Kittel – Doktor Faustus of The Third Reich : Guilt, Regret and the Theatre of Moral Collapse…
Gerhard Kittel is not an easy man to spend an evening with. He isn’t meant to be. Kittel: Dr Faustus of the Third Reich, playing a tightly focused two-night run, is the kind of theatre that leans into unease rather than smoothing it over. It asks its audience to stay in the room with contradiction, to resist the temptation of moral shortcuts, and to sit with a figure who is at once intellectually brilliant, historically culpable and profoundly troubling.
Kittel was, by any serious academic measure, a gifted philologist. His scholarship in biblical languages and early Judaism was formidable. Had he been born fifty years earlier—or perhaps fifty years later—his name might now circulate quietly in theological departments, safely detached from history’s darkest chapters. But he lived when he lived, and his considerable intellectual firepower was turned towards legitimising Nazi antisemitism. His work did not simply reflect the ideology of the Third Reich; it helped to clothe it in the authority of scholarship.
This is where the play begins, but crucially not where it ends. Kittel refuses the lazy satisfaction of painting its subject as a pantomime villain. Instead, it digs into the far more uncomfortable territory between intelligence and moral failure. Was Kittel wicked, or merely shallow? Was he a committed ideologue, or an ambitious academic who chose not to ask where his work was leading? The play does not offer easy answers, and that refusal is its sharpest edge.
There is something unmistakably Faustian at work here. Knowledge pursued without ethics. Status gained at the cost of humanity. The devil, in this telling, does not arrive with smoke and spectacle but with academic credibility, conference platforms and institutional applause. Evil, Kittel suggests, often sounds calm, reasoned and authoritative. It speaks fluently. It cites sources.
Playwright Charlotte Pickering has been clear that this moral ambiguity is not an accident but the engine of the piece. “I wasn’t interested in redeeming Kittel,” she says. “What drew me to him was the gap between his obvious intelligence and the catastrophic consequences of his thinking. I wanted to understand how someone so clever could fail so completely to interrogate the harm he was doing.”
That interest in failure—ethical, intellectual, human—runs through the play. This is not a history lecture dressed up as drama, but a forensic examination of complicity. Pickering describes the writing process as an act of interrogation rather than judgement. “If we decide too quickly that someone is simply a monster, we let ourselves off the hook,” she notes. “The danger is always closer than we like to admit.”
The picture becomes even more unsettling when the play turns towards the later stages of Kittel’s life. His defence statement after the war, the inscription on his grave—partly written in Hebrew—and the accounts of his children, as recorded in Leonore Siegele Wenschkewitz’s investigations, all suggest a man who came to regret the harm he had caused. Whether that regret was deep, sufficient or morally meaningful is left deliberately unresolved.
“I don’t think regret cancels guilt,” she says. “But pretending regret doesn’t exist also simplifies things in a way that feels dishonest. Kittel can be tragic and guilty at the same time. In fact, that tension is the tragedy.”
That approach sits squarely within the creative ethos of Heirs of Banquo, the company behind the production. This is a company with little interest in “comfort” theatre. Their work consistently grapples with power, ideology and the fractures where morality gives way to self-interest. Heirs of Banquo productions tend to ask difficult questions and then trust the audience to do the heavy lifting.
As a company, they are drawn to moments where certainty collapses—where systems, beliefs and people reveal their fault lines. Kittel feels like a natural extension of that ethos. There is no neat moral bow tied at the end of the evening, no invitation to leave feeling reassured. Instead, the audience is left with residue: questions that linger, discomfort that refuses to dissipate.
And that discomfort feels uncomfortably timely. In an era where “expertise” is routinely weaponised, where academic language is used to legitimise exclusion and dehumanisation, Kittel’s story feels less like a historical outlier and more like a warning flare. This is a play about what happens when intellect outruns conscience, when brilliance is allowed to operate without ethical resistance.
For Liverpool audiences accustomed to theatre that punches above its weight, Kittel: Dr Faustus of the Third Reich promises an intense, provocative couple of nights. It does not ask us to sympathise with Gerhard Kittel. It asks something harder, and more necessary: to look closely at how intelligence can be corrupted, how regret coexists with guilt, and how the most dangerous ideas are often delivered politely, persuasively, and with impeccable academic credentials.
This is theatre that doesn’t let you off lightly—and that, frankly, feels like the point…
Kittel: Dr Faustus of the Third Reich
23 – 24 January 2026
Unity Theatre
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