HOTEL MAYFLOWER: Why Write This Play?
Persisting in my belief that drama can connect human struggles past and present
Get a copy of Hotel Mayflower at Sea Urchin or Water Row Books or the Moloko Print shop.
Long-buried links between Ernst Toller, Ilse Herzfeld Klapper Burroughs, and William Burroughs before Toller’s suicide in 1939 sparked my desire to write Hotel Mayflower.
Yet mere excavation is obviously insufficient. What does this story mean today? Why should people care?
Creating plays about history means having a passion for research. I have written before about the inspiration offered by the late playwright Trevor Griffiths. He said once in an interview:
I try to find out the whole map of the ground that we’re dealing with… I think the job, really, is to cover the ground enormously thoroughly, so that you really do appropriate it. You own that territory. You might use but a thousandth of the materials you’ve actually sought to master. But each piece that you use, each nugget that you use, will be connected, organically, to another hundred or another thousand pieces. It’s like a bed from which the text will grow.
As I worked on Hotel Mayflower, the questions raised by the landscape were both large and small. What were the visa policies of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that proved so dangerous for Ilse Klapper? What was the weather in Manhattan on January 24 and May 22, 1939? What would Toller have heard on the radio?
Asking and answering questions is only part of the journey. Again: What is the point?
As I wrote, the parallels between 1939 and today proved startling and weighty. (The infamous American Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939 that year provides a useful window into today’s resurgent fascism.)
Three larger things continue to stick out for me now when I recall why I wrote Hotel Mayflower: questions about revolution, the vanishing/erasure of Holocaust narratives, and the relationship between theatre and history.
Say You Want a Revolution?
Ernst Toller was a key revolutionary figure in Germany in 1918 and 1919 – and not only as a writer. Indeed, his global success as a playwright and poet was fueled by his political activities in the Bavarian Soviet Republic – and his imprisonment for being one of its leaders.
Yet as Toller moved past his early Expressionist works and into the role of a public intellectual after being released from jail in 1924, his political views became more nuanced. He never lost his identification with the working classes, nor his advocacy for human dignity. But in plays such as The German Hinkemann and Hoppla, wir Leben!, Toller dug deeper into the vexing challenges at the intersection of individual destiny and collective action.
These questions cast even further shadows for Toller over ensuing years. His deep involvement with the Spanish Civil War must have exposed him to the immense contradictions within that struggle – especially as the Republican cause was infiltrated and subverted by Josef Stalin’s minions.
While records do remain of Toller’s impassioned and ultimately doomed efforts to aid Spain, much of his personal correspondence from 1938 and 1939 has been lost. (It was likely destroyed after his suicide, but that’s another tale.) But it seems impossible that Toller was oblivious to the internal dissension and violence within the ranks of those who opposed Francisco Franco’s fascists.
By 1939, Toller’s views of revolution must have darkened perceptibly. Certainly, his sense that the left alone could vanquish Hitler and Mussolini had vanished. He gave speech after speech calling for a unified front against totalitarianism.
Toller’s shift in viewpoint from 1919 to 1939 suffuses my characterization of him in Hotel Mayflower. As I wrote, I thought often about some sentences uttered by Polish poet Aleksander Wat in his memoir, My Century.
Wat describes how editing the Literary Monthly (Miesięcznik literacki)– one of the great Polish socialist journals of the period between the wars – exposed him to internal battles within leftist politics in that era. Then he adds:
But I was also increasingly in touch with people’s wounds, their suffering, their endless suffering. For some of them there seemed to be no remedy apart from a revolution. Only later did I learn that a revolution would bring those people nothing but new sufferings. But I didn’t know that then.
A Deeper Weave
We should have universal and ready access to the narrative – and the lessons – of the Holocaust by now. No lack of energy has been expended in chronicling its evils. Nor are we lacking in vivid examples of how humans manufacture inhumane and brutally effective systems of oppression and death. And we also know (or should know) how average people become complicit in their operation – or numbed to the wreckage they create within a society.
So it seems incomprehensible in 2024 that our society is rife with so many of the Holocaust’s obvious evils. Antisemitism, yes. Racism, indubitably. But also the specific hatreds of manifold “others”: immigrants, or those who profess a different faith or sexual preference.
How does Charlottesville happen if we truly know the story?
Many people in our own moment have consigned the lessons of the Holocaust to history. And as the last survivors of the death camps (or the invasion of Normandy) pass away, we are losing a vital human connection to these terrible events.
The power and pungency of our narratives about these events – rooted in evidence – must now carry this burden. So the connection between William Burroughs and the story of the Holocaust presents a unique opportunity to connect these stories of exile, escape and extermination to broader American cultural and literary currents.
Burroughs’ fiction remains immensely relevant. His world of viruses, addiction, and oppression continues to resonate powerfully in 2024. Thus, a largely-ignored story from his life before fame – when he married a woman 14 years older than himself and saved her from deportation back to Nazi Germany – should attract more attention as another bright link in our narrative chain that runs from the 1930s to our moment.
This work is at the center of Hotel Mayflower. And scholars such as Thomas Antonic – in his book, Among Nazis – delve even deeper into this story: taking up not only William Burroughs’ “velvet marriage” to Ilse Herzfeld Klapper, but also his time in the University of Vienna’s medical school, where many of his instructors were fervent Austrian Nazis.
In a moment when we must identify and tell these stories with all of our skill, the story I tell in Hotel Mayflower is important.
Blowing Dust from the Books
As I wrote Hotel Mayflower, I was reading a lot of German writer and director Heiner Müller. His work possesses deep and swift currents of thinking about the role that history plays in making theatre — and the high stakes.
Take this exchange between Müller and Sylvère Lotringer in the early 1980s, published in Germania – a 1990 Semiotext(e) collection of interviews and assorted short texts:
MÜLLER: A critic saw in my last plays an attack on history, the linear concept of history. He read in them the rebellion of the body against ideas, or more precisely, the impact of ideas, and the idea of history, on human bodies. This is indeed my theatrical point: the thrusting on stage of bodies and their conflict with ideas. As long as there are ideas, there are wounds. Ideas are inflicting wounds on the body.
LOTRINGER: Ideas produce dead bodies. As long as you have history …
MÜLLER: … you have victims.
Which ideas wound the bodies of my characters in Hotel Mayflower? Fascism. Political exile. The notion of books (and knowledge) as dangerous. Individual liberty. The difficult compromises of democracy and nonviolence.
In his foreword to A Heiner Müller Reader, playwright Tony Kushner describes the German writer’s work as “plays for history’s theater” – a history that “is not time gone by but rather frighteningly present.” He sees both toxicity and immediacy at the center of Müller’s work:
History is the corpse rising out of the hastily dug pit. History lingers as a poison vapor in the present air, we draw it into our lungs with every breath.
As fascism and racism and antisemitism and all the other evils we thought that we had banished rise again to threaten civility, dignity, and decency in our society, we need history plays.
Filling this particular need is what animates Hotel Mayflower and many of my other plays. In our moment, it is an essential task.