Memory and Pain: A Critical Examination of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt through the Holocaust

Abstract

Tom Stoppard, a playwright of Jewish origin born in 1937 and still alive, reflects his own past in terms of the Holocaust in his 2020 play Leopoldstadt. While Leopoldstadt conveys Stoppard’s life from past to present as an autobiographical family story, it also confronts the author with his painful past in the modern age. Besides the modern individual and Europe, both having undergone development and transformation with Modernity and Modernism, the traumatic traces left behind by the historical process reveal the reality of the Holocaust. In this respect, Leopoldstadt is important in terms of understanding the impact of the characters’ confrontation with their past memories and unforgettable traces caused by the Holocaust on the memory of modern and postmodern Jewish societies. The theoretical framework of this study is based on Zygmunt Bauman’s views on modernity. Bauman is a thinker who has made significant contributions to the issues of modernity and the Holocaust, and his work contains important explanations for understanding the complexities of the modern world. His critique of modernity also leads Leopoldstadt to address the effects of the Holocaust and the dark sides of the modern world. This study focuses on how Stoppard, who experienced the devastating effects of the Holocaust, addresses the interplay between his Jewish identity and the challenges he faced in the modern age. The aim of this study is to evaluate the traumatic painful realities of the historical process in the play Leopoldstadt from the perspective of the relationship between memory and history.

Keywords

• stoppard
• bauman
• modernite
• holokost
• otobiyografi
• stoppard
• bauman
• modernity
• holocaust
• autobiography