by Richard Lord
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” American playwright Bess Wohl would most probably agree with that insight.
Bess Wohl is one of America’s many highly regarded younger playwrights. She’s gained plaudits for her inventive approach to subject matter and the wide range of her dramatic investigations. Back in the late summer of 2022, People’s Light in Malvern gave us a production of Grand Horizons, which was Wohl’s take on the contemporary phenomenon of grey divorce. South Philly’s own Theater Exile has now brought us a solid production of Wohl’s Camp Siegfried, which is her take on an almost forgotten phenomenon of the American 1930s: the push for robust support of the Nazi regime here in America.
The title of the play is taken from the name of a real German nationalist summer camp run by the Nazi-aligned German American Bund for six years, starting in 1936. This camp operated on Long Island, just at the edge of a pleasant community with the unfortunate name of Yaphank.
The play is a two-hander. The two characters we encounter have the too-easy-to-remember labels of Him and Her. Her (handled nicely by Jenna Kuerzi) is a 16-year old who admits to having some English blood in her ancestry. Him (played convincingly by Adam Howard) is more kern deutsch (German through-and-through). One year older than Her, Him is a veteran of these camp summers. He’s all too keen to guide newbie Her through all the wonderful possibilities Camp Siegfried offers. Regular fun activities at the camp include things like swimming, hiking, barbecues, bonfires, songfests, underage drinking of beer, splashes of German culture – and, oh yes, seeding deep affection for Adolf Hitler and Nazi ideology.
As the play opens, Her is not at all sure of her place in the camp; she seems ready to admit she doesn’t really belong. In fact, her attendance is more because of prompting by her aunt. Meanwhile, Him seems quite assured of himself and his views. In the early scenes, he voices his pride at being German and asserts there’s nothing in their German heritage that German-Americans need to apologize for. The fellow sounds quite reasonable at this stage: the long history of German/Austrian culture did produce quite a lot to be proud of. In those scenes, there’s nothing nefarious about Him’s pride, although he seems to have a bit too much respect, maybe even fondness, for Fritz Kuhn, the devoutly Nazi leader of the Bund.
Nonetheless, the play does not really delve all that deeply into the political possibilities at play there. Wohl hints at what drives the malignant growth of fascism: an appeal to atavistic tribalism that taps into the darker regions of the human soul. She also shows why Him, the self-proclaimed “runt” of his family, could be pulled ever more into the fold of dedicated Nazis.
No, this is not the play that examines the appeal of Naziism to many Americans young and old during the long years of the Great Depression. The drama actually is much more focused on the developing relationship between Him and Her. It’s not a breezy summer romance piece, however; Nazi ideology and allegiance to that ideology is just another factor in the problems of two teenagers struggling to navigate the twisting waves of their emotions in a difficult time.
One of the achievements of Bess Wohl’s writing here is how she deftly tracks the changing psychological dynamic between these two young people. A clear reversal in that dynamic takes place as the play proceeds: the nervous girl we see in the early going grows stronger, more self-confident, while the assured young veteran of Bund-run programs slinks further into self-doubt and his need for something solid to grab onto.
Wohl also gives nods to the link between that dark chapter from American history and our current political climate. Twice in the play (including in her big moment in the camp festivities), he character Her says that she believes that America “kann wieder grossartig sein”. The best translation of that phrase is “America can be great again”, with its clear echoes of the movement led by a present-day American political figure of German ancestry with pronounced authoritarian tendencies.
Director Deborah Block deftly guides her two-handed cast through the changes and the emotional swings the text requires of them. It’s a direction that’s clean and clear, relying on the precision of the text and the strengths of the two performers.
As mentioned, both Jenna Kuerzi and Adam Howard do fine jobs bringing these two teens to life.
Howard’s Him manages to remain a somewhat sympathetic character even as we see him drawn into the vortex of Nazi ideology. He hits all the right notes, even the sour ones, as he delivers an admirable account of this confused young man using borrowed bravado as a shield for his insecurities.
Her is actually the more complex role in the piece, and Jenna Kuerzi does a fine job of exploring its complexities. We see Her emerging from her own tight web of insecurities to become a more focused young woman gaining some control of the situations she’s been pulled into.
The transformation is handled nicely. In the early going, Kuerzi’s pronunciation of her new German vocabulary is recht furchtbar: quite awful. (German language lessons are part of the camp’s activities for monolingual American kids.) By the time she delivers a speech as the play moves to its climax, her pronunciation has certainly improved, though it still needs some work. This wince-worthy pronunciation is quite intentional, I suspect; it shows that she’s only dipping her toes in the swamp of ugly German nationalism. Her improvement in pronunciation is a sign of either warming up to the ideology or cold cynicism. (Him’s accent is, by the way, better than Her’s right from the start.)
Him and Her. Okay, I’ve held back long enough. I simply cannot understand why playwright Wohl gives her characters those tags. I guess she thought she could make some relevant statement about the universality of being tempted by toxic ideologies, but it just doesn’t take in this play. In Creative Writing courses, we often tell aspiring writers to come up with good names for their characters early on. This makes the characters more real for the writers themselves, and then more appealing to potential readers or audience members. True, the characters never call each other Him or Her, but it would have defined them even more if Wohl had given them fitting names which they could have shared with each other on that first meeting.
But back to the Theatre Exile production. Marie Laster’s set leans towards minimalism, which is fitting in this production. Christopher Colucci handled the sound design well, as is typical of his work. The musical blends work nicely, and we hear echoes of Wagner, appropriate as Richard Wagner was absolutely Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer.
An(gela)/Rayne Bey costumes capture the look of the fashions favored at Nazi-inflected youth camps, Emily Shuman’s props add another realistic element to the production, and Drew Billiau’s lighting design puts the ribbon on a quite commendable production.
Camp Siegfried is certainly not Bess Wohl’s best play, but it is a worthwhile piece. More, recent events in this country and many other parts of the world in recent weeks make it ever more relevant. Sadly so.
Camp Siegfried runs at Theatre Exile 1340 S. 13th Street (Philadelphia) thru Sunday, November 19. Performances are Thursdays, 7:00; Fridays and Saturdays 8:00; Sundays 3:00. There will also be a Wednesday, 3:00 performance on November 15 as well as a second Saturday performance at 3:00 on November 18.
The Trivia Trail
As noted above, Camp Siegfried held its first summer camp session in 1936, which also happened to be the summer of the famous Berlin Summer Olympics. Its last year of operation was 1941. Several months after Siegfried folded the tents on that edition, Hitler’s regime declared war against America, pulling the US into the European conflict which had been raging for over two years. This signalled the end for those hazy, crazy days of Siegfried summers.
The German American Bund itself was dissolved in 1941, shortly after America and Germany officially went to war with each other.
As alluded to in the play, the town of Yaphank actually did have streets that bore the names of Hitler, Dr. Goebbels and Hermann Göring during the Thirties. Not surprisingly, those streets were quickly renamed after Germany and America went to war with each other.
Another of the summer camps run by the Bund was Deutschhorst Country Club in nearby Sellersville in Bucks County. This camp was opened in 1938. Area residents reported that many of the cars in the camp parking lots had their license plates covered with paper bags; their owners were apparently fearful that FBI agents might be keeping tabs on them.
A reconverted grist mill on the 40-acre property was used as the local headquarters of the German American Bund. Fritz Kuhn, then head of the Bund, appeared at Deutschhorst that first summer and delivered his notorious “Hitler can lick anybody” speech.
Fritz Kuhn appeared again at this camp on September 3, 1939, or two days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, sparking World War II. Apparently, Kuhn had arrived to play the role of apologist for the German invasion, assuring concerned camp attendees and Bund members that everything was going to be alright, they just needed to put their trust in dem Fuehrer.