George Tabori

George Tabori (Budapest, 1914 - Berlin, 2007) was a theatre director, playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Born in Austria-Hungary as György Tábori, he wrote and worked in German, English and Hungarian, and his plays, shaped by Nazism and the Holocaust, became a landmark of postwar European theatre.

His family was Jewish, but he was raised as a Catholic and only learned of his origins at the age of seven. His father, Kornél, was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, while his mother and his brother Paul escaped. Tabori worked as a bellboy at Berlin's Hotel Adlon, but had to leave Nazi Germany in 1935. He settled in London, where he worked for the BBC and obtained British citizenship in 1945. During the war he cooperated with British intelligence and reported from the Balkans.

In 1947 he moved to the United States, where he translated Bertolt Brecht into English and worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess. In the late 1960s he returned to Europe and staged The Cannibals in Berlin, then built his career in Bremen, Munich, Cologne and Bochum. His theatre mixes weeping and laughter, treats death with a brutal and comic edge, and drifts into absurdist surrealism. He wrote more than fifty plays, four novels and countless stories and radio pieces. In Mein Kampf, a black comedy, he portrays Hitler as a failed painter living in a Vienna hostel, befriending a Jewish Bible seller.

His legacy lies in bringing the Holocaust onto the stage without taboo, allowing himself jokes on the subject that his Jewish background made acceptable to audiences. His final production was Blessed Food at the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen in May 2007, a few months before his death in Berlin.