Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (24 page)

There were, however, as Auschwitz survivor Ruth Kluger relates, a number of jokes in questionable taste about Jews returning to Germany to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. In Vienna, for instance, people would ask, “
And has your Jew come back?” Many former citizens of the German Empire had learned nothing from history—not because they were stupid, most likely, but because in order to draw lessons from the past, they would have had to face it squarely, and that they did not want to do. So former hardcore Nazis were able to rise back up through the social ranks in both the West and the East, and the period in general was characterized by an ugly superficiality.
Most Germans wore blinders, and anti-Semitic prejudices were not at all out of place in good society.

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:

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:

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.