Arthur Miller and Kristallnacht
Broken Glass by Arthur Miller
Library Theatre, Manchester, 1997
Broken Glass premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre New Haven, Connecticut on 1 March 1994, but the events which inspired it had lain dormant in Miller’s conscience for over fifty years. It had its genesis in a strange phenomenon the playwright had encountered during the war. A woman suddenly lost the use of her legs and doctors were baffled as to both the cause and how to treat the condition. The woman’s husband was also afflicted with the compulsion to dress only in black, “as if,” Miller observed, “he was in mourning for his life.” The two images came together in a play which in an early version was to be called The Man in Black.
Since writing the play Miller has discovered that the anecdote he heard was by no means an isolated incident. Many Jews in America suffered disablement to a greater or lesser degree, and recent times have produced similar phenomena in the reported cases of hysterical blindness among Cambodian women brought on by the actions of the Khmer Rouge. Miller the playwright has taken the image and used it as a metaphor for withdrawal. But the point is that such withdrawal can be painful, and its physical form could simply be the outward manifestation of a deeper psychic problem. Denial of the truth and abnegation of personal responsibility can ultimately turn inwards and start destroying an individual as surely as if they were standing squarely in the paths of the bombs, the bullets and the cudgels.
The play is set in Brooklyn a few days after Kristallnacht, the orgy of violence that overwhelmed the Jewish community in Germany following the assassination of a minor diplomat in the German embassy in Paris in November 1938. America at the time, like the rest of the world, seemed powerless, or at best unwilling, to intervene in the affairs of the European state, despite all the evidence there had been throughout the thirties to indicate that Nazism had its genocidal sights fixed firmly on several non-Aryan communities of which the Jews were only the most numerous. One of the themes of the play – indeed, one of Miller’s most consistently explored themes – is how national morality can influence and ultimately overwhelm personal values. Here, as in The Crucible, he poses the simple question “What happens when you can’t walk away?”, and the true measure of a character is how he or she chooses to cross that final bridge when they come to it.
The Depression had brought many Americans face to face with an uncomfortable reality for the first time. It had proved to a hitherto stable and self-confident country that nothing was certain, and the whole fabric of existence could crumble overnight. The Jewish community felt the truth of this more than anyone as the Gellburgs’ New York, no less than Europe, was particularly rife with anti-Semitism. “The social contract was being torn up in America,” Miller wrote, “while in Europe the fascists were destroying the underlying web of obligations that keep society in place.” It wasn’t just the political fabric of society which the Depression tore up either. The effects were felt everywhere, in human relationships on the small scale of the family just as much as in the worldwide sense of indifference which so long delayed America’s entry into the war. When two people in a marriage lose the habit of sympathy and understanding with each other, what hope is there that they will be able to feel anything for their fellow man beyond the confines of the life they share?
And such problems are still with us. Fifty years and more after its end, the Second World War may seem as distant and irrelevant as Agincourt to a modern audience, but all the horrors that led up to it were only typical of many nations’ reluctance to face up to their social responsibilities on a global scale. According to Miller, “All the patriotism and the ethnic nationalism is knocking on the door and it’s as dangerous as it ever was.” Look at Iran in the eighties and, even more recently, Rwanda. In 1994 Sarajevo was fired on by armed militia who could not see their human targets any more clearly than the fascist pilots who bombed the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937. Sarajevo happened during rehearsals for Broken Glass and inspired a characteristically indignant response from the playwright: “They blew up sixteen children and did you see anybody pause on his way to lunch?” Yet responsibility is something we must accept in order to remain human, and surely the greatest sin of all is to pretend that we are powerless to alter the course of events. It is this kind of moral and physical paralysis, Miller maintains, that could destroy the world, and is the fundamental theme at the heart of his drama.
As the scholar and Miller expert Christopher Bigsby wrote in 1995 on the play’s first appearance in Britain at the National Theatre: “A good deal more than glass is broken in this play. Society is at odds with itself; individual relationships are fractured. In Miller’s words, Broken Glass is concerned with ‘a public concern and a private neurosis’. The task is ‘to find that juncture where they actually meet’. On one level they meet in the mind of a woman, shocked into paralysis. To understand the cause of her distress may thus be to understand, too, something of that greater failure of charity, of love, which it shadows.”