GERMANY: The Eloquence of Silence

As opening night approached, theater directors became more and more uneasy. How would German audiences react to the Pulitzer Prizewinning Broadway hit, The Diary of Anne Frank? What would they feel about the nerve-rasping true story of the teen-age Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis for two wartime years in a cramped attic in German-occupied Amsterdam, was finally captured and killed in a concentration camp? When Germans at war’s end saw actual movies of concentration camp horrors, they greeted the films with skepticism and derision. Would they jeer Anne Frank off the stage? One night last week, in a mass premiere, the curtains of seven major theaters in seven German cities rose on Anne Frank. At West Berlin’s Schlosspark Theater, a packed opening climaxed the city’s Cultural Festival. At the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf in the rich Ruhr, the elegant opening drew a crowd in black tie and bare shoulders. Other theaters—in Hamburg, Karlsruhe. Konstanz, Aachen and East Germany’s Dresden—were jammed.

In all seven theaters, once the curtain rose, a dead silence blanketed the audience. In each case what happened on the stage was merely a play within a play: the true drama took place in the orchestras, balconies and boxes. After a couple of hours the curtains came down with the voice of the dead girl saying, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart,” and her father, who had been bitter, slowly closing her diary and saying, “She puts me to shame.”

At that moment, with the curtain down, an extraordinary thing happened. The audiences, which had sat through the performances in what appeared to be a shocked silence, sat on in silence, without applauding. The elegant Düsseldorf audience filed out quietly, many moist-eyed and with smeared face powder and rouge. U.S. Actors’ Coach Paula Strasberg, mother of Susan Strasberg. who created the Anne Frank role on Broadway, described what happened in Berlin: “After the curtain fell there was a deep, dark silence. Not a sound. It seemed to me the people weren’t even breathing. It lasted minutes but seemed interminable. Then a thousand human beings arose and left the theater. And still there was not a sound. I felt I had to walk outside to breathe. I met friends, and we asked each other, ‘Have you ever had this kind of experience before?’ None of us ever had.”

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