Obermayer German Jewish History Award, Distinguished Service

“My approach is to make the documents speak”

Playwright Michael Batz explores Hamburg’s role during the Nazi era

Each January 27, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hamburg playwright and theater director Michael Batz stages a new and powerful production exposing facets of the city’s Nazi past. The popular, meticulously researched performances incorporate an unusual storytelling style in which historical characters speak in their own words.

It all began in the 1990s, when Batz read Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The book told the World War II story of 412 men in a Hamburg police unit who traveled to southern Poland and participated in mass killings of Jews. “It was a Hamburg story and I wanted to know more details about it,” Batz says. His research took him from the Hamburg prosecutor’s office to the central office of state legal administration in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg. What he discovered there in the archives set his artistic life on a new course. 

Using the policemen’s original statements to explore the horror suffered by their Jewish victims, Batz turned his investigation into a dramatic reading and documentary performance with 10 actors and a group of musicians. It premiered in 1998 at Hamburg city hall. Batz, like his audience, was transformed by the experience, which helped lay bare the crimes of the Nazi era in a unique artistic form. He has produced a new performance each year since.

“I started to dig the ground where I was living, that was my approach, and the story became bigger and bigger,” says Batz, who is co-founder of the international Kulturfabrik Kampnagel performance space, artistic director of the Hamburg Art Ensemble, and founder of the Theater of the Speicherstadt. “Hamburg in a way is my stage, and I try…to make things public, and to tell the other side of Hamburg history. The untold stories are a motivation for me.” 

Batz creates his performances based strictly on historical documents and survivor testimonies, using only original quotes to honor the legacy of Hamburg’s Jewish victims as he examines the roles played by Nazis and their sympathizers in the courts, businesses, and the culture at large. He has used diaries, letters, government documents, and other primary materials discovered in the Hamburg State Archives and elsewhere. 

“Work in the archives sounds abstract, but it’s not abstract,” says Batz. “You have original documents in your hands, like farewell greetings from people who committed suicide or got deported. It’s like a direct contact. There is incredible material still left in the archives, and sometimes I think there must be an end, but no, there is no end, there is more and more and more, and so I go on.”

Batz has performed his documentary readings in city halls, museums, and theaters from Hamburg to Berlin, Vienna, and Shanghai, where he also designed a memorial plaque that today honors the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum.

He was born 1951 in Hannover, the son of a former Wehrmacht soldier who was captured in southern France and imprisoned at a POW camp in the United States before he returned to Germany in 1947. Batz not once remembers his father discussing his experience during the war, nor what happened to the Jews. “My family never told me about anything,” he says. But while in high school in the 1960s, Batz got to know a Jewish teacher who guided him toward his future path as an artist. “Mr. Goldbach, my Latin teacher, was impressive and gave me something very important for my life—he taught me to be open and tolerant, to allow doubts, and to trust free thinking, not dogmatic thinking.” 

Batz went on to study German language, literature, and history at the University of Marburg in the 1970s, but theater became his true love or as he calls it, “my liberation.”

Batz’s work has explored the auctioning off of Jewish properties in Hamburg and investigated the killing of children in Hamburgs’ children’s wards. Tenebrae, which he co-produced with the composer Ernst Bechert and performed in collaboration with the Neuengamme Concentration Camp memorial, chronicles the crimes of the Gestapo at Hamburg’s secret police headquarters. 

Is It a Long Way From Auschwitz to Hamburg? (Ist es weit von Auschwitz nach Hamburg?) examines the history of 1,500 Jewish women deported from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Hamburg in 1944, where they were used as forced labor. And in one of his most famous works, Batz told the fascinating story of Paul Levy’s House (Das Haus des Paul Levy), a Hamburg architectural masterpiece and the first cooperative condominium of its kind. It was built by two famous Jewish architects, the Gerson brothers, and was ultimately appropriated by the Nazis.

Youth audiences have been drawn to his work—some 800 young people typically show up for the special performance day he holds annually for Hamburg’s youth. 

Batz’s documentary performances have been collected and published in an anthology, Stop It! 20 Documentary Pieces on the Holocaust in Hamburg, (Hört damit auf!), which takes its title from the Hamburg artist Walter Sternheim (alias Arie Goral), who in the postwar years said it would be better to stop the Nazi trials than to continue announcing Nazi acquittals. 

In 2006, Batz discovered through a distant relative that his father’s cousin had in fact been a senior SS commander in Einsatzgruppe A, in Riga, which annihilated the Jewish population in Latvia. “I was broken after I learned that,” says Batz, who admits he still hasn’t found a way to tell this difficult personal story through performance. 

For Batz, everything he needs to tell a story—and to move audiences with his revelations about Hamburg’s past—he finds in documents. “My approach is to make the documents speak, because I think the truth is concrete and knowledge requires detail, detail, detail. History is the food of the present and a source for the future,” he says. “We need memory. It is a vital element.”

Responding to the new rise of the far right in Germany, Batz adds, “We have to keep on fighting for an open society and democratic values. I want to live in a society of understanding and respect, a society that is rich in otherness and curiosity for the other. Each human being is an ‘other’ for others, and only in this perspective lies liberation for each person.”