Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (13 page)

BOOK: Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

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Zerlett’s remarks were published in the magazine
Film-Kurier
on January 17, 1939, roughly two months after the Kristallnacht pogrom. Film historian Klaus Kreimeier has rightly called
Robert and Bertram
an “advertisement for death,” and it’s hard to interpret Zerlett’s sorry excuse for a movie as anything else. It was made around the same time as the notoriously anti-Semitic historical drama
Jud Süss
, a huge popular hit, and it wasn’t long before cattle cars full of deported Jews began rolling eastward. The Final Solution had begun, and the connection between the flood of anti-Semitic films and genocide can hardly be denied. Kreimeier writes:

The fact that by 1942 this genre had run its course can be attributed to the fact that the killing machinery was running at full speed. Propaganda had done its job. The Nazi leadership had to have assumed that the mass deportations would not go unnoticed by the general populace, and the mass exterminations were probably a public secret. But thanks to factors that included a series of several very successful films, the German people had been psychologically prepared.
That, in any case, was how the
political leadership and their minions in the film industry saw the situation.

The distorted image of Jewishness at the center of
Robert and Bertram’s
comic plot was not just a reflection of crude beer-tent anti-Semitism. It was part of a coolly planned, larger strategy. A seemingly harmless comedy was a far more effective means of infusing poisonous propaganda than the weekly newsreels. Audiences laughed and did not expect any political message. But the humor in question made them receptive to the campaigns that led to the persecution, ostracism, and extermination of Jews.