Many years ago, in the mid-1990s, while I was preparing a show about the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in Trieste, I learned about Aktion Te Vier, Action Ti Quattro, the first Nazi mass extermination: the elimination of seventy thousand Germans, including the mentally ill, the handicapped, the disabled and children with malformations.
Why did I learn about it? Because the same laborers, the same squads of butchers from T4, who for the first time experimented and used techniques that would later prove fundamental to the Final Solution, after having exterminated about two million Polish Jews in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, were sent to Trieste to manage the Risiera.
When I saw Ausmerzen by Marco Paolini, which talked about everything that had determined, preceded and followed T4, I was deeply moved. A real punch in the stomach. Paolini, with profound theatrical wisdom, makes us understand in a clear and crystalline way how a new science, then called eugenics, which pursued racial hygiene, with sterilization first and physical elimination afterwards, was one of the elements that favored the birth of Nazism and not the other way around. Racism has always existed, but at the end of the 19th century it found rational confirmation in a science (or pseudo science) and became state eugenics, to protect the “good part” of the population. And the German doctors, who adhered to it in a significant way, no longer had to cure but to “defend healthy genes” and expel the “weak” and “contaminators of the race”.
It is too simplistic to limit ourselves to dividing the world between the poor victims (ballasexistenzen, ballast existences) and the evil executioners (the Nazis). The genesis of the delirium of the pure Aryan race and the resulting consequences are more complex and disturbing. Heavy consequences, because we still find ourselves dealing with those ideas, which have taken root deeply, which have become incarnate and which are not so easy to eradicate, much, much more than we think or can imagine.
March 11th will mark the centenary of the birth of Franco Basaglia, who was not only the one who revolutionized the history of psychiatry. When he was very young he had also been imprisoned for six months because he distributed anti-fascist leaflets. For this season of the Teatro della Cooperativa, as artistic director I had thought of some initiative dedicated to the great Venetian psychiatrist. I asked Marco Paolini if he could bring Ausmerzen to us. When I called him, after telling me that his commitments prevented him, he proposed: “Why don’t you do it?”. An idea that I immediately accepted because it seemed like a truly excellent opportunity to try my hand at one of his most interesting and profound works and to add a further piece to my theatrical journey of research, study and in-depth study on themes related to the great History of the past century and especially the Second World War.
Alongside me on stage there will be Barbara Apuzzo, a disabled actress, a friend who has frequented our theater since the beginning and who with her voice, her body and her physical presence will make Ausmerzen’s message even clearer.
