What remains? That is the salient question for historians of performance as they search the present for embodied memories of the past, attempting to document experiences that vanish almost without a trace as a condition of their iteration. Paradoxically, Dorota Sajewska’s Necroperformance, her haunting account of the advent of theatrical modernism in Poland and Central Europe during and after WWI, locates the clearest signs of this elusive kind of life in mementos of death. The disturbing cover photograph by Friedrich Fohrer, for example, shows none other than the young Bertolt Brecht cutting up while off duty from his day job as a medical orderly in 1917. Posing jauntily in pork-pie hat and bib-fronted white shirt, the aspiring poet-playwright and burial-detail factotum smirks slyly, keeping his hands in his pockets, looking like nothing more sinister than a teen-aged Charlie Chaplin, except that his crooked elbows cradle two gap-toothed human skulls, one tucked neatly under each arm. Their smiles, no less than his, confirm that the joke’s not only on them: Brecht’s vaudeville turn with such macabre souvenirs of the Great War does more than catch the eye of the beholder; it vivifies Sajewska’s well-supported thesis about the mul-tilayered deposits of repressed cultural memories and their incremental recovery by means of performance.

Sajewska’s project seeks emancipation from the oppressive regime of historical forgetfulness. To that end she documents and contextualizes multigeneric performances made during the First World War or responsive to it thereafter. For her the archive of performance history is also a place of performance—a space for the initiation ritual for researchers, crossing over the threshold between past and present (438). The performance texts and events they retrieve from the archive free up long-silenced voices to speak their truths loud enough to be heard over the cacophony of intervening histories. “Emancipatory necroperformance,” Sajewska writes, “can be defined not only as a trace of evidence or a means of preserving marginalized presence but also as an alternative possibility or way of seeing, as a peculiar code that is only decipherable from a certain—minority, but paradoxically privileged—perspective” (214 –15). No European minority of codebreakers has been more “privileged,” in this bitterly ironic sense of the word, than Polish ones. Sajewska notes how Poland’s national identity and institutional body politic have been remaindered by periodic dismemberment followed by sustained imperial occupations under one hegemon or another and typically by several at once. The cultural inflection point of that troubled history, she argues, came with the so-called War to End All Wars and its violent revolutionary aftermath. Some potential readers, remembering the atrocities of Katyń or Auschwitz, might immediately link Sajewska’s concept of necroperformance directly to the legacy of WWII and the Cold War. Others might think first of the oeuvre of Polish playwright-auteur-director Tadeusz Kantor, “the father of the Theatre of Death” (391), whose career began in the 1940s, blossomed in the 1950s, and reached its apogee in the 1970s and 1980s. They would not be wholly wrong to make these connections, but it is the author’s ambitious intention, as well as her notable achievement, to dig carefully beneath the more recent layers of bone and ash in order to exhume the generative traces of antecedent events that occurred during WWI, 1914 –1918, and the subsequent Polish-Soviet War, 1919–1921.

Spinning out the spidery intricacies of middle-European cultural performance, with Poland caught dangling between Germany and Russia, Sajewska suspends no social or artistic identity on a monofilament; rather, she embeds each one in a web of relationships. Her narrative moves with celerity through the international and intergenerational careers of Stanisław Wyspiański, Nikolai Evreinov, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator, Stanisław Witkiewicz, Ernst Toller, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and many more besides. She documents how their works reenact in different ways the revolutionary urgencies of the modernist avantgarde as it exploded trans-nationally in the shocks and aftershocks of the Great War, which, as she puts it, “ushered in a total representational crisis” (123). Marian Kantor, for example, Tadeusz’s father, fought in both WWI and the Polish-Soviet war as a soldier in the storied Polish Legion. He also appears as a character in his son’s autobiographical Wielopole, Wielopole (1980), a memory play set in a child’s bedroom that becomes an imaginary field of battle. The palpable presence of the absent father—the senior Kantor served for the duration, visited home three times on furlough, and never returned to his family after the war—appears poignantly in a photograph sent back from the front. According to Sajewska, writing an eloquent summary of her thesis and demonstration of her method, this artifact “encapsulates the entire structure of the piece, embodying as it does the theatre of death” in which the dead do not disappear forever but return to some kind of embodied life in the reenactment of their memory through performance (399). The “war body” of her title, therefore, can be understood variously as the remembered body of the combatant or casualty of the Great War, the living body of the performer who reenacts it, and the body of evidence that connects both of them across time.

Necroperformance generously acknowledges its indebtedness to José Esteban Muñoz and other American performance studies scholars such as Diana Taylor, Rebecca Schneider, and Robin Bernstein who have theorized the relationship among ephemera, artifacts, and embodiment. In her preface, titled “The Postmortal Life of the Body—A Prologue,” Sajewska recounts one of her finds in the Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw: an amateur herbarium dating from 1918 and consisting of damaged fragments of “blossoms, leaves, and twigs” systematically labeled, glued, and pressed into a school notebook (7). The poignancy of this find increases exponentially when the reader learns that the specimens were collected and preserved by Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-German visionary of international socialism who was assassinated by the proto-Nazi Freikorps in Berlin in 1919. Dismembered by her murderers and dumped in the Landwehrkanal, her body was never definitively identified. Subsequently purged for doctrinal unreliability, her reputation languished in Polish national memory like a pressed flower. But it blossoms into another kind of life through Sajewska’s recuperative encounter with the herbarium, reanimating the disarmingly whimsical diligence of the charismatic personality that organized both it and the Spartacus League a century ago. Carefully documented and well argued, Necroperformance might likewise inspire historians of performance to answer the most challenging of all the questions posed to them by skeptics with a measured but confident reply: enough remains.