During the course of his long life, Tabori worked as a journalist, a literary translator, a screenplay writer and, most recently, as a creator of productions for the Berliner Ensemble.
Tabori was born György Tábori in Budapest on May 24, 1914. His father, Kornél Tábori, was a writer, journalist and the editor of the Pesti Napló newspaper. Kornél Tábori died in Auschwitz.
The Berliner Ensemble's production of "Waiting for Godot" directed byTabori. Photo: berliner-ensemble.de
Tabori studied catering in Berlin, working later as a waiter, then as a coffee house manager. After Hitler came to power, he retured to Hungary, where he worked for the Ritz Hotel and later a London-based travel agency. When the country's politics became increasingly more anti-Semitic, Tabori emigrated to London. In 1939, he started working as a correspondent for the Hungarian newspaper Magyar Nemzet, covering Bulgaria then Turkey.
During WWII, Tabori was with British troops in Jerusalem. He then became the BBC's correspondent in Cairo. Tabori stayed with the BBC until 1947.
Afterward, he emigrated to the United States, where he wrote screenplays for films by Alfred Hitchcock and other great directors. In the U.S., he met Bertolt Brecht, Leon Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann.
In 1970, at the urging of Brecht's wife Helene Weigel, Tabori returned to Europe, living in London, but working for theatres in Berlin, Bremen, Munich and Hamburg. In 1975, he established the Bremen Theatre Laboratory. Between 1987 and 1990, he was director of The Circle Theater in Vienna. In 1989, he moved to Austria. Tabori was a guest director at Vienna's Burgtheater the Leipzig Opera and many theatres in Berlin. Most recently, he worked on pieces for the Berliner Ensemble.
Tabori started writing his first novel in Egypt. The book, Beneath the Stone, was published in English in 1945 and in Hungarian in 1947. Two more books followed.
In the U.S., Tabori started writing plays. A work about an Austrian family of emigrants, directed by Elia Kazan, premiered in New York in 1952, and The Emperor's New Clothes premiered in 1953. Tabori's later works were more bitter, demonstrating the hopelessness in the world, but they were always composed with a degree of irony. Among them is The Cannibals, in which a group of concentration camp prisonsers eat one of their fellows, and Mein Kampf, a black farce about a Jewish salesman who tries to teach the art student Hitler some manners.
