Memorial Page for George Tabori (née György Tábori)

George Tabori (born György Tábori on 24 May 1914 in Budapest; died 23 July 2007 in Berlin) was a Hungarian-British writer, playwright, screenwriter, translator and theatre director. He connected exile, Jewish experience, British and American years and German postwar theatre in work that refused to let memory become ceremonial and fixed.

Budapest, Berlin and exile

Tabori grew up in a Jewish family in Budapest. In the early 1930s he went to Berlin and Dresden for training in the hotel trade and saw the rise of National Socialism at close range. In 1936 he emigrated to London. His father Cornelius Tabori was later murdered in Auschwitz; his mother survived deportation. This family history remained a core element of his work.

London and America

In Britain Tabori worked as a journalist, translator, BBC employee and for a time with British intelligence. In 1947 he moved to the United States. There he wrote novels, plays and screenplays, including work on Alfred Hitchcock's film I Confess. He moved among exiled writers and worked with Bertolt Brecht. Tabori wrote for many years in English before his theatre had its strongest effect in the German-speaking world.

Theatre about memory

With plays such as The Cannibals, Mein Kampf and My Mother's Courage, Tabori brought violence, antisemitism and German memory onto the stage. His humour did not soften the subject. It opened a space in which fear, guilt, grotesque elements and tenderness could appear side by side. That was why his productions in German theatre were both uncomfortable and fruitful.

Return to the German-speaking world

In 1971 Tabori came to Germany on a DAAD fellowship. He worked in Berlin, Bremen, Munich and Vienna, founded the Bremen Theatre Laboratory and later directed Theater Der Kreis in Vienna. In rehearsals he combined text work, improvisation and physical presence. Actors described him as a director who demanded precision while allowing contradiction, play and risk.

Recognition

In the 1980s and 1990s Tabori became an important figure in German-language theatre. He received many awards, including the Mülheim Dramatists' Prize and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1992. From 1999 he worked at the Berliner Ensemble. His work remained cosmopolitan: Budapest, London, New York, Berlin and Vienna were not just stations, but different languages and memory spaces of his theatre.

Farewell

George Tabori died in Berlin on 23 July 2007. He was 93 years old. His memory is linked with a theatre that did not evade the violence of the twentieth century and still trusted wit, humanity and the openness of play.