摘要：How to represent the Holocaust, a historical experience that largely exceeds our imagination, on stage? In its seminal performance Kamp, the Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern addresses this question by literally restaging the experience of Auschwitz on a miniature scale. Kamp is not just a simple attempt to commemorate a particularly painful episode in our recent Western history, the performance makes the spectator think about what we experience as ‘real’ in this recollection and, at the same time, how this memory is determined by various cultural conventions. This self-reflexive perspective, I will argue, is a truly baroque strategy. In this article I will therefore return to the religious wars at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. There, too, concrete violent historical circumstances led to a fundamentally violent theatrical imagination, to a spectacular ‘theatre of the real’. At the same time, this theatre simultaneously put itself, or rather the idea of theatrical representation itself, at stake. It is this meta-perspective that makes it possible not only to show the unbearable, but also to understand the constructed nature of historical memory.
