Holocaust literature—poetry, prose and drama—generally falls into one of two ideologically oriented interpretative categories.  The first position is the particularistic stance.  This point of view, championed by writers such as Elie Wiesel and Cynthia Ozick, maintains that the Holocaust is qualitatively and quantitatively a unique event without precedent or parallel.  Adherents of the particularistic perspective question the propriety of most artistic representations.  Lawrence Langer, Alvin Rosenfeld, Sidra Ezrahi, and Nora Levin have argued that such efforts tend to simplify and reduce the magnitude of the occurrence.  They are particularly distressed by artists who deny the specificity of Jewish suffering, treat the Holocaust as a symbolic metaphor for Western society and who, in the words of Nora Levin, "pander to the craving for the sadistic, the pornographic, sentimental, grotesque, even the comic, in the abuse of ... history."1

     The second interpretative stance regarding the Holocaust is the universalistic position.  It has been delineated by Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, and George Steiner, and forms the philosophical underpinnings for dramatic works by C.P. Taylor, Peter Barnes, George Tabori, and Martin Sherman.  Proponents of the universalistic perspective assert that the Holocaust was indeed a horrific historical catastrophe, but it nevertheless remains within the continuum of the Western tradition.  Therefore it is not only appropriate, it is necessary to seek analogies, utilize metaphors, and derive symbolism in order to understand and transmit the universal qualities of the event.

     Arthur Miller is perhaps the foremost spokesman for a universalistic and humanistic interpretation of the Holocaust. He places the event within the cultural and historical continuum of Western history by utilizing conventional dramaturgical models.  He has examined the ethical ramifications of the Holocaust in four plays, one screenplay, one novel, and has addressed the issue in his autobiography.  The novel, Focus, published in 1945, deals obliquely with the subject in its exploration of anti-semitism and the attraction of fascism in the borough of Queens during the final days of the Second World War.  After the Fall,produced in 1964, presents a contemporary Everyman haunted by images of concentration camps whose salvation awaits in a woman who fought the Nazis.  Incident at Vichy, also written and produced in 1964, is the story of a group of Jews waiting to be interrogated by Nazis.  Playing for Time, aired on television in 1980 and later adapted for the stage, is about a woman who survives Auschwitz because she is a member of the concentration camp orchestra.  In the introduction to the second volume of his collected plays, Miller also suggests "an echo of the theme" in The Creation of the World, and Other Business "where the dilemma for God Himself is his inabilities to determine his own responsibility for the indifference to murder in the minds of his most gratifyingly successful creature."2   In 1994, Miller returned to the topic of the Holocaust in his latest play, Broken Glass.  In this play, set in New City in 1938, a woman becomes so obsessed with reports of atrocities in Germany that she suffers psychosomatic paralysis.

     The similarities between these works go beyond their correspondence in subject matter.  Miller employs a recurrent thematic approach to champion a universalistic interpretation of the historical event.  The five plays and one novel form a unified philosophic and structural paradigm that continues to be emulated by British and American playwrights.

     An intellectual heir of the socialism and idealism of the 1930s, Miller embraces both an existential and teleological view of the world.  He believes the Holocaust has both historical importance and contemporary relevance.  He is not interested in the historical narrative of the Holocaust per se.  He does not seek to shed light on unknown details or to address the political repercussions of the event as was the case with Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy or Martin Sherman's Bent.  Instead, Miller is concerned with the ethical issues confronting an individual in the face of monolithic power.  He explores the possibility for 'authentic' action when there is little recourse, and even less hope.
 Miller examines the pathology of barbaric group behavior and innate prejudice in his novel Focus (1945).  The book identifies the parallels between American hate groups and German Nazism while demonstrating the seductive methodology of fascism.  The novel begins with the awakening of its hero, a gentile, whose sleep has been disturbed by the cries of a woman seeking help.  He refuses, however, to aid the woman because she looks Puerto Rican.  The protagonist, Newman, however, is then mistakenly identified as a Jew and proceeds to lose his job.  In a memorable scene the gentile-mistaken-for-a-Jew watches a newsreel about Nazi atrocities in Europe.  He sympathizes with the plight of the Jews and finally begins to understand the universal character of evil.  The novel comes full circle when he is beaten by fascists on the same street where he had ignored the cries of the Puerto Rican woman.

     The central character's failure to take action against evil in front of his own home and his collusion with it at work allows it to grow until it eventually swallows him up.  At the end of the book, Newman—beaten and bloody—identifies himself to the police as a Jew.  This act of self-definition commits Newman to actively confronting the terror that had always been around him, but which he had previously ignored.  The themes articulated in Focus—identifying with the victim, the universal character of evil, and the need for responsible individual action—will resonate throughout all the plays of Arthur Miller and will be particularly central in his works about the Holocaust.

     Although Miller did not write a play about the Holocaust during the 1950s, he evidently considered how it could be done.  In a 1958 interview published in Harpers he voiced reservations about the Goodrich & Hackett dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank.  He criticized the play primarily for its upbeat reassuring message.  His comments are reminiscent of the ending of Focus and provide insight into an attitude he would articulate more fully in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy:
 

What was necessary in this play to break the hold of reassurance upon the audience, and to make it match the truth of life, was that we should see bestiality in our own hearts, so that we should know how we are brothers not only to these victims but to the Nazis, so that the ultimate terror of our lives should be faced—namely our own sadism, our own ability to obey orders from above, our own fear of standing firm on humane principle against the obscene power of mass organization.3

     Miller was deeply troubled by what he had witnessed at the Frankfurt trial and struggled to put it into perspective.  He refused to accept the ineffability of Auschwitz and wanted to believe it was not the culmination of Western culture: "Maybe the past really had been severed and the avant-garde was right.  Even so, I had to search out continuity.  One had to explain all this so people could understand it and not do it again."6

     Upon returning to America, Miller wrote quickly After the Fall and Incident at Vichy.  After the Fall, Miller's first attempt to dramatize the ethical issues surrounding the Holocaust, has little or nothing to do with the historical event.  The Holocaust, reduced to the level of a metaphor, literally hovers over the action.  The directions for the set designer are explicit:  "dominating the stage, is the blasted stone tower of a German concentration camp."7  The Holocaust imagery is used to convey symbolically the suffering and self-absorption of the protagonist.  By imposing the Holocaust upon the subject matter, Miller seeks to turn a Strindbergesque tale of marital failure and self-destruction into a universal morality play about individual responsibility.  In Timbends, he asserts that the play is "about how we—nations and individuals—destroy ourselves by denying that this is precisely what we are doing."8   Miller repeats the dramaturgical strategy of After The Fall thirty years later in Broken Glass (1994) when he attempts to meld the horror of Kristallnacht with the breakdown of a marriage.

      Miller suggests a new metaphysics in After the Fall that combines the concepts of original sin with the Judaic ideal of deeds.  In this system of thought the inherently flawed character of man creates a universal brotherhood predicated upon responsible action rather than amorphous love.  At the end of After the Fall Quentin comes to accept this viewpoint, when looking up at the concentration camp tower, he wonders: "Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?  I tell you what I know!  My brothers died here."  He then looks at the prostrated figure of Maggie and adds, "but my brothers built this place; our hearts have cut these stones!"9

     After the Falladdresses the ethical ramifications of the Holocaust by utilizing a contemporary situation that Miller believes has moral correlations to the historical event.  Incident At Vichy, written in a three-week creative spurt, is a conventional historical drama that seeks to recreate the past through a contemporary prism.  But when Miller wrote Incident at Vichy in 1964, he was no longer a detached observer of the intellectual debate.  After his article in The Herald Tribuneand his symbolic usage of the Holocaust in After the Fall, he was now a full participant in the vitriolic discourse and was firmly identified with the Bettelheim/Arendt/McCarthy camp.  Incident at Vichy, quite predictably, reflected Miller's biases and predilections.  He created an artificial scenario in the play that manipulated the historical record to support the universalistic interpretation of the Holocaust.

     The narrative structure of Incident at Vichyfollows the pattern of a conventional melodrama.  At some point in 1942, a German professor from an institute of racial purity and a Major from the German Army are sent to Vichy, France in order to identify Jews and to facilitate their deportation to Auschwitz.  The professor and the reluctant Major are assisted by a sadistic Captain from the French police and his two brutal detectives.  The method employed for finding Jews is simple and crude; police cars are dispatched through the streets of Vichy in search of men with semitic features.  Apprehended individuals are brought to a nondescript building where their papers and genitalia are checked.  Those 'proven' to be either Jews or Gypsies, regardless of citizenship, are taken to the waiting boxcars. Those who can prove their racial purity are issued a safe conduct pass and are immediately released.

     The action of the play occurs in the highly charged atmosphere of the prisoners' waiting area.  The arrested include one French gentile, six French Jews, a Gypsy, a bearded Jew from Eastern Europe, and an Austrian nobleman.  The dramatic tension increases in the holding area as the prisoners are processed.  Terror creeps upon the Jews as the desperation of their shared plight becomes apparent.

     The dramatic climax of the piece occurs when Von Berg, the Austrian prince, performs a tragic act of self-sacrifice.  Von Berg gives his document of safe passage to the French Jew, Leduc, who otherwise will be sent to Auschwitz.  Leduc takes the pass from the Austrian and escapes with the knowledge that he can only expurgate his guilt of survival through socially responsible action in the future.

     The scenario of Incident at Vichyis based upon the premise that all Jews, foreign or French, were equally at risk for deportation to Auschwitz in 1942.  Throughout all of 1942, 1943, and up until April of 1944, however, Jews with French citizenship, who were not Communists and who did not join or associate with the Resistance, were, in almost all instances, protected from deportation by the Vichy authorities.  The French sacrificed stateless foreign Jews to the Nazis in order to protect her own citizens.10

     Arthur Miller's play about Vichy France in 1942 bears little relation to the historical model.  The events represented in the drama never occurred, and never could have occurred.  The only Jew at risk in the play, from a historical perspective, would have been the bearded Hasid because presumably he was not a French citizen.  All the others, and particularly the protagonist Leduc—a war veteran—would have been protected by Vichy/Nazi agreements.  These agreements remained in force until April 14, 1944, at which time the Nazis demanded that all Jews, regardless of nationality, be delivered for shipment to the east.  At this point, however, the situation in France was disintegrating, with the Resistance gaining strength and the Vichy regime crumbling:  A situation quite different from that suggested in Miller's play.

     Miller reacted angrily when such historical inconsistencies in the play were pointed out to him.  He dismissed such incongruities as minor and of little importance asserting that artistic truth needed to be differentiated and liberated from reportage:

Well a worship of fact—by fact I mean the crudest sense—is always an obstruction if one is looking for the truth.  There's a difference between the facts and the truth; the truth is a synthesis of facts.  We now see the reflection of a technological age where facts are king.11

     Early in the play the painter Lebeau relates that "in 1939 I had an American visa.... I actually had it in my hand."12   But he fails to use it because "my mother wouldn't leave the furniture.  I'm here because of a brass bed and some fourth-rate crockery.  And a stubborn, ignorant woman"(6).  Miller, however, fails to explain why Lebeau, apparently a French citizen, would have sought such a visa in the first place.  Evidently Lebeau should have known that Germany was going to invade France, that the French army would prove totally ineffectual, that England would suffer the debacle of Dunkirk, and that the Nazis would embark upon a policy of total genocide.  The playwright, enjoying the benefit of historical hindsight, implicates Lebeau in his own fate:
 

...I used to say to my mother and father just what you're saying.  We could have come to America a month before the invasion.  But they wouldn't leave Paris.  She had this brass bed, and carpets and draperies and all kinds of junk... And I told them, "You're doing just what they want you to do!" But, see, people won't believe they can be killed.  Not them with their brass bed and their carpets and their faces (50).

     The Jews in Incident at Vichyare assimilated to the point that they have no Jewish identity whatsoever.  God is never mentioned in the play, nor are Jewish traditions and customs ever referred to.  The only discussion of religion takes place towards the end of the piece when Leduc confronts the Austrian prince.  Leduc's argument, however, reduces the Jewish religion to an existential precept.  In a speech that is taken almost verbatim from Sartre's Antisemite and Jew, Leduc asserts: 13
 

Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else.  And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold abstraction.  Each man has his Jew; it is the other.  And the Jews have their Jews.  And now, now above all, you must see that you have yours—the man whose death leaves you relieved that you are not him, despite your decency.  And that is why there is nothing and will be nothing—until you face your own complicity with this...your own humanity (51).
 

     Fania Fenelon had been a successful chanteuse before the outbreak of the war.  During the occupation of Paris she sang for the German soldiers while clandestinely working as a courier for the Resistance.  In 1943 she was arrested and sent to the French concentration camp at Drancy where she languished for almost a year.  In the spring of 1944 she was deported with many thousands of other French Jews to Auschwitz.  Coincidental to her arrival at the concentration camp, the female orchestra was in need of a singer, and Fenelon was recognized by someone who had heard her sing in Paris.  Fenelon went on to become the orchestrator for the group and surreptitiously kept a record of her observations.  Fenelon's memoirs provides information about the day-to-day operation of the orchestra, the way the Nazis interacted with the musicians, the relationship of the orchestra members to the other prisoners, and numerous other details about life in the concentration camp.  The memoir is a historical document of immense importance that, like the work of Tadeusz Borowski, Primo Levi, and Viktor Frankl, provides an articulate well-detailed firsthand account of life at Auschwitz.

     A comparison between Fenelon's writing and Miller's adaptation is quite fascinating.  It shows the seams of Miller's craft and the centrality of his interpretative stance.  Miller consciously sets out to create an existential heroine who maintains her dignity and free will in dire circumstances.  Miller makes significant changes in Fenelon's narrative in order to magnify the dramatic aspects of her experience.  For example, Fenelon tells us in her memoirs that within twenty-four hours upon her arrival at Auschwitz she was placed in the barracks of the orchestra.  She asserts that this course of events saved her life because after the trauma of the boxcar trip she was not physically or emotionally prepared for the brutality of slave labor or the general conditions in the camp.15  Miller, however, makes a major point in his screenplay to demonstrate that Fenelon was a 'normal' prisoner who suffered all the indignities and harshness that daily life at Auschwitz had to offer:

As Fania talks, slowly fade to a double exposure of Fania and Marianne.  Snow falls over the image of the two women in their bunk; a forest; now spring comes; flowers appear and green grass; brook ice melts—always over the image of Fania and Marianne dragging stones, carrying wood, digging drainage ditches ... And finally, once again, in their bunk ... Both are haggard now, with the half-starved look of other prisoners.16

     Perhaps the most interesting deviation in the screenplay from the memoirs is the creation of the fictional character Shmuel.  Shmuel serves a narrative function and provides a symbolic presence.  He is a Jewish prisoner from the men's camp who works as a handyman in the women's sector.  In this capacity he repeatedly comes into contact with Fenelon and urges her to bear witness to both God and man.  Shmuel is a mystical figure with long antecedents in Holocaust and Hasidic literature.  Like the character of Moché the Beadle in Elie Wiesel's Night or Ernie in André Schwarz Bart's The Last of the Just, Shmuel has a transcendent quality that suggests prophetic powers.  He mysteriously appears five times during the course of the movie, and at the end, he leads a British soldier to where Fenelon lies near death.  The recurring presence of Shmuel adds a poetic element to the piece and links it to Miller's earlier work The Creation of the World, and Other Business.  Shmuel provides the connection between man and God.  He is the Lord's designated representative at Auschwitz.  God, however, is absent and, as Shmuel tells Fenelon, the surviving prisoners have to "look and see everything, so you can tell Him when it is over" (480).  Fenelon, however, tells Shmuel that she is an atheist, but he says that it does not matter, "I always know who to pick" (480).

    Miller never had much patience for proponents of the particularlist perspective.  In Timebends he asserts that their parochial rhetoric had muted open discussion: "Important though it may be to memorialize the Holocaust lest it fade away, its built-in human causation remained largely unexplored terrain for most people, who continued to nurture their fear of tribes and persuasions other than their own like something sacred."17   He asserts that crucial lessons have been lost and forgotten because of the intimidating clamor of certain commentators.  He uses the screenplay of Playing for Time to reiterate his philosophical position regarding the event and to blast the particularlist critics of his earlier work:

Oh, Esther, why don't you just shut up?  I am sick of the Zionists-and-the-Marxists; the Jews-and-the-Germans; the Easterners-and-the-Westerners; the Germans-and-the- non-Germans; the French-and-the-non-French.  I am sick of it, sick of it!  I am a woman, not a tribe!  And I am humiliated!  That is all I know! (492)

...I’ll tell you a secret—I have all kinds come into my office, and there’s not one of them who one way or another is not persecuted.  Yes.  Everybody’s persecuted.  The poor by the rich, the rich by the poor, the black by the white, the white by the black, the men by the women, the women by the men, the Catholics by the Protestants, the Protestants by the Catholics—and of course all of them by the Jews.  Everybody’s persecuted—sometimes I wonder, maybe that’s what holds this country together!18