One of his legacies as a playwright lies in his attempt to contribute to a truly felt reconciliation between Germans and Jews. Konrad P. Liessmann appropriately called him a "reconciliation artist" who surely deserves to flourish outside the German-speaking theater.
Although Tabori gained British citizenship in 1941 and adopted English as his language, he has always been more of a cosmopolitan, a migrant who has lived and worked in nineteen different countries throughout his life. He certainly would not align himself with any nationality. As quoted by Jörg W. Gronius and Wendy Kässens in Tabori (1989), he has asserted that "My home is the stage, my bed, and books."
Tabori was born 24 May 1914 in Budapest--at the time still part of the Hapsburg Empire--to Cornelius Tabori, a Jewish journalist and left-wing intellectual, and his wife, Elsa. Tabori's upbringing was nonreligious, and he often states that he only became aware that he was a Jew with the rise of fascism in Germany and Hungary. After the matura in 1932 he started an apprenticeship in a hotel in Berlin, where he witnessed Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933. He returned to Hungary in May but spent another three months in Germany in 1934, working in a Dresden hotel.
This is a free page. This page contains 190 words. This
biography contains 4,248 words (approx. 14 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our George Tabori Access Pass.
