Fascism, Phantoms, and the Future

While spending a portion of my sabbatical year conducting research in Vienna, I found that I could not escape the ghosts of Austria’s fascist past. Sometimes I anticipated these encounters, at other times they popped up unexpectedly, but they always left me shaken. The most haunting performance I witnessed was Lass uns die Welt vergessen: Volksoper 1938, a play about the events inside a theatre at the time of the Nazi annexation of Austria. As an American attending this production in the spring of 2025, at the time of Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, the play functioned as more than a mere historical lesson. It struck me as an ominous portent.

The majority of Austrians welcomed the 1938 Anschluss (“connection”) that made their country part of Germany’s Third Reich. Immediately, there was an escalation in the persecution of those considered impediments to the greatness of the master race, particularly Austria’s Jews, who had been central to the production of the celebrated Viennese culture.

Despite their participation in the Nazi war machine and administration of the Final Solution, Austria did not go through the same de-Nazification process that took place in Germany after the war. Instead, with the support of the occupying Allied Forces, Austria fashioned the myth of being “Hitler’s first victims” and therefore not responsible for Nazi atrocities.

The election of Kurt Waldheim, a former officer in the Third Reich’s armed forces, as president of Austria in 1986 functioned as a turning point, focusing international attention on the country’s Nazi past. Since the early 1990s, Austria has more thoroughly engaged in Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”) and establishing an Erinnerungskultur (“culture of remembrance”). Along with government policies of repatriation and restitution, the commitment to acknowledging Austria’s fascist past can be seen in theatres, art galleries, concert halls, museums, parks, and even on streetcorners.

The ghosts are visible everywhere in Vienna. But, for me, as a dramaturg and theatre professor whose grandfather fled the Nazis in 1933, they most powerfully came to life on the stage of the Volksoper.

Is art a frivolous distraction, or might it be the one thing that can heal a broken world?

Let Us Forget the World: A Ghost Story

The Vienna Volksoper (“People’s Opera”), built in 1898, is a three-tiered proscenium theatre with 1,261 seats, regularly producing a repertoire of operas, operettas, and modern musicals in German with English supertitles. When Lass uns die Welt vergessen: Volksoper 1938, a play by Theu Boermans and Keren Kargarlitsky, premiered there in December 2023, a leading Austrian critic described it as “a haunting example of the culture of remembrance.”

This docudrama-metamusical contains a play-within-a-play: Gruß und Kuss aus der Wachau (“Greetings and Kisses from the Wachau”). It’s a silly operetta composed by Jara Beneš and set in a rural region dotted with villages and castles. Three sisters working at a tobacco factory dream of finding husbands, while their widower father has romantic pursuits of his own. Impoverished aristocrats sell their castle to a wealthy American lady—stereotypically gregarious and uncultured, with a Texan accent—and intend to have her marry their son, who for some contrived reason is disguised as a chauffeur. The musical stylings range from old fashioned operetta, waltzes, and beerhall numbers to tango, can-can, and the Charleston. It’s colorful, exuberant, and ridiculous. And it’s the show that was in rehearsal at the Volksoper when the Nazis marched into Vienna on 12 March 1938.

While Lass uns die Welt vergessen stages full numbers and scenes from Gruß und Kuss aus der Wachau, the play proper focuses on the actors, writers, musicians, and theatre administrators—a good number of them Jewish—hard at work creating this lighthearted frivolity while the world outside the theatre inexorably slides into turmoil. The backstage drama is engulfed by the documentary film clips projected across the stage: the Austrian Chancellor in negotiations with Hitler, Hitler’s massive rally at Heldenplatz, Jews scrubbing the streets, concentrations camps. In the words of the play’s program, “The bright colors of the revue mingle with the dark ink with which the history of that time is written.”

The production engages in a version of what critic Alisa Solomon has referred to as a “repossession.” In discussing George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along and Paula Vogel’s Indecent, Solomon argues that these recent plays belong to a

growing and revelatory category of theatrical works that investigate contemporary issues by reconfiguring old hits, now largely forgotten or deemed no longer stage-worthy. The writers who refashion them seem to work from a profound love for, even infatuation with, their source material—and also with some discomfort issuing from the material’s historical context.

This relationship between text and context is the central dynamic of Lass uns die Welt vergessen. It explores the lives of the people caught within the contradiction between a joyous operetta and terrifying fascism. The characters give voice to different perspectives on what should be done in these circumstances. Pretend that politics are irrelevant? Appease the Nazis? Fight them? Flee? They must also wrestle with more philosophical questions. Is art a frivolous distraction, or might it be the one thing that can heal a broken world?

Drawing on the historical record, Lass uns die Welt vergessen shows the process of the Nazification of the Volksoper. As rehearsals are underway in February and March of 1938, there’s a National Socialist committee within the theatre. First, they insert a couple of chorus boys in brown shirts and armbands, much to the dismay of the director and the writers. Then, in a shockingly short span of time, the operetta is fully transformed into fascist propaganda, with Jewish actors removed from their roles, a stage filled with men in Nazi regalia, and “Aryans” taking credit for the words and music of Jewish writers. The show-within-the-show curdles in front of us, becoming (deliberately) less good, with less talented actors taking over key roles and the Jewish director (whom the Nazis force to stay at the helm, despite his desire to quit) deteriorating into madness.

Some of the best exchanges happen between the Souffleur (prompter), an observant Jew who occasionally slips into Yiddish, and the old Bühnenmeister (stage manager), a veteran of the Great War who believes there was more harmony and unity under the Emperor. At one point, these two behind-the-scenes workers discuss theatre ghosts and dybbuks, making clear to the audience that we are, indeed, looking at a haunted stage. The Volksoper premiered Gruß und Kuss aus der Wachau in 1938 on the very same boards that now presents Lass uns die Welt vergessen in 2025. The play is site-specific, returning to the exact scene of the crime to meet the phantoms that have haunted the Volksoper for eighty-seven years. The effect is chilling.

The final moments of the play include photographs and short statements about the fates of the Jewish theatremakers we’ve seen represented on stage: the director who escaped to Brazil, the conductor who led the San Francisco Opera for three decades, the soprano who managed to stay in Europe and had a thriving career after the war, the lead actor and writer who were murdered at Auschwitz.

Austrian Text/American Context

While Lass uns die Welt vergessen stages the historical and political context outside the walls of the theatre in 1938, the audience brings their own understandings of the events outside the walls of the theatre in 2025. In the same season that saw the triumph of the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement in the United States, right-wing populist parties won the largest percentage of votes in both Austria and Germany. While centrist and progressive parties in parliamentary systems were able to prevent the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) or the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from forming a government, Trump’s Republican Party now controls all branches of America’s federal government.

To be clear: Austria is not America, 1938 is not 2025. Any attempt to construct a direct correlation is bound to fail and diminish our ability to see the present clearly. Nevertheless, looking back as well as looking ahead is one way we sharpen our vision, so I find myself interrogating Austria’s past while imagining the future of America.

I found myself wondering about the theatre artists who will create performances eighty-seven years from now. What works from our current day might they “repossess”?

I don’t believe the American president would find much of value in Lass uns die Welt vergessen. A mere two months after taking office, he issued an executive order to remake institutions, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, that he believes to be in the thrall of a “race-centered ideology” that “deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.” The Congressional Black Caucus, chaired by Yvette D. Clarke, immediately responded, “There is nothing divisive or improper about telling the truth… We do not run from or erase our history simply because we don’t like it. We embrace the history of our country—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”

The desire to create revisionist histories has led the administration to numerous acts of cultural vandalism, including the revocation of National Endowment for the Arts grants, the hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, and the defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Such control allows a government to construct narratives about who counts as “a real American” and therefore is entitled to the right of due process, the protection of their political speech, the legal recognition of their identity, and the economic benefits of the American system.

Critics like David Firestone have condemned the administration’s “aggressive effort” to rewrite history:

In this new narrative, there can be no arguments about oppression by race or gender or ethnicity or sexuality or economic class, the administration implies, because no such oppression will be acknowledged in the official history, which can only be uplifting… The White House is trying to impose a government-mandated whitewashing of art and history. Nothing painful will be depicted, described or taught; no human suffering will be acknowledged; no heroes will be reduced in their grandeur by moral failings.

The sense of shame that exists within Austria’s culture of remembrance may well be one of the forces preventing their country from succumbing to the rising tide of right-wing extremism.

Janine Jackson articulates the ideological underpinnings of this attack on Black history when she argues, “The harm wrought—and, to be clear, intended—is not just to Black people, but to the very concept, the aspiration of multiracial democracy.” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw warns us that “those who would erase the past are intending to repeat it.”

While sitting in the audience at the Volksoper, watching the fate of Austrian theatre artists in 1938, I did not wonder whether their contemporary American counterparts will be among those who speak out against authoritarian ideologies and policies. They already are, continuing the legacy of earlier artists who saw the theatre as a site of civic engagement in which to challenge racism, sexism, and other forms of social injustice. Indeed, this administration’s actions can be understood as a backlash against the scholarship, art, activism, and popular culture that were successfully fostering an American Erinnerungskultur, increasingly gaining traction within our cultural and political institutions.

Instead, I found myself wondering about the theatre artists who will create performances eighty-seven years from now. What works from our current day might they “repossess”? How will they represent the social and political forces of our era, the acts of bravery and cowardice, the humanity and the cruelty? How will our ghosts haunt them?

The Necessity of Negative Light

I realize that many Americans agree with Trump’s view of history. They may feel that depicting instances of oppression and injustice puts America in a negative light. It’s true that many phantoms are fully visible only when the light we shine on them is negative. Some Americans may resent the feelings of guilt or shame that can accompany a confrontation with the ghosts of history. But I agree with Firestone when he writes, “There is no harm in accepting that shame. More of it might help new generations confront the reality of their past and prevent further injustices.”

The sense of shame that exists within Austria’s culture of remembrance may well be one of the forces preventing their country from succumbing to the rising tide of right-wing extremism. I applaud the Volksoper for staging Lass uns die Welt vergessen, as well as the Austrian audiences who witness this performance. It takes courage not to turn away. Sometimes it’s ugly. Sometimes it’s scary. But it’s necessary. The price of shielding our eyes from the ghosts is too high.

If we clearly regard the ghosts of the past, we will, hopefully, be haunted by fewer phantoms in the future.