Dacula - Victim and Victimizer

In C.P. Taylor's Good and Martin Sherman's Bent, the line between victim and victimizer is blurred. Both protagonists in the plays transition from victim to victimizer, and for one protagonist, briefly reverts back to victim.

In Bent, the protagonist Max, a prominent gay man, does not initially seem reluctant to admitting his sexuality to himself or to others around him. Our perception of him quickly changes when a Sturmabteilung soldier that he sleeps with is brutally killed by SS soliders in Max's apartment.. He and his boyfriend Rudy flee from their home in Berlin, taking on new identities and leading a brief nomadic life in an attempt to cross the border. Max appears to be the victim at first, a man who is forced to flee his hometown because he acted on his inescapable sexual orientation. However, the fact that Max denies his own sexuality after this incident and denies professing his love to Rudy while they are runaways also puts Max in the category of victimizer. 

We see Max changing from victim to victimizer in the train scene as well. Max and Rudy are eventually captured and placed on a train headed for Dachau. The SS soldiers brutally beat Rudy on the apparent basis that he wears glasses. As Rudy is taken away by the soldiers, he calls for Max to help him, but Max does not answer. In doing so, Max victimizes himself by making the decision to deny his true self. He destroys his own dignity by having intercourse with young dead girl to prove his heterosexuality. Max once again exemplifies the victimizer, defiling the dignity of the young girl and once again denying himself. Max chooses to be labeled as a Jew with a yellow star instead of gay with a pink triangle in hopes that the concentration camps will be less brutal if he labels himself this way. At the camp, he meets and falls in love with Horst, a gay man who helps Max realize that by acknowledging his true self, he can have dignity for himself. Horst is killed by soldiers at the camp, and Max puts on Horst’s jacket with the pink triangle and commits suicide. This action is symbolic of max reverting from victimizer to victim. For that brief moment before he commits suicide, Max finally regains dignity by admitting his sexuality to himself.

In Good, not only is the line between victim and victimizer blurred and shifted from time to time, but also the concept of what merits a man to deemed “good.” Is good defined as rooted in morality, or is good defined as obedient to our superiors? German professor John Halder begins the play as a man unsure of which side to be on, the SS and Nazi party or against them. In the end, he finds himself involved with the Third Reich, suppressing his moral conscience and unknowingly corrupting it. We see Halder indirectly help the Reich by assisting in the execution of millions of people, notably through his book on euthanasia. Halder is the victim at the beginning of the play, unsure of himself or where his moral conscience is telling him to go. Halder is a victim of the political and moral corruption that surrounds him, forcing him to choose between his morale and what society defines as acceptable and “good.” As the play progresses, our view of him as victim quickly diminishes. As much as Halder tries to convince himself that in spite of his involvement and in spite of suppressing his morals, he can still see himself as a “good” man, the audience is unconvinced.  Halder remains the victimizer by the end of the play.

Through these two works, we begin to understand that when it comes to the Holocaust, concrete labels for each person may not necessarily be easy to do. We learn from Bent and Good that not every person involved in this mass execution can be labeled as strictly the “victim” and strictly the “victimizer,” although that may certainly be true for the majority of people involved.