Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich

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Interviewed for a 2001 documentary, Reinhard Spitzy, an intimate of Hitler, said he could easily imagine Hitler laughing privately at Chaplin’s burlesque of him. Schonwald, Josh, “The Rise of Hitler Humor,” in Otium, Vol 2 # 4, 13 January 2006. Available at http://otium.uchicago.edu/articles/hitler_humorist.html. Es ist eine ganz wichtige und durchaus moderne Erkenntnis, dass Führer und Politiker, die ungeliebte Kinder waren, besonders gefährlich sind, weil sie in ihrem Gerechtigsempfinden völlig gestört sind, in ihrem Empfinden, was richtig und was falsch ist.” The artistic peak of this cinematic effort was the mordant Ernst Lubitsch comedy “ To Be or Not to Be” (1942), in which Hitler is explicitly compared to a ham actor-manager who embarks upon a vanity production of – what else? – “Hamlet.”

Israel-Hamas war LIVE: Israeli airstrikes destroy 300 targets in Gaza and Lebanon overnight as WHO warns of 'imminent public health catastrophe'One astonishing photo shows him embracing a Jewish girl called Rosa who referred to him as 'Uncle Hitler' The film portrays Hitler as an impotent man who plays with battleships in the bathtub and wets his bed. Most critics have not been amused. The atmosphere is invariably electric. Sometimes people leave. Others accuse him of feeding anti-Semitism. He told the BBC he doesn’t know why people laugh or why he finds it funny. “It’s not my job to analyse myself. That’s for my mother or my psychiatrist”.

The Jewish girl who blinded the Fuhrer to his own warped ideology: Nazi leader embraces child who called him 'Uncle Hitler'... despite his persecution of the Jews Vermes told the BBC: “We have learnt over more than sixty years that Hitler was a bad person. But by learning this, we don't think that he did anything that made sense. In a number of interviews, Levy justifies the use of humour even when treating subjects such as Hitler and the Holocaust, arguing that laughter can diminish Hitler’s hold on the public’s imagination. For Levy, too much authenticity and believability in a portrayal of Hitler, even if that portrayal is critical, create a cult-figure. Laughing at Hitler can prevent that from happening. (36) Moreover, Levi comments that given the exaggerated theatricality to which the Nazis were prone, they parody themselves. He relies on the received historical image of Nazism as transmitted by texts, photos and film archives of the period to show that his portrayal derives from reality, for the Nazis were in Levy’s opinion self-caricatures. (37) Whether Hitler and the Nazis are intrinsically funny is not in dispute, nor is whether comedy is suitable for dealing with historical trauma, over seventy years of comedy and laughing at Hitler suggests they are and it is. The question asked directly and indirectly by detractors and supporters of the film is whether Levy’s comedy helps viewers overcome the trauma of the past or simply ignore it. This was not the United States, Poland, South Africa. This was Germany. The twenty and thirty-somethings in the studio audience, the children and grandchildren of Nazi lieutenants and SS troops, were not just laughing at Hitler, they were roaring. (29)

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Grunbaum himself says to his wife when she wants to kill Hitler: 'Now you are just like him, you would kill a defenseless person.' At first this is seems OK, because both Hitler and his victims were human. But how to handle this is a very delicate question." Levy removes Hitler and the Nazis from their historical, although not geographical context. Two years earlier, Oliver Hirschbiegel had also created an ahistorical portrait of the Nazi leader in Der Untergang, but he kept his figure in a world that simulates reality, preventing viewers from seeing Hitler as caricature or self-parody. Hirschbiegel’s Hitler thus retains the danger of a man who was capable of sanctioning the murder of millions of people. Levy in contrast situates Hitler in a fantasy, the absurdity of which not surprisingly emasculates Hitler. The film’s Hitler resembles the Hitler portrayals in the films of earlier directors; he is a blustering tyrant and nothing more. Adolf Hitler often posed for propaganda photos with children at his Alpine residence the Berghof, Bavaria