Opinion: Gettysberg and Katowice

"Poland once asked that you die for Gdańsk, I now ask you to live for it."

Lech Wałęsa
Speech to Joint Session of the United States Congress, November 15, 1989

Two plays by French Philosopher Jean Genet are being performed this season, both characteristic of the theater of the absurd.

The theater of the absurd is often criticized for being ridiculous rather than noble; for preferring to celebrate the equivocation of the high and the low. It aims to demonstrate that life is essentially nauseating, and in this respect often fails to impress the broad mass of mankind for the simple reason that nausea is not a permanent state in human life. The theater of the absurd proposes that it should be.

The recent tragic accident in Katowice, where scores of people were killed and injured when the roof of an exhibition hall collapsed on them last week, also suggests that it should be. Even if we accept the comfort of the Church or the mere fact of accidental death, we are still left in a world similar to the one presented by Genet's plays; where life is absurd, where heroism or beauty are illusions or expressions of will painted over a cruel universe.

Abraham Lincoln, standing over the battlefield at Gettysburg, a picture of which Polish experts are helping to restore, did not find the spectacle of death absurd.

He assured mankind in his momentous speech, that the sacrifice of the dead would not be in vain so long as we the living dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work of those who fell in the battle for a "new birth of freedom."

Gettysburg and Katowice are not unrelated. The men who fell at Gettysburg struggled for a freedom and equality enjoyed by the men, women and children who died in Katowice.

We are often accustomed to complain that our lives are now too mundane, too routine, too absurd. We forget that the soldiers who fought, whether in Gettysburg or in Gdańsk, gave their lives precisely so that we could make such complaints, rather than bleed under slavery and oppression.

Katowice cries out that life is absurd, but if we cup our ears, we might yet hear the fallen of Gettysburg and Gdańsk joining in our sorrow, yet content that their deaths meant that we could die amongst family, friends and birds, rather than on bloodied fields of war.

Peter S Rieth, Zbigniew Raszewski Theatrical Institute