History isn't just written by the victors. It's stored in dusty albums, tucked away in desk drawers, and occasionally stumbled upon by archivists who know what they're looking at. When a mysterious photo album landed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum back in 2007, nobody knew it would eventually spark one of the most provocative theatrical experiences of our decade. That album belonged to Karl Höcker, an adjutant at Auschwitz. The images inside didn't show the expected horrors of the gas chambers or emaciated prisoners. Instead, they showed mass murderers laughing, eating blueberries, and playing accordion.
That chilling dissonance forms the beating heart of Here There Are Blueberries, the documentary play by Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich that made its way to Broadway at the Schoenfeld Theatre. Theatergoers often expect history plays to offer clear-cut villains and noble heroes. This production refuses to give you that comfort. It forces you to look directly at the banality of evil.
The Ordinary Faces of Extraordinary Monsters
We grow up watching cinematic depictions of Nazis that cast them as snarling caricatures. Hollywood loves a mustache-twirling monster. The reality is far more disturbing. The Höcker album exposes men who loved dogs, celebrated birthdays, and shared quiet moments with female secretaries, all while orchestrating the industrial slaughter of thousands of human beings daily.
When you sit in the theater, the tension comes from watching museum archivists Rebecca Erbelding and her team pore over these black-and-white prints. They aren't staring at battle plans. They're staring at snapshots of a summer camp picnic, except the camp is Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the picnickers are SS officers.
You see Richard Baer, the camp commandant, smiling brightly. You see Josef Mengele chatting near a rustic lodge. These details strip away the distance we put between ourselves and historical atrocities. They look like normal people. That is precisely why the play shakes you to your core. It suggests that ordinary humans are entirely capable of compartmentalizing monstrous acts while enjoying everyday pleasures.
Why This Story Belonged on the Stage
Documentary theater operates differently than traditional drama. The dialogue is pulled directly from historical records, interviews, and depositions. Kaufman, working alongside the Tectonic Theater Project, specializes in this kind of investigative storytelling. You might remember their work on The Laramie Project. They don't invent narratives. They assemble fragments of truth until a bigger picture emerges.
Bringing this specific material to Broadway wasn't just an artistic choice. It was a cultural intervention. We live in an era where photographic evidence is constantly manipulated, doubted, or ignored. The play reminds us that photographs carry weight, but they also require context. An image of a smiling Nazi doesn't humanize him in a sympathetic way; it exposes the terrifying elasticity of the human conscience.
The production design strips away elaborate sets. Instead, projections of the actual photographs dominate the space. You see the pixelation, the corners of the physical album, the handwriting on the back. The audience becomes part of the investigative team. You're sitting in the dark, examining the evidence, wondering how you would have acted if you stood in that exact office in 1944.
The Chilling Echoes in Modern Culture
The most profound impact of Here There Are Blueberries stems from how it connects the past to our digital present. Höcker and his cohorts weren't hiding their documentation. They pasted their memories into custom leather albums, meticulously organizing their snapshots. They wanted to remember those summers at Auschwitz fondly.
Today, we document everything. We curate our feeds, smile for selfies, and share our daily routines online without pausing to consider how future generations might view our digital scrapbooks. While our modern digital footprints rarely match the horrific scale of a Nazi concentration camp, the impulse to normalize our environments, no matter how toxic or destructive they might be, remains entirely human.
When the play ran at La Jolla Playhouse and New York Theatre Workshop prior to its Broadway transfer, audiences walked out into the lobby in near-total silence. People didn't chat about the staging or the lighting design. They talked about complicity. They talked about how easy it is to look away from uncomfortable truths when the sun is shining and the blueberries are sweet.
What Theater Can Achieve That Textbooks Cannot
History textbooks give you dates, casualty numbers, and political maneuverings. They cannot replicate the physical weight of sitting in a room with hundreds of strangers, staring up at the smiling face of a mass murderer who thinks nobody is watching.
Live performance demands presence. You cannot scroll past a scene change. You cannot mute the actors when the dialogue turns uncomfortable. Kaufman's direction leans heavily into this discomfort. The production doesn't preach. It presents the archival findings and lets the sheer absurdity and horror of the evidence hang in the air.
If you ever get the chance to read the script, or if productions travel to regional theaters near you, pick up a ticket. Better yet, dig into the digital archives provided by the Holocaust Museum online. Look at the faces in the Höcker album yourself. Let the silence make you uncomfortable. That discomfort is the exact proof that history is still alive, watching us from the margins of old photographs, waiting to see if we've learned anything at all.
