It would take a further generation for the situation to change in West Germany. During the 1960s and ’70s, Germans began in earnest to investigate and acknowledge the horrors of the past, as the demands of young people overcame the stiff resistance of the war generation. The painful process revealed bottomless abysses, although many older Germans never stopped repeating the mantra that they had known nothing about the Holocaust. In such an emotionally charged situation, it was practically impossible to laugh about Hitler.
As far as mainstream cultural depictions of the Holocaust were concerned, a number of unwritten rules began to crystallize. The American Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres summed them up as three conventions:
1. The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history.
2. Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason—artistic reasons included.
3. The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event with seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead.
There were, of course, breaks with these conventions, but artists who deviated from them experienced varying receptions.
Sometimes, the public granted individual filmmakers and comedians a kind of tacit “license” to make fun of Hitler’s regime. Most postwar German critics, for instance, applauded Chaplin’s Great Dictator. It was scarcely conceivable that a German reviewer would have dared criticize a figure so iconic in the Anglo-Saxon world as Charlie Chaplin, and it was generally recognized that Chaplin’s intentions had been thoroughly noble. Although the film is arguably one of the funniest ever made, it was clearly aimed at drawing attention to dangers of subscribing to Nazi insanity. The German reception of Billy Wilder’s 1961 comedy One, Two, Three, which featured a whole menagerie of bizarre, heel-clicking pseudo-Nazi figures, was similar.
German critics were always ready to accept anti-Hitler comedies, but the criteria by which they judged them changed over the years. The more time passed, the more relaxed Germans became about depictions of the Führer as a ridiculous tin-pot dictator. To reflect that change, cultural historians Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert added two new rules to Des Pres’s three conventions:
4. The province for depictions of the Holocaust is “high culture.” Popular cultural productions are automatically considered suspect and more superficial. Comedies appeal mostly to an audience that isn’t necessarily well educated. Therefore, it’s more difficult for comedies to be taken seriously as high culture.
5. The artist needs to have the correct attitude and motivation: altruism, good intentions, the proper moral and didactic aims. Even when a piece of culture is comic, the artist has to display appropriate seriousness.
But by the end of the 1960s, the American comedian-director Mel Brooks would break all the rules—written and unwritten—of historical piety.
A scene from Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1968) (Photo Credit 11)
A scene from La Vita e Bella (1997) (Photo Credit 13)
Adolf, the Nazi Sow, depicting a pint-sized Hitler and a transvestite Göring (Photo Credit 15)
The Holocaust may not have been the focus of Brooks’s 1968 film The Producers, but the part it played in the story was anything but politically correct. Two Broadway producers conspire to defraud their investors. To cover up their criminal undertaking, they intentionally plan a massive flop, reasoning that no one is going to bother to check the books of a show that was a box-office disaster. In order to guarantee that their production is a failure, they hire a notorious neo-Nazi to compose a musical, and when the deranged fellow, in all seriousness, delivers a script entitled Springtime for Hitler, the producers think they have come up with the perfect scam. But they are drastically mistaken. The show, in which female Nazis cavort on stage in lingerie, becomes a huge comic hit. The producers’ scam is uncovered, and the two are sent to jail.
There is no hint of “appropriate seriousness” in Brooks’s blockbuster, and the film never pretends to be high culture. But audiences loved the impious, unconventional idea, and Brooks was justifiably rewarded with an Oscar for best screenplay. “If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator, you never win,” Brooks would remark years later in a magazine interview. “But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.” German critics, without exception, agreed—not least because the director was American and Jewish. A similar German production might have been given a far rockier reception. The discomfort many Germans felt with ridiculous depictions of Hitler was hardly a thing of the past in 1968.
Brooks’ far less successful 1983 remake of Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be also drew critical praise, but that doesn’t mean all Anglophone productions were beyond criticism. In 1990, for example, some Germans were outraged by a British TV show, made for the satellite network Galaxy, in which Hitler was portrayed as a petit bourgeois, suburban twit. The premise of Heil, Honey, I’m Home, was that Hitler and Eva Braun survived the war and now live in a provincial settlement of row houses. Hitler is constantly quarreling with his Jewish neighbors, the Goldensteins, and is depicted as a narrow-minded bean counter and incessantly complaining neighborhood pest. The authors used this scenario as a vehicle for all sorts of cheap gags, and even the British press was not amused, complaining that the show trivialized the Holocaust and the suffering of those who had survived Nazi war crimes. Shocked by the reaction, Galaxy pulled the sitcom after only one of eight episodes had been shown. Excerpts from Heil, Honey, I’m Home were, however, unearthed for a later show called The 100 Greatest TV Moments from Hell.
Such thoroughly negative reviews were hardly a good omen for one of comedy’s biggest international stars when he decided to tackle a very touchy subject. In 1997, when Italian comedian Roberto Benigni released La Vita e Bella (“Life is Beautiful”), a comedy about the Holocaust, it was hard to imagine a more difficult balancing act. The film begins relatively harmlessly, with a number of scenes introducing the Jewish protagonist, Guido Orefice. With a variety of tricks, and using his overactive imagination, Guido seduces his future wife, Dora, away from a local fascist party secretary. Yet the hero’s fantasy life so completely dominates him that he fails to notice the political climate changing around him. He runs away with his bride, for example, on a horse borrowed from his uncle, oblivious to the fact that animal has been painted with Nazi slogans. The second half of the film jumps forward to a time when the bitter reality of fascism has caught up even with this dreamer. Guido and Dora are married and have a son, Giosué. One day, the Germans order that all the Jews in the village be deported and taken to a concentration camp. Guido, Dora, and Giosué are among these victims. The rest of the film takes place in the camp, which bears a vague resemblance to Auschwitz.
Guido knows that not only is his own life at stake, but also those of his wife and son. To keep the boy calm, Guido tells him that life in the camp is a gigantic game whose goal is to score points—for instance, by hiding himself away during the day while his father is out doing compulsory labor. This deception saves Giosué from the gas chamber. The grand prize for winning the game, Guido tells his son, is a tank, and that prize is “paid out” at the end of the film, when American troops arrive to liberate the camp. But their help comes too late for Guido, who is shot by the SS just before the American soldiers free the prisoners.
The story was challenging, to say the least. Never before had there been a tragicomedy set in a place resembling Auschwitz. Benigni’s previous works had been largely harmless comedies. Moreover, he himself was from Italy, a country that had been part of Hitler’s Axis. This violated the unwritten rule, recorded by Laster and Steinert, that only Holocaust victims, and not those from later generations, were allowed to engage in this genre of gallows humor. Benigni must have known he was taking a
double risk. But the storm of outrage he might reasonably have feared failed to materialize. The few negative reviews the film received were mild, and even critics of Benigni’s work conceded that he had adroitly mastered the difficult balancing act. La Vita e Bella never seemed exploitative, trivializing, or tasteless. The scant objections that were raised concerned the unrealistic depiction of the concentration camp, and in fact Benigni’s setting was no more than a sketch of Auschwitz, with the brutality of the guards and the industrialized murders occurring only on its margins. The New York Times, for instance, pointed out that life had hardly been so placid in the death camps, and that there had been no children in Auschwitz.
The film’s American distributor was nervous and added a written disclaimer, drawing attention to the fictional nature of the plot. But this was unnecessary. It was abundantly clear that La Vita e Bella was a kind of fairy tale, and its highly stylized depiction of the Holocaust was one reason the film was so effective. Most people in the audience watched the movie with images of the real Auschwitz in their heads. The first half of the movie, which had all the trappings of a romantic comedy, set up the tragedy of the family’s dramatic fall from grace. By the time the three protagonists were deported, the audience thoroughly sympathized with them. There was no need to include the details of historical reality to make viewers appreciate the horrors of that fall, or of the hellish world that replaces Guido’s private utopia. Benigni avoided the mistake of switching styles and registers in the middle of the movie. Because the film remained a fairy tale, which made more use of allusion rather than concrete detail, it appealed all the more strongly to the audience’s imagination.
Although the hero is killed in the end, La Vita e Bella is a film about survival, and the innocent boy Giosué embodies the hope that persists even amid the worst of horrors. Evil is depicted as something ridiculous and banal that will one day pass or be overcome. Even if Guido must die, Giosué survives to grow up in a world without National Socialism. This moral may sound simplistic, but fairy tales are allowed to be dreamy—that is their nature. Benigni won four Oscars in 1997 for his peacemaking, funny and tragic work—a well-deserved recognition for a sensitive take on the Holocaust trauma that never once drifted into triviality. A year later, German critics were equally mild in their judgment of a far more drastic work of satire by one of Germany’s leading comic book artists. Walter Moers’ 1998 Adolf, the Nazi Sow was another work on the dangerous topic that some initially might have found hard to take. The central premise was that Hitler, complete with center part and moustache, had survived the war hidden in the sewers and reemerged in modern-day Germany. But the old-fashioned dictator is no match for the postmodern world and so becomes embroiled in a series of absurd situations. In one episode, the Führer appears in a popular, real-life TV cooking show, where he explodes in rage in the mistaken belief that the host is Jewish. In another he allows his Tamagotchi to starve, as revenge for what he sees as Japan’s betrayal in World War II. “Miserable traitors,” the Führer fumes. “Two little atomic bombs, and what do they do? Throw in the towel!” His only consolation is the discovering that his old buddy Hermann Göring also survived World War II and is now working as a transvestite prostitute in Hamburg’s red-light district.
Hitler needs all the friends he can get as Moers sends him on a journey through all the clichés of the modern media world, from the cult of Princess Diana to housewives abducted by aliens. Hopelessly befuddled, the ex-dictator is utterly incapable of understanding the country he once ruled and can only vent his frustration in half-articulate outbursts of rage. When he hears the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” for example, he’s incensed that a song about Jews could be such a hit in Germany. Worse still for Hitler, no one in the brightly colored, comic-book landscape of postmodern Germany pays any attention to the old man’s ravings. Modern-day Germany, with its incessant talk-show babble, may be superficial, Moers seems to be saying, but at least there’s no place in it for the Führer. Cast adrift in a homeland that has become a foreign country, Hitler can lead nothing more than a shadow existence.
“Real Adolf fans don’t find it any funnier than do the antifascists,” wrote the German newspaper Junge Freiheit, which has itself been accused of fascist tendencies, about Moers’s work. But in truth, few people in the German media chose to publish their opinions, positive or negative, about the controversial comic. Michel Friedman, then the deputy head of the Council of Jews in Germany and never one to shy away from a fight, merely described Moers’s opus as “unsuccessful.” Readers were the ones who ultimately judged Adolf, the Nazi Sow. With them, Moers’s thin volume was a massive hit, selling more than 170,000 copies.
WITH THE PASSING of generations, Germans have become more relaxed about depictions of Hitler as a ridiculous figure. Nowadays, it no longer seems strange for comedians to play the Führer in movies, like Dani Levy’s Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler. What used to be acceptable only for foreign productions is now considered admissible for German works as well. Without the ideological ballast from the past, media outrage at “trivializing” depictions of Hitler seems artificial and overwrought. Temporal distance has done its work. When Germans today watch newsreels from the Third Reich, they are able to see not just the monstrousness of Hitler’s regime but also its absurdity. That does nothing to decrease the importance of the Holocaust. On the contrary, people today ask themselves how a generation of Germans could have committed such grave crimes at the behest of a loudmouthed tyrant with a silly moustache. The days of demonizing Hitler are over. Nonetheless, the question of how he could ever have held such power will become harder, and not easier, to answer. For later generations, who have only seen Hitler in his bizarre appearances in historical newsreels, the appeal of the Führer for the masses is completely mysterious.
Is it permissible to laugh at Hitler? Is a comedy like Mel Brooks’s The Producers immoral? The respective answers are yes and no. Brooks’s film does not decrease the significance of the Holocaust; it reduces Hitler to human dimensions so that people can see him as something other than the evil demon promoted by the historiography of the 1950s. Germans in the Third Reich were neither possessed by an evil spirit nor collectively “hypnotized” by their Führer. They have no claim upon either mitigating circumstance. When we laugh at Hitler, we dismiss the metaphysical, demonic capabilities accorded to him by postwar apologists. All the more pertinent is the question of how the empty trickery of the Nazis, which was already all too well exposed by critics in the late 1920s and 1930s, could have ended in the Holocaust.
On closer examination, the argument, advanced so often in Germany after World War II, that people were unaware of Hitler’s demonic maneuvering and were thus more prone to seduction simply does not hold water. The “ridiculous Führer,” stripped of his imperial posturing, was by no means a postwar innovation. Enough caricatures exist from the early years of Nazism that depict Hitler as loudmouthed buffoon and tin-pot dictator. The many disrespectful jokes about the Nazi Party leadership that circulated during the Third Reich also support the conclusion that Germans were by no means unwilling victims of propaganda. Great numbers of people back then saw through the swindles cooked up by Goebbels and his gang. Sadly, that did nothing to alter the fact that, in the course of a few years, Germany was thoroughly drawn into the terrible whirlpool of Nazi crimes.
NOTES
I. POLITICAL HUMOR UNDER HITLER
1 “the various collections of ‘whispered jokes’ ”; Among these anthologies, Sellin’s should be mentioned in particular since it appeared immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich. The other anthologies of jokes were published with far more temporal distance to their subject matter.
2 “we have no way of knowing precisely how widespread they were.”; See Wöhlert, p. 7f.
3 “an expression of Jews’ will to survive against all odds.”; See Landmann, p. 12.
II. THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL HUMOR
1 “Thus, poli
tical jokes could only arise in the modern, secular world.”; See Wöhlert, p. 15.
III. THE NAZI SEIZURE OF POWER
1 “ ‘… for this reporter nothing special.’ ”; See Fest, p. 356.
2 “bellowing out their idiotic favorite song: ‘When Jewish blood squirts from the knife, happy days will return.’ ”; Quoted in Focke/Strocka, p. 15.
3 “This forced entry into the landed nobility earned him the nickname ‘von Ribbensnob.’ ”; See Wiener, p. 85.
4 “They greeted one another with the words ‘Swing heil!’ ”; See Allert, p. 25.
5 “the penalty for noncompliance being the ‘slaughter’ of the animals.”; See Allert, p. 87.
6 “the identity of the true culprit.”; See Steinert, p. 264.
7 “I can’t imagine anyone believes in Communist culprits instead of a contract job commissioned on behalf of the swastika.”; Klemperer, vol. 1, p. 8.
8 “The brothers Sass [SA+SS].”; The Sass brothers were the leaders of a notorious gang of criminals.
9 “a Jewish invention”; Focke/Strocka, p. 143.
10 “Brought into line, brought into line.”; Quoted in Kühn, p. 102.
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Page 17