepted in Viennese high society, but she ends up far more invested in Jewish traditions than most of the actual Jewish people in her extended family, she longs for a synagogue and wants to learn Hebrew in her old age and dementia even though the Nazis treat her with deference, and it's her portrait that is stolen by the Nazis and which Rosa is fighting to see returned to the last remnants of the family after the Holocaust.
- Israel: Arguments about, at least.Ludwig: The only welcome Theodor Herzl‘s little book received was in the anti-semitic press. A state for the Jews? Good idea! Get them out of here! ...The Empire is made up of so many peoples you couldn’t remember them all, but you left out the Jews, the only people without a territory. So when someone comes along and says, 'We lost our territory but we can have it again, a country where we’re not on sufferance, where we can be what we once were…
- Jewish and Nerdy:
- One of the main characters, Ludwig, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, and is obsessed with number theory, particularly solving the Riemann Hypothesis.Ludwig: If I went to sleep for a hundred years, the first thing I'd ask when I woke up is, 'Has Riemann been proved?'
Hermann: Why?
Ludwig: Because if it has, I can state with certainty how may prime numbers exist below a given number however high; and if it hasn't, I can't. Not without certainty.
Hermann: That is a very annoying answer. - His sister's grandson, Nathan, also picks up the same aptitude for mathematics.Nathan: I'm still playing cat's cradle, only I call it dynamical systems.
- One of the main characters, Ludwig, is a professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna, and is obsessed with number theory, particularly solving the Riemann Hypothesis.
- Jews Love to Argue: Much of the first scene at Christmastime is spent focusing on an ongoing argument between the brothers-in-law Ludwig and Hermann.
- Not Actually His Child: Played for somewhat dark laughs; Hermann reveals that he's got a signed affidavit from Gretl and (presumably) Fritz to declare that Jacob is really the product of their affair and thus fully not Jewish. Ernst, whom he's revealing this to, points out that the affair began several years after Jacob was born; Hermann admits that he had to pay the other man quite a hefty sum, and plenty of up and coming men are frantically producing proof that their apparent fathers were actually cuckolded.
- Mercy Kill: It's heavily implied that Ernst administers a lethal injection to the seriously ill Wilma, to spare her being forcibly sent by the Nazis to a hospital where she'll likely be killed anyway.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: There is much tension between Ludwig and Hermann in the opening act.
- Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: As life starts getting worse and worse for the Jewish people in Austria, some members of the family try to find ways to get out of the country, but they're hamstrung by the immigration policies of other countries. It's hammered home how the refusal to accept refugees contributed to the final death toll of the Holocaust. Percy Chamberlain attends a conference of countries who decide they can't take any more Jewish people in; Ernst mentions that England is taking in immigrants who are willing to become servants or valets; Nellie and Leo only manage to get out thanks to Nellie marrying Percy; Rosa, who emigrated to New York in the 1920s, worked desperately to get visas for her family which were only granted just as the war broke out, and in 1955 she reveals to Nathan and Leo that the USA took in ten thousand fewer refugees than they had promised.
- Plot Parallel: During the 1938 segment, Sally reads to the children from a book of fairy tales and snippets of The Six Swans can be heard. The fairy tale mirrors several aspects of the Merz/Jakobovicz family:
- In The Six Swans, a princess and her brothers are reunited after years apart. Nathan and Rosa are reunited with Leo after WWII and the Holocaust keep them apart.
- The princess of The Six Swans is able to free her brothers from a curse by sewing shirts out of asters (or stinging nettles in some retellings). The Merz family made their fortune in the textile business.
- At the end of the fairy tale, the princess is able to complete all six aster shirts except one, which is left with an incomplete sleeve. One of her brothers still has a swan's wing instead of an arm when he turns back into a human. Jacob Merz lost his arm in WWI.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The disappearance/theft of Gretl's portrait during the Anschluss and Rosa's attempts to get it back mirror the controversy surrounding the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
, up to and including rumors about the sitter's infidelity, the work being renamed and displayed in public, and the descendant's attempts to recover the work. - Shed the Family Name: Leo's mother changes his name from Leopold Rosenbaum to Leonard Chamberlain after fleeing to England from Austria, so he wouldn't go to school with a German - and therefore Jewish - name.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Jacob in 1924, left without his left arm after the Great War.
- Significant Double Casting: Out of a cast of thirty six characters, only a few are double cast to pack a specific punch, depending on which combination the production goes with:
- Fritz, the non-Jewish and antisemitic cavalry officer whom Gretl has an affair with / Leopold Rosenbaum/Leonard Chamberlain, who was brought up Christian from the age of eight and has little to no memory of his Jewish childhood (both original production and Broadway)
- Jacob Merz, who survives WWI but loses an eye and an arm, is thoroughly disillusioned with Austria, its politics and antisemitism, and who escapes the Holocaust by being legally designated a Gentile only to commit suicide out of Survivor's Guilt / Nathan Fischbein, who survives the Holocaust but is forever traumatised by the deaths of almost his entire family and is thoroughly disillusioned with how, in the years after WWII, Austria is swiftly absolved of its compliance with Nazi Germany (original production)
- Jacob / Percy Chamberlain, Nellie's second husband, who strongly encourages the family to emigrate and is frustrated at their seeming lack of effort in trying to escape Austria, and is somewhat complicit in his wife's erasure of Leo's Jewish identity (Broadway)
- Ludwig Jakobovicz, who argues with Hermann about Jewish assimilation and holds no illusions about what might be in store for the Austrian Jews /Nathan (Broadway)
- Wilma Jakobovicz Kloster, who opens the play musing about past family members lost to time / Rosa Kloster, Wilma's daughter, who closes the play by reciting a list of her murdered family (Broadway).
- Status Quo Is God: Played with.Nathan:Demel has coffee and cakes again, Fidelio will be the first performance at the new opera house, and conducted by an ex-Nazi.
- Survivor's Guilt: Jacob survived the Holocaust since he was legally a Gentile, but committed suicide in 1945 because he didn't feel he deserved to have been saved.
- Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Leo, now aged 25, has repressed all memories of his family's terror at the hands of the Nazis.Nathan: No one is born eight years old. Leonard Chamberlain’s life is Leo Rosenbaum’s life continued. His family is your family. But you live as if without history, as if you throw no shadow behind you.
- Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Stoppard based his story on his own experience of learning what happened to his family in the Holocaust. The characters in the play are fictional as Stoppard's relatives were from Czechoslovakia rather than Austria and were non-practising, but his childhood was similar to Leopold/Leonard's; he was born Tomáš Sträussler, his parents emigrated to Singapore with him and his brother on the day the Nazis invaded the country, and his birth father died when the Japanese attacked Singapore. His mother later remarried an English man and they moved to England, where Stoppard was raised with little to no idea of his heritage or what had befallen his parents' families. He didn't learn the truth until he was in his fifties, when the Soviet Union collapsed and his cousins in Eastern European were able to contact him.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: At the end of the show Nathan, Rosa, and Leo stand together in the apartment, reviewing the family tree Rosa has written up for Leo (who can barely remember his life before England). Leo asks what happened to each of their relatives; Rosa and Nathan list how how everyone died.
