Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (16 page)

This joke shows how aware Germans were in 1941 of the terrible power exercised by the Nazi state. But few rebelled against Nazi excesses, because of fear, indifference, or basic National Socialist convictions.

The signs were clear, however, that Nazi Germany had passed its zenith. In attacking its archenemy-turned–temporary ally to the east, Germany had overreached itself. The Soviet Union, with its vast territory and immense military resources, was a wall against which Hitler would bang his head for the next four years. Once again, Germany began by conquering territory, but within in a few months, its advances slowed and then stopped altogether. What followed was the darkest period of the Third Reich, and in
that period an empire was radicalized, internally and externally, to an extent previously unknown in history.

LONG BEFORE Hitler proceeded to his Final Solution, people abroad knew that Jews were being cruelly discriminated against and persecuted in Germany. But it was not a topic much canvassed in the general culture of the world outside; for example, films of the prewar years made little mention of these injustices. In the age of appeasement, the political situation was too precarious for such accusations, and in the 1930s the only moviemaking nation to be truly active on the propaganda front was Germany itself. The most powerful world influence on public opinion, Hollywood, had little interest in producing films that were harshly critical of the Nazis, though the studios’ reasons had less to do with political sympathies than with practical, economic considerations. Although few people wanted to admit it, the American film industry depended on the European market, and in a time haunted by fascist terrorism and fears of a new war, no one in Europe wanted to see “problem films.” Audiences craved diversion, and Hollywood provided them with tailor-made escapist fantasies, light entertainment in every conceivable form.

The American people themselves maintained an embarrassed distance from the unruly, self-destructive nations of “Old Europe,” and the problems of the European continent seemed especially far away to those basking in the southern California sun. In 1936, only five percent of Americans overall could conceive of their country going to war against Germany. And instead of telling the truth about Germany’s rearmament and racist insanity, Hollywood had its stars doing dance steps. Only with the onset of World War II did the big studios begin to mobilize audiences.
Here, too, economic considerations played a major role. After the German invasion of Poland, the European market had drastically shrunk. Many films could not even be distributed within wartime Europe. Meanwhile the mood in America had turned patriotic, and
even the calculating studio bosses began to realize that the United States might not be able to avoid entering World War II.

ONE STAR of the American film industry had recognized, much more quickly than his colleagues, just how dangerous the German threat was. Charlie Chaplin had been involved in World War I, too: with his film
Shoulder Arms
, the world’s most famous comedian had marched to the front against the Kaiser’s Imperial Germany. No one knew how to use humor as a weapon more perfectly than Chaplin, and he was born to create a cinematic parody of—and warning against—the absurdly inflated imagery of the Nazis.

A number of strange coincidences connected Chaplin with Hitler. Not only did they wear the same mustache, but also they were born only four days apart. Surprisingly, Chaplin did not come up with the idea of playing the role of the psychopathic dictator on his own; it was suggested to him by his fellow director and producer Alexander Korda. In his memoir, Chaplin described his reaction to Korda’s suggestion:

Chaplin’s ambitions were cemented by the fact that German journalists were constantly going after him in their propaganda organs, with Goebbels’s press referring to him as “the little Jewish tumbling figure” or simply as “repulsive.” Chaplin could hardly wait to pay the Nazis back for their insults.

The final script for
The Great Dictator
was completed the same day England declared war on Germany, and the project, in which Chaplin had already invested half a million dollars, went into production shortly thereafter. The story was simple but clever. Chaplin plays a Jewish barber who has lost his memory in World War I and is released from hospital after years of fruitless treatment, only to find Tomania (Germany) completely changed. The barber knows nothing about the political rise of the Nazis or their anti-Semitic pogroms, an ignorance that leads to a series of absurd situations. Chaplin also plays the megalomaniacal Tomanian dictator, Adenoid Hynkel, and the scene jumps back and forth between the ghetto and the autocrat’s palace. Hynkel delivers a number of bizarre speeches to the masses in jumbled
pseudo-German, bosses around his henchmen Herring (Göring) and Garbitsch (Goebbels), and engages in ridiculous competitions with his Italian ally and rival, Benzino Napaloni. Because the Jewish barber and the Tomanian dictator look exactly alike, the plot turns into a comedy of mistaken identities. The barber takes over Hynkel’s office, sends the tyrant to a concentration camp, and makes a speech pleading for peace and lambasting the misanthropic, racist policies of his doppelganger. A scene from the first draft of the script that showed the dictator’s Jewish wife undergoing cosmetic surgery in order to look like a stereotypical German Frau was left out because it was considered too drastic.

Chaplin immersed himself in his work on the set. He had viewed copious material from the weekly German newsreels and sucked up details like a sponge. In order to play both roles equally plausibly, he shot the Hynkel and barber scenes at separate times, first tackling the ghetto sequences before moving on to the ones in the dictator’s palace, which he filmed in December 1939. By March 1940, he was able to inform his studio bosses that the movie was a wrap. There had been worrisome signals from the U.S. State Department while the film was being shot, and the appeasement-era British government, too, fretted that a film depicting Hitler as a buffoon might not be such a good idea and threatened to ban it from being shown in the U.K. Chaplin had legitimate reason to be concerned the film might never see the light of day.

But then events took a dramatic turn, as Chaplin later described in his autobiography:

The Nazi government launched a full-scale diplomatic campaign to stop Chaplin’s project at the last minute. But although many Americans still sympathized with Germany, its efforts were in vain.

Chaplin’s troubles, however, were far from over. Before the film’s premiere, he received letters from people who threatened to throw stink bombs or even shoot bullets at the screen. He went ahead anyway, and the film was a huge popular hit, making more money than any of the comedian’s other movies. The press was less enthusiastic; some critics accused Chaplin of throwing his lot in with the Communists. Many objected in particular to the sentimental speech by the Jewish barber at the end of the film, addressed directly to the audience. The naive pacifism it expressed was probably what led Chaplin to cautiously distance himself from
The Great Dictator
after World War II. He later said that if he had known then the extent of the Nazis’ crimes, including Auschwitz, he would have never made the movie.

Ernst Lubitsch, the director of the other great anti-Nazi wartime comedy, would receive none of the laurels enjoyed by Chaplin. In fact,
To Be or Not to Be
, which is today rightly regarded as a classic, caused him substantial difficulties. Above all, it was bad timing that caused audiences to reject and critics to lambast the
film. Chaplin’s
Great Dictator
hit the cinemas in 1940, well before the United States entered the war. It was easy for people in the U.S. to laugh at the terrible events in Europe when the conflict still seemed so far away. But a year later, when Lubitsch began shooting his masterpiece, the situation had changed. The Stars and Stripes now flew over the battlefields of Europe and Anerican blood was being shed to help free the world of the terror of Nazism, and that was no laughing matter. For many, it was a completely inappropriate time to release a comedy about the Third Reich.

But although critics and public resisted the idea behind it,
To Be or Not to Be
was a very funny film. The plot was a twisted work of genius. A young Polish fighter pilot, Stanislav Sobinski (Robert Stack), falls in love with the theater actress Maria Tura (Carole Lombard). Every time Tura’s actor husband takes the stage and launches into the famous Hamlet soliloquy, Sobinski leaves the audience and has a backstage rendezvous with Tura. Just as their affair is discovered, World War II breaks out, and Sobinski leaves his lover to go fight. When it becomes clear that Poland is no match for the more powerful Germany, he travels on to London, where he and other exiles volunteer to fly dangerous missions for the Royal Air Force. But a Gestapo spy called Professor Siletzsky has insinuated his way into the ranks of the Poles fighting in exile, and by a simple ruse, he gets his hands on a complete list of individuals active in the Polish resistance. On that list is Maria Tura, and when the unsuspecting Sobinski asks Siletzsky to pass on the words “To be or not to be” to her, the fake professor misinterprets this as code. The pilot discovers Siletzsky’s true identity, but not before the latter has made his way to Poland to hand over the list to an SS officer named Ehrhardt. Sobinski sets off to avert the catastrophe and parachutes into occupied Warsaw.

There he contacts Maria. Her troupe is distressed by the bad news but has no idea how they can prevent Siletzsky from passing the list with Maria’s name to the Nazis. Sobinski and she then come up with a daring plan. They convert their theater into a fake Nazi headquarters and set a trap for Siletzsky. The actors dress up as Nazis, and Maria’s husband Joseph takes the role of Gruppenführer Ehrhardt. The deception works, but during a conversion between the supposed Ehrhardt and Siletzsky it emerges that the spy has made a copy of the list, which he has left in his hotel room. So Joseph assumes a new role: the Gestapo spy Siletzsky. As the situation in Warsaw begins to heat up, the Turas dress up another actor as Hitler and flee with the entire troupe in the Führer’s private plane.

Lubitsch approached the material with light hand and effortlessly mastered all the somersaults of the plot. The cast—especially Jack Benny, who plays the pompous thespian Joseph Tura—obviously had fun with the script. But the first screenings in early 1942 made it abundantly clear that the movie was going to flop. The specially invited audience greeted the clever punch lines with steely silence. In particular, many viewers were enraged a scene in which the real Ehrhardt says, “What [Tura] did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland.” Reviews were constantly citing this line as proof of how tasteless the film was, and whole rows of viewers left movie theaters when it was uttered. A wave of outrage was aimed at Lubitsch, who was accused of laughing at Polish suffering.

The following review illustrates the critics’ incomprehension and knee-jerk rejection of the film: