Q&A with Heirs of Banquo Productions about their production KITTEL

Coming to Unity Theatre, Liverpool 23rd and 24th January, KITTEL: Doktor Faustus of the Third Reich is a Faustian re-imagining of the life of Professor Gerhard Kittel, a renowned theologian who rose to the highest ranks of Third Reich academia. We spoke to the company, Heirs of Banquo Productions.

What is KITTEL about and where did the idea come from

The KITTEL play draws on the early modern Faust legend about Faust, the German divinity scholar who sold his soul to Satan. The story focuses on one man, Gerhard Kittel. In asking how a caring pastor, a brilliant academic, a follower of Jesus, a kind and loving family man broke so bad, the play offers a terrifying account of individual and group evil.

The play focuses on ideas, language and influence. Why was it important to centre the story in the cultural and intellectual sphere?

Words are the essence of human rationality and, also, of the two great religions that feature in the KITTEL play, i.e., Judaism and Christianity. The first words of the Johannine Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God”, express how language is the universal signifier for both reason and spirit.

Language is how human beings mediate each other and our respective spaces. Spaces can be physical, such as the person, the home or the city. They can be metaphorical, such as the cultural sphere or intellectual realm. They can be physical and metaphorical, such as the nation state, art, or intellectual property or history. As the carriers of ideas which can make or break individuals — and even whole societies, as happened under the malignant rule of Adolf Hitler, for example — words carry responsibility.  

KITTEL is inspired by the intellectual history of a real person, Gerhard Kittel. His story resides in the cultural and intellectual sphere. In becoming a Hitler apologist, Gerhard Kittel, a singularly brilliant mind whose career was grounded in the languages and texts of the Jewish people, betrayed the Word. For Gerhard, the Word was the moral code given by the Christian God whom he served as an ordained Lutheran priest. 

How did feedback from academics and working with academic research inform the rehearsal process and final production?

KITTEL is the result of extensive background research into the intellectual history of WW1 and WW2, German antisemitism and the Holocaust. The playwright also looked at the historiography of German theology and German 19th and 20th century politics. She spent many hours thinking and writing in the Liverpool Hope University Library, and in the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. She travelled to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, as well to archives in Tübingen and Cuxhaven, to look at documents  — letters, memos, papers. Many of the digital resources came from the DNB (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek). The primary sources are Kittel’s own writings. Several of the original editions are props in the stage show.

Rowan Williams, who is a poet and a playwright as well as a theologian and public intellectual, provided invaluable advice on aspects of structure, tone and language of the script. All of his suggestions were adopted. The resulting draft was sent to Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge University, who tweaked the Hebrew.

How does the character of Herr Herold help shape the audience’s understanding of Kittel’s moral choices?

In the dramatis personae section that prefaces the script, Herr Herold is simply described as “Satan”. Herold embodies evil. In metaphorical terms, he is the human shadow. Falling into this shadow, Gerhard Kittel destroys his own reputation for eternity. Onstage, Herold manifests as the radically evil Nazi chieftains — Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Mengele — with whom Gerhard comes into contact during his twelve-year career working for Hitler’s loathsome cause.

This is the first production from Heirs of Banquo Productions. What artistic values or questions do you hope will define the company going forward?

We hope that the company will continue to be defined by its bravery and honesty. We will be taking KITTEL forward after the Liverpool premiere because, in the assessment of Rowan Williams, “its timeliness could hardly be exaggerated”.

Swimming against the tide is hard. This is a play about the biological, psychological and religious nature of virulent racial hatred… and where it can take even a cultural sophisticated society like 1930s Germany. Our team have lost track of the abusive, pro-Hitler, antisemitic posts they have had to take down from HoBP social media platforms. (Note: Free speech is fine. But write hate on our walls and we will remove it.)

Open casting, open minds, a spirit of thinking and listening and doing: this is how the KITTEL project has run from the get-go. This is a very difficult, very uncomfortable script. It holds a mirror up to our human-all-too-human — to quote Nietzsche — proclivity for radical evil.  Radical evil does not happen because, as Primo Levi said, “monsters exist”. It happens because the rest of us exhibit, most of the time, an inexhaustible urge for distraction, a childlike credulity, a wilful refusal to think.  

What do you hope audiences leave thinking about, and thinking about in the days after?

The lessons to be drawn from Gerhard Kittel's story transcend antisemitism. One key parallel between the 1920s and today that the play brings out concerns narratives. Today, just as in the period after WW1, originally extremist views are becoming increasingly mainstream until they are no longer questioned at all. KITTEL is a historical play, not a political manifesto, but its relevance for the present cannot be overstated.