TINA KRONTIRIS
Censorship has always being used by states to regulate people’s political beliefs, sexual attitudes, moral and ethical norms, and even religious practices. In times of war the imperative for regulating public thought and behaviour increases because of the need for national propaganda which is deemed crucial to the outcome of the war. At such times censorship regulations become more stringent. This is certainly true of the Second World War, the producer of the largest censorship operations ever. Although traditionally the arts have been thought to transcend the worlds of politics and war, they were certainly not exempt from regulatory measures in the years 1939–45. Along with cinema, theatre was a very closely monitored form of art presumably because of its recognized direct influence upon the audience. The kinds of censorship and degree of vigilance exercised by country states during the Second World War depended on various factors, such as a country’s position in relation to the war (what side of the war it fought on), its degree of independence (whether it was an occupied or a free state) and the social, ideological, and national concerns of the ruling system in effect before and during the war. In England, for example, the censors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office showed an increased concern over matters of public morality, responding to a conservative call for an exemplary ethos that Britain should display in the eyes of its Allies, especially the Americans, who were likely to see theatrical performances in London (Aldgate 19).
Discussions of censorship have generally focused on the power that exercises control,1 when in fact censorship is a practice characterized by a power-resistance relationship. In his influential book Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), James Scott studies the dialectical interaction between the powerful and the powerless and suggests that although they are unequal in their capacity to enforce policy, both sides are constrained by the conditions of their interactive setup.2 Scott observes that the powerful and the powerless behave differently in each other’s presence than among members of their own group, and he posits the existence of two types of discourses or ‘transcripts,’ as he calls them: the ‘public transcript,’ which is the self-constructed image of the powerful ‘as they would have themselves seen’ (18), and the private or ‘hidden transcript,’ which ‘represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant’ (xii). The powerful can also have a hidden transcript in so far as the motives and aims of their hegemonic rule are articulated privately but never avowed in front of outsiders or wider audiences. On the basis of this distinction between a public and a hidden transcript, Scott discerns four varieties of political discourse and resistance among subordinate groups (18–19). First, there is the appropriation of the flattering self-portrait of the dominant power. In their official rhetoric, the latter will often incorporate various sensitivities (humanitarian, democratic, anti-racist, etc.) to present themselves as rulers with noble aims (‘good guys’). Second, there is the hidden discourse and action – taking place ‘offstage’ – where the subordinates, away from the fear or intimidating gaze of power, can express feelings and thoughts that must normally be held back in the presence of the representatives of power. Third, there is a type of public discourse, created through disguise and anonymity, that appears harmless on the surface but is intended to convey a double meaning while concealing the identity of the originator of the discourse (this discourse includes rumours, jokes, stories, songs, rituals, codes, etc.). Finally, there are acts of challenge and open defiance, acts that cause the rupture of the seal, the ‘cordon sanitaire,’ between private and public transcripts (201).
This concept of a dialectical relation between power and resistance that is constituted by hidden and public discourses and practices is especially suitable in explaining the operation of oppositional theatre under conditions of severe censorship in Nazi-occupied countries during the Second World War. Nazi censorship restricted the choices of theatre artists, who, in turn, developed strategies of resistance that enabled them to do more than the official Nazi policy allowed. In the rest of this essay I wish to examine one instance of theatrical censorship – that imposed on Shakespeare, England’s national playwright, by the Axis powers that occupied Greece from 1941 to 1944. Using as a case study a performance of Othello in Athens at the heart of the Occupation period, I shall try to investigate the conditions of censorship under which the play came to be staged and the use of this Shakespearean play by a Greek theatre company both as a form of resistance against Nazi ideologies and as a means of combating artistically the debilitating conditions of the Occupation. In the process I hope to shed light on the interrelationship of foreign dominance, cultural politics, resistance, and collaboration.
When the German troops invaded Athens on 26 April 1941 all forms of public life froze. There was no official ban against performances (the state-controlled National Theatre was ordered to carry on as usual), but fear kept both audiences and actors at home, so the theatres shut down for a few days. When they reopened, they had to comply with new, emergency regulations. According to a circular published by the German and Italian occupying forces in July 1941 (Dizelos 454–5), censorship was to be exercised on all plays scheduled for performance, and all shows were limited to a two-hour span; evening shows were to begin at 7:00 p.m. so that the spectators could return home before curfew time. Ten days prior to the opening of a performance, the theatre company was obliged to submit the play script for inspection to the members of three separate censoring committees – the German, the Italian, and the Greek.3 Theatre companies were also obliged to invite the censors to attend the dress rehearsal that included full costumes and complete sets. In their various circulars, which were eventually incorporated into a law, the occupiers specified all the restrictions and forbade, among other things, the staging of plays written by authors of Allied countries and the use of words such as ‘English,’ ‘American,’ ‘Australian,’ ‘Soviet,’ that directly referred to the Alliance.4 Punishment for the violation of censorship rules ranged from a steep fine to closure of the theatre and/or the arrest of the company members (Dizelos 455).
Shakespeare, as an Englishman, was certainly at the top of the banned-authors list, which explains his general absence from the Greek stage during the Occupation period. He is noticeably absent from the National Theatre of Greece, an institution that in prewar times staged a Shakespeare play at the opening of each new season. Of course, Shakespeare’s absence from the Greek National Theatre during the Occupation is not surprising. A play by the national poet of England on the national stage of an Axis-occupied country carried an obvious symbolism of English superiority, intolerable to the occupying powers. In their resistance to censorship, private theatre companies in Greece would often camouflage English and American plays by changing the titles and attributing them to unknown French authors (Dizelos 457–8; Georgopoulou 298–301). Shakespeare, the master of counterfeiting, did not go in disguise. In the one and only time that he appeared in Greece during the Occupation he did so under his own name – or, at least, under the name of his play. On 13 May 1942 an advertisement of Othello appeared on the entertainment page of the daily newspaper Elefthero Vima (see fig. 5.1).5
5.1. A facsimile of the advertisement for a production of Othello at the Cotopouli Theatre, Athens, Greece, 1942. The caption reads: ‘Othello/ Directed by Spyros Melas/ Music by Manolis Skouloudis/ Sets & costumes by G. Anemoyiannis/ Today 7 p.m. “First”/ Theatre Cotopouli.’ Scanned by the Central Library of Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece.
This advertisement appears to be the same as similar postings for prewar shows, except for the total absence of the name ‘Shakespeare,’ which would have been prominently displayed. There is one more irregularity: the advertisement names Spyros Melas as director, but the artist who actually instructed the actors in their roles and directed the play, 35-year-old Dimitris Myrat, is missing. Yet, as we shall see below, these are small matters if we consider the fact that Othello is one of Shakespeare’s best known plays and as such is closely associated with the Bard’s name in the public consciousness. Why was such a play staged in the middle of the Occupation period?
Conditions were hard for the Greeks during this period.6 Lack of food, an uncontrolled black market, a chaotic political situation, and an astronomical inflation rate that rendered the national currency valueless were the main features of the Occupation. Death from starvation was the biggest problem, as famine reigned supreme in the urban areas, especially in the first year of the German invasion. During the winter of 1941–2 people starved to death by the hundreds. Whatever food supplies the country had put away were consumed by the German army, which pillaged storehouses and requisitioned any stock held in shops; at the same time large quantities of farm produce and raw materials (such as cotton and sole leather) were shipped to Germany (Mazower 24). Hitler and his ministers were totally unconcerned about the grave consequences of such actions.7 These hard economic conditions, along with the enforcement of strict censorship, posed problems of survival for the theatre as well. The elimination of plays by authors of Allied countries, together with the periodic shut downs incurred by the occupying powers (ostensibly for reasons of public health), made it extremely difficult for theatres to operate and created high unemployment among actors. Even construction materials for stage sets and props became scarce, as products such as nails, boards, and canvas were used up in the war effort. Indeed, it is surprising that in such conditions the theatre survived at all, yet survive it did, as there was a demand for all kinds of entertainment, especially revues. Also, despite the hard times, there developed a sense of optimism among artists and intellectuals, who proved very productive in this period.8 This optimism was largely inspired by the resistance that Greeks throughout the country had shown against their Nazi occupiers. Many actors enlisted in the National Liberation Front (a widely active underground resistance organization), creating a special branch in the area of the theatre (Papadouka 41; Georgopoulou 292–8). While most theatre companies struggled to stay afloat, mounting ‘light’ comedies and catering to an audience of low expectations, a few, including the Cotopouli Theatre company (which produced Othello) set higher goals.
Dimitris Myrat, a member of the Cotopouli Theatre company and its artistic director in early 1942, staged Shakespeare’s Othello apparently as a way of combating the crippling effect of this dire atmosphere. In the spring of that year the Katerina Theatre had mounted an innovative production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The staging of these two plays by leading private companies signalled a turn towards quality productions in the midst of the Occupation. Why Myrat chose to stage Othello specifically, and to cast himself in the title role, is not clear from the available evidence. Having played several youthful roles in Shakespearean productions during the 1930s, perhaps he wanted now to try his talent in the more mature and challenging role of the Moor who kills his beautiful, aristocratic wife out of jealousy. Or, possibly, he may have thought this play would pass censorship more easily on account of its ‘domestic’ theme. What Myrat certainly aimed for in his production of Othello was the introduction of a new, psychologically oriented and ideologically progressive approach to Shakespearean drama, hoping thereby to initiate the uplifting process in the Greek theatre. In an interview with a theatre critic during the rehearsal process, the young actor-director appears to have stated that he wished to steer away from previous interpretations of the play in Greece. ‘I formed the impression,’ says the critic, that ‘he [Myrat] was fully conscious of his mission and took care to understand the innermost soul of the tragedy … to advance his interpretation on surer ground, different from the one established by the various Othellos that his older colleagues have presented to the Greek public from time to time’ (Rodas 2).
Using the 1623 Folio version of the play, in which Othello refers to himself as a ‘base Iudean’ (5.2.348), the multilingual Myrat created a humble, self-controlled general whose slightly Hebraic accent, kippah-like cap, and very dark (but not black) skin associated him with Syria or Palestine (see fig. 5.2).
He stressed the human side of Othello – not the heroic or the jealous one – thus portraying a Moor of Hebraic origin who, though possessed by the passion of jealousy, is able to exercise self-control and engage in self-reflection before he takes his final decision to murder his wife.9 Myrat’s Othello was in contrast to the Moor of uncontrollable passion and primitive instincts that had appeared on the Greek stage up to that time.
Changes were accordingly introduced by Myrat in teaching the role of Iago to the lesser-known actor Christos Tsaganeas, who appeared as a psychologically disturbed man. Tsaganeas’s distorted facial expression and bizarre movements on stage were intended as symptoms of his unbalanced mental condition. Iago’s evil was thus to be understood in psychopathological terms. Although Myrat did not entirely succeed in convincing his critical audience of this interpretation, or in creating a wider stir,10 he did, nevertheless, offer an antiracist view of Othello. In the context of the Occupation such an interpretation acquires a special significance as a subtle act of resistance against the Nazis, who persecuted Blacks and Jews.
5.2 Dimitris Myrat as Othello, Cotopouli Theatre, Athens, Greece, 1942. Reproduced with the permission of Voula Zouboulaki, widow of Dimitris Myrat.
Myrat’s production of Othello would probably not have been allowed without the mediation of the playwright and theatre critic Spyros Melas, the Nazi-collaborator who was displayed as director on both the advertisement and the printed program. Normally, the play script would be presented to the censors by either the theatre owner or the director of the production, but Dimitris Myrat, a socialist sympathizer involved in underground resistance activity,11 was altogether the wrong person to negotiate the censorship matter. The diplomatic and inventive Melas was much better suited for the job on account of his personal qualities, his high reputation as an intellectual (he was member of the prestigious Athens Academy), and his favourable disposition towards the occupiers. From the first days of the Occupation Melas had published pro-Axis articles in the daily press, urging his compatriots to show ‘sincere and active cooperation with the victor’ (Melas 1),12 an attitude for which he was later expelled from the Association of Greek Writers. His collaborative disposition as well as his contributions to the Nazi literary magazine Quadrivio, published weekly by the Italian forces,13 endeared him to both sides of the Axis powers and enabled him to negotiate theatrical matters with them.14 Melas had never directed a Shakespeare play nor dealt with Shakespeare in any other way. During the Occupation years he worked on commission for various theatre companies, rewriting and adapting scripts so that they would pass censorship. It is reasonable to suppose that Cotopouli Theatre hired him to update a 1915 translation by Constantinos Theotokis and to make cuts in the text so as to fit the play into the two-hour performance limit imposed by the Occupation authorities. All the available evidence suggests a hidden transcript: the theatre company’s presentation of Melas as ‘director’ and the basic reason for hiring him were the connections he offered with the Axis powers and the greater chance he had in getting the play approved by the censors. Evidently, then, Othello had passed censorship as an exception to the rule.
Such an exception may have been facilitated by the privileged position Shakespeare held within German culture. From 1797, when Schlegel started translating Shakespeare, to 1915, when Gerhart Hauptmann made the famous statement, ‘there is no nation, not even the British, which is more entitled to call Shakespeare its own than Germany’ (qtd in Hortmann 3) the idea of ‘unser [our] Shakespeare’ had taken a strong hold on German culture. It was this assimilation of Shakespeare into a common Germanic heritage that enabled stagings of the Elizabethan dramatist even during the war years, albeit not without problems, contradictions, and disagreements (see Ackermann and Habicht in this volume). As the 1946 issue of the German scholarly periodical Shakespeare Jahrbuch shows, a great number of Shakespeare plays were performed in the years 1939–45, including some, such as the Histories and Othello, that had been ostensibly banned (Mühlbach 113–21).15
Of course, in occupied countries citizens were more restricted in their actions, and rules of censorship were more rigidly applied, but this was not always and not uniformly true. The severity of the occupying power depended on the significance of the country to the overall German plans and the degree of cooperation on the part of the occupied country. Generally speaking, the Germans and the collaborationist governments, in their attempt to minimize resistance, relaxed control on artists or writers if these individuals did not directly challenge their authority and power. In France, for example, during the first two years of the Occupation the Nazis allowed artists a surprising degree of freedom, permitting them to display works that ‘would have exposed them to harsh recrimination in Germany’ (McCloskey 18). This policy was part of the Nazis’ public transcript, which aimed to distract the attention of the French from the atrocities committed daily by the occupiers. This relative leniency did not apply when a country tried to protect Jewish artists. In fascist Spain, where Franco maintained a semblance of independence from Hitler, the Germans attempted to withdraw from circulation Poetry at Hand, published in December 1940 by German-Jewish émigré Franz Werfel (Bowen 138).16 The same policy was maintained in occupied Greece, where the Germans had a reputation for being more lenient than the Italians in matters of censorship,17 and there is no doubt that policy came from Berlin, not Rome.
Finally, in explaining the exception of Shakespeare’s Othello from the rules of censorship in occupied Greece, we must look into the ‘faultlines’ – assailable points of the dominant power’s control system.18 There were several faultlines in the system of the occupiers that created opportunities for the occupied or conversely made things more difficult. One of these was the latent antagonism between the German and Italian forces. Greek author Yiorgos Theotokas wrote about this matter in his diary notebook: ‘The Germans show contempt for the Italians in a pointed way. It is obvious that vis-à-vis the first the Italians have a complexe d’inferiorité, full of wily animosity. The Italians spread this whisper about the Germans: they are barbarians’ (Theotokas 261).19 There was also antagonism between the Italians and the Greeks. The latter, who had defeated the Italians at the Albanian border in the first phase of the war, invented a series of jokes or satirical stories about them and lost no opportunity to ridicule the ‘spaghetti masters’ and their Duce.20 As a faultline within the occupying power block, antagonism usually worked against the occupied as it made it more difficult for them to break the censorship system. In the case of Shakespeare, however, antagonism may have challenged the Italians to show off their cultured side, since the Elizabethan dramatist was universally recognized as a high-art symbol. Alternatively, or additionally, the antagonism here may have been offset by the mediation of Spyros Melas, who contributed to the Italians’ self-constructed image of cultural superiority by writing articles for their Quadrivio, as stated above.
Another faultline in the power system, more negotiable by the powerless, was the process of mediation in the censoring mechanism itself: the occupiers had to rely on Greek collaborationists for reading the scripts – a form of dependence that essentially transferred the censoring authority to the Greek readers working for the German and Italian committees. Such readers, whose principles of collaboration were more material than ideological, were not infrequently susceptible to corruption. What was placed on the table along with the text sometimes determined whether the play would be allowed. One theatre owner describes in her memoirs the following scene at the office of the German censorship committee, where the reader was a self-indulgent medical doctor who had studied in Germany: ‘Before he would start reading we would put on the table, right in front of him, a bottle of wine and a fancy cake. We would let him eat and drink, while we did not dare touch either the wine glass or the cake. We were afraid that we might incur his displeasure and cause him to reject the play’ (Manolidou 46). Such incidents evince the vulnerability of the occupying powers that were necessarily constrained by their unfamiliarity with the Greek language as well as by the unavailability of ‘proper’ collaborators.
In the final analysis, the kind of censorship exercised was a political decision on the part of the Germans, who determined the degree of cultural intervention in each country. Heinz Kindermann, Germany’s most influential man in ‘theatre science’ in the last years of the war, spoke high-mindedly about a German theatre that carried ‘the message of German humanity’ to people from ‘Paris and The Hague to Vilnius and Lublin, from Trondheim to Athens’ (qtd in Hortmann 17–18). Apart from its glaring distance from the reality of inhuman acts committed daily by the Axis powers, such a statement was also at variance with Germany’s cultural policy and practice in each occupied country. In France, Hitler apparently aimed at cultural domination, as evidenced by the fact that his men moved quickly after the armistice to take control of French art and also by the fact that a few months after the invasion Joseph Goebbels, the German minister of propaganda, personally oversaw all cultural activity in the occupied part of France (McCloskey 21).21 In occupied Poland the Führer showed no higher aims than the humiliation or physical extinction of artists and intellectuals (as Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney reveals in her essay in this volume). For Greece he harboured no particular passion or racial prejudice. Mark Mazower, a historian who has written extensively on the Second World War in Greece and the southern Balkans, contrasts Hitler’s attitude towards Poland and Greece: ‘Greece and Poland were very different cases so far as the Germans were concerned. Greece was less important strategically, less contemptible racially. From Hitler downwards there was nothing but admiration on the German side for the way the Greeks had fought’ (18).
In occupied Greece this positive attitude of the Germans towards the Greeks is evidenced by the fact that German officers showed a genuine interest in classical Greek culture. They attended a performance of Oedipus at the ancient Herodeion a few months after the invasion and did not react when the audience provocatively applauded a group of wounded soldiers who came in just before the start of the performance wearing hospital pajamas (Theotokas 271). The German authorities pressed the National Theatre (over which they had direct control) to mount German plays, but the evidence suggests that the Greek artists working for this state institution did not often give in to German pressure.22 Overall, in Greece the degree of German intervention in matters of culture appears to have been minimal. This is not perhaps as surprising as it may appear. If the Germans who implemented Nazi policy in Greece could not keep the Greeks from starving to death or, worse yet, could not refrain from consuming their food, how could they propagandize German culture? Undoubtedly, Nazi cultural policy in Greece was weighed against Hitler’s higher priorities in the region. The Führer had never actually intended to invade Greece, nor did he have any long-term plans for this small country in the southern Balkans (Mazower 18). His real target was the invasion of the Soviet Union and in 1941 he was preparing a move in that direction. The invasion of Greece had been necessitated by an unexpected turn of events, namely, the humiliating defeat of Mussolini’s forces by the Greek army at the Albanian border. Once Hitler had restituted the prestige of the Axis by invading Greece, there was no reason for him to waste valuable resources. Additionally, Greek resistance ran high and the gain from suppressing it would not answer the cost.
The staging of Shakespeare’s Othello in occupied Greece could be inscribed in any combination of the above transcripts. It provides evidence that no system of power is unbreakable by resistance and that, in our study of the Second World War, the ‘good guys,’ the devoted patriots who fought for their country’s freedom, cannot always be clearly separated from the ‘bad guys,’ the collaborationists who sought to befriend the enemy for personal gain. In conditions of war and occupation by a foreign military power, collaboration with the dominant power and resistance against it necessarily occur side-by-side in everyday social life, yet because such acts constitute part of the hidden transcript, they shall never come to full light.
1 See, for example, George Roeder, Jr, who discusses the careful monitoring of the visual representation of the Second World War by the Roosevelt administration, which withdrew or released images of death so as to regulate public reaction to the war.
2 Foucault’s idea of power as ‘the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate’ (Foucault 92) and his proposition that ‘there is no binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations’ (94) may be applied to peacetime societies but not to wartime situations or totalitarian states. Scott’s Gramscian approach to social anthropology helps to explain political practices used especially in situations where ideological or other types of control are of immediate concern to the state.
3 Play scripts were submitted in duplicate to the members of the censoring committees. One copy would be returned to the theatre company with indications about required cuts or changes; the other copy would be kept on file.
4 References to conditions of the Occupation (especially hunger and lack of food) were banned, as were references to mountains and the countryside because they signified freedom and resistance. Likewise, the use of national Greek costumes on stage was forbidden because they symbolized national independence.
5 Translations from the Greek here and throughout are mine.
6 For an excellent, comprehensive study of the conditions in the period 1941–4, see Mazower, especially chapters 3–6.
7 Günther Altenburg, Hitler’s official representative in Greece, was especially alarmed by the starvation deaths and was sensitive to the criticism that was being levelled at the Germans. He wrote to Hitler about the problem, saying that Germany was taking food out of the country instead of bringing it in and that Greece must be helped economically and not be allowed to fall into political and military chaos (Mazower 24, 27). However, the Führer did not show any special concern about the matter and the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture was opposed to sending supplies to Greece (Mazower 27).
8 The establishment in 1942 of the influential Art Theatre by the later renowned Greek director Karolos Koun is an example of creative, resistance-inspired work in this period.
9 When the Cotopouli company restaged Othello later in 1951 and took the production on tour to Egypt and Cyprus, Myrat, who played the black general again, wrote a review of his performance, which he published anonymously in a Cypriot daily and later reprinted under the title ‘Self-Criticism of an Othello.’ In this review article Myrat analyses the character of Othello, whom he describes as a noble, self-possessed man with a primitive inner core. He states that Othello must be portrayed as a ‘self-controlled man,’ not as ‘an enraged beast’ (Myrat 75) and considers the general’s behaviour in the fourth act as an outbreak of his primitivism, a momentary loss of self-control. The interpretation of 1942 agrees with that of 1951 on many points, but not on the issue of Othello’s colour; Myrat presented Othello in the earlier performance as a dark-skinned ‘Iudean,’ but in the later one as a Negro (79).
10 The Occupation conditions short-circuited the usual route of reception. Whereas normally four or five critics would review a Shakespeare production, this time only Michalis Rodas appears to have written a review, in which he expresses his disappointment at the results of Myrat’s studied effort. The production did not enjoy a continuous run. Performances ceased four days after the show opened because all theatres were closed down for a three-week period by order of the occupying powers due to the threat (or ostensible threat) of an epidemic. Performances of Othello resumed in February 1943, but by that time public attention had been lost.
11 According to Olympia Papadouka, an actress who participated in and later wrote about the Resistance, Myrat was the secretary of the theatre branch of the National Liberation Front (Papadouka 325).
12 See also Yiorgos Theotokas, ‘I periptosi tou Spyrou Mela’ [The case of Spyros Melas], Nea Estia 44 (1948): 953–6.
13 Quadrivio advertised itself on its pages as the organ of ‘the New Order’ and actively sought contributions from well-known Italian and Greek authors. This publication was a propagandistic attempt (a ‘public transcript’) on the part of the Nazis to show their good face, while at the same time it may also have been part of the ‘private transcript’ between the Italians and Germans, with the former showing off to the latter. Quadrivio was published by the Italian forces in Athens as a supplement of Tiveris, a pro-Nazi daily paper that circulated in Rome in 1933–43.
14 Theodore Kritas, a former actor who worked as theatre manager in the occupation years, records an instance when Melas had asked the Italian commander to intervene on his behalf in a squabble he had with a specific theatre company (Kritas 195–7).
15 Publication of the Shakespeare Jahrbuch was suspended from 1940 to 1945. When it resumed in 1946, the journal offered an overview of Shakespeare performances in Germany and Austria during the war years.
16 Through their embassy in Spain, the Germans claimed that the book was politically dangerous. After an exchange of correspondence on the matter, Franco’s Falange did not comply with the German request, ‘most likely because Werfel’s book was already in circulation and Germany did not have a strong argument against it remaining so, other than the author’s Jewish heritage’ (Bowen 138).
17 Greek author Yiorgos Theotokas comments on the cruelty of the Germans, but says that they were not as passionate about matters of secondary importance to them as the Italians were. He records in his diary for 26 September 1943, after the departure of the Italian forces: ‘German censorship is much more liberal than the Italian. Today we write whatever we want as long as we don’t criticize Germany’s hegemonic struggle’ (430).
18 According to Alan Sinfield, a ‘faultline’ is a flaw in the political structure caused by a disjunction between the ideological and military power (Sinfield 40). I use this critical term here not to suggest an ideological rift between the two Axis powers, but rather to indicate the points of cultural friction, which rendered their ostensibly unified power breakable and exposed its hidden transcript to the occupied.
19 On the animosity between the Germans and the Italians, see also Mazower 84.
20 The German soldiers would recount with pleasure the story of a Greek shoe black who mocked the carabinieri on the street by raising his arms high and calling out ‘Bella Grecia,’ the phrase the Italian soldiers had used at the Albanian border when they surrendered to the Greeks (Mazower 60).
21 McCloskey suggests that Hitler was envious of French culture and antagonistic towards Paris as the embodiment of high European art. ‘Hitler had toyed with the idea of destroying Paris altogether,’ she writes, but he changed his mind after a visit to the French capital, which he decided to let stand ‘as a diminished and humiliated relic soon to be surpassed by the grandeur of the new Berlin’ (21).
22 During the Occupation period the National Theatre staged plays by Sophocles (Oedipus), Molière (The Miser, The Misanthrope, and Tartuffe), Euripides (Iphigenia at Tauris, Medea, and Hecuba), Goldoni (The Fan), Dimitris Horn (To Fyntanaki [The Novice]), Goethe (Faust), Schiller (Louisa Miller), Calderón (The Phantom Lady), Kornaros (Abraham’s Sacrifice), Levidis (The Shepherd and the Nymph), Ibsen (A Doll’s House), Lessing (Minna von Barnhelm and Emilia Galotti), Synadinos (In the Heat of the Summer) Terzakis (The Big Game), and Bogris (The Engagement).
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