‘I don't know if anyone today … can imagine what laughter meant in a Nazi concentration camp,’ wrote a survivor of the World War II Jewish ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) in 1961. More than 40 years later, during Dr Lisa Peschel’s research on theatrical performance in the ghetto, several original scripts written in the ghetto came to light. Almost all of them are comedies. In this lecture Dr Lisa Peschel will examine them through the lens of recent research on the social effects of humour: how are we to decode the ‘inside jokes’ in these plays, and how might comic theatre have created the psychological effects the survivors claim?
Dr Lisa Peschel is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. Her articles on theatrical performance in the Terezín/Theresienstadt ghetto have appeared in journals in the US and the UK as well as Czech, German and Israeli publications. She was a co-investigator on the £1.8 million project 'Performing the Jewish Archive' funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (Nov 2014-June 2018), during which she reconstructed scripts from the ghetto for performance in the US, the UK, the Czech Republic, Australia and South Africa. Her anthology of rediscovered scripts, Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezin/Theresienstadt Ghetto, was published in 2014 (Czech- and German-language edition 2008).
The conversation will be streamed on ZOOM. RSVP through Eventbrite to receive a Zoom link. It will be recorded and available on YouTube.
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The event is a part of lecture series Literature by and about Czech and Slovak Jews organized by the Society for the History of Czechoslovak Jews and Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, New York Chapter, with support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic and Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association.
