Play’s focus on victimhood challenges our relationship to the past

DEBORAH STONE: Joanna Murray-Smith’s drama, Berlin, now playing in Melbourne, reminds us we are shaped by the past but not defined by it

AS THE CURTAIN RISES on Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Berlin, a free-spirited young German woman is flirting with an Australian tourist in the edgy contemporary city.

But the dark history of the place is never far away. Before long, his Jewish heritage is revealed, and their respective inheritances cannot be avoided. Neither character is old enough to have any personal involvement in the events of the Holocaust - there can be no personal guilt or grief - but the legacies of the city weigh heavy.

The tension of Berlin develops as Charlotte rejects Tom’s sense of victimhood and denies that as a young German woman, she has any responsibility for events that happened two generations before she was born.

Berlin, which premiered last week at the Melbourne Theatre Company, is a powerful play well worth seeing, but it has challenging moments for Jewish audiences.

Murray-Smith bravely puts into the mouth of her German character a sentiment that is uncomfortable for Jews to hear but which is often said behind our backs: that Jews hold their griefs too tightly and “play the victim card” too often, that we refuse to move on and dwell unproductively on a negative past.

The play asks whether the right to reparation, or even to a sense of injury, should survive into the third and fourth generation.  More broadly it demands we consider our responsibility for that which we inherit.

No topic is more deeply Jewish than our relationship to the past. Jewish culture can be defined by our sense of history – the drive to remember and connect with the past is more universally Jewish than any belief, ritual, or cultural artefact.

Deep in that practice of memory is the sense of ourselves as victims.  “For not only one has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation, they rise up to destroy us” is a refrain we hear not only in the Haggadah but also in the vernacular of Jewish education, community advocacy and Israel fundraising.