Is Life beautiful? Can the shoah be funny?Some thoughts on recent and older films

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 279-308

  Gilman, Sander L ^a,b  

^a Liberal Arts in Human Biology

^b UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745310686     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448967     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. See Art Spiegelman, Maus:A Survivor's Tale, 2 vols. (New York, 1986, 1991)
2. See also the following: Spiegelman, "Art Spiegelman: Un Subtil Sens de l'équilibre (An Exquisite Sense of Balance)," interview by Barry Schwabsky, Art Press 194 (Sept. 1994): 27-32
3. "A Conversation with Art Spiegelman," interview with Susan Jacobowitz, Artweek 16 Dec. 1993, pp. 15-16
4. and "The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman: A Conversation with Michael Silverblatt," Tampa Review 5 (Spring 1992): 31-36. The following bibliographic citations on Spiegelman give a sense of the importance of Maus in the culture of contemporary American art: Barrett Watten, "Out of History," Artweek, 16 Dec. 1993, p. 14; "Art Spiegelman: The Maus That Roared," Art News 92 (May 1993): 63-64
5. Spiegelman, "High Art Lowdown," Artforum 29 (Dec. 1990): 115
6. and Matthew Freedman, "When It's a Matter of Life and Death: Art Spiegelman's Diagrams," Arts Magazine 65 (Oct. 1990): 83-87. The following critical essays provide various readings of Maus: Michael Rothberg, '"We Were Talking Jewish': Art Spiegelman's Maus as 'Holocaust' Production," Contemporary Literature 35 (Winter 1994): 661-87
7. Richard Martin, "Art Spiegelman's Maus, or, 'The Way It Really Happened,'" in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature, ed. Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (Paderborn, 1994), pp. 373-82
8. Rick Iadonisi, "Bleeding History and Owning His (Father's) Story: Maus and Collaborative Autobiography," CEA Critic 57 (1994): 45-56
9. Joan Gordon, "Surviving the Survivor: Art Spiegelman's Maus," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5 (1993): 81-89
10. Stephen E. Tabachnick, "Of Maus and Memory: The Structure of Art Spiegelman's Graphic Novel of the Holocaust," Word and Image 9 (Apr.-June 1993): 154-62
11. Robert Storr, "Art Spiegelman's Making of Maus,"
12. Tampa Review 5 (Spring 1992): 27-30
13. Marianne Hirsch, "Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory," Discourse 15 (Winter 1992-1993): 3-29
14. Miles Orvell, "Writing Posthistorically: Krazy Kat, Maus, and the Contemporary Fiction Cartoon," American Literary History 4 (Spring 1992): 110-28
15. and Kurt Scheel, "Mauschwitz? Art Spiegelmans 'Geschichte eines Überlebenden,'" Merkur 43 (May 1989): 435-38
16. See Sheva Fogel, "Drawing on Politics and Chutzpah: A Look at Israel's Comics and Cartoons," The Comics Journal 141 (Apr. 1991): 31-34
17. See Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (Tokyo, 1983). The plot of Tezuka's novel is as follows: It begins with the Japanese newspaperman Sohei Toge, in Germany to cover the 1936 Olympics. When his brother is killed in Berlin, Toge's quest to discover why takes him both to the Nazis' Nuremberg rally and into a Gestapo interrogation room and brings into his hands a secret that could bring down Hitler. In Kobe, Adolf Kaufman, the half-German/half-Japanese son of a German consulate employee befriends Adolf Kamil, the son of a baker living in Kobe's Jewish community. Toge returns to Japan, where he is pursued both by Japan's secret police, suspicious of anyone less than enthusiastic about Japan's growing militarism, and by the Gestapo officer who murdered Toge's brother, still after the secret papers for which he was killed. Meanwhile, Adolf Kaufman, sent to school in Germany, meets Adolf Hitler. Adolf Kamil's father journeys to Lithuania to offer 500 dispossessed yeshiva students refuge in Kobe's Jewish community. Adolf Kaufman, recruited into the SS, falls in love with a Jewish girl whose family is to be deported to a death camp. Sohei Toge finds new allies in Japan. And the secret of the Toge papers finally falls into the hands of Adolf Kamil
18. See Joseph Patrick Witek, '"Stranger and More Thrilling Than Fiction': Comic Books as History" (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1988), and Bernd Dolle-Weinkauff, "Das 'Dritte Reich' im Comic: Geschichtsbilder und darstellungsaesthetische Strategien einer rekonstruierten Gattung,"Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung 2 (1993): 298-332
19. See "Laughter at Film Brings Spielberg Visit," New York Times, 13 Apr. 1994, p. B11
20. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York, 1999)
21. Aristotle's, too, if the book on Comedy had not been lost. Aristotle notes in the Poetics, 5.1449a2-3, that comic laughter is critical of the ridiculous, but that it is a ridiculous which "is not painful or destructive"; this passage is discussed in detail in Gerald F. Else, Aristotle's "Poetics": The Argument (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), pp. 184-89
22. See Helmut Arntzen, Die emste Komödie: Das deutsche Lustspiel von Lessing bis Kleisl (Munich, 1968)
23. See Terrence Des Pres, "Holocaust Laughter," Writing into the World: Essays, 1973-1987 (New York, 1991), p. 278
24. See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on "Hamlet" "Othello" "King Lear" and "Macbeth" (London, 1905)
25. Des Pres, Writing into the World, pp. 280-81, 286
26. See Alan Dundes and Thomas Hauschild, "Auschwitz Jokes," Western Folklore 42 (Oct. 1983): 249-60
27. Uli Linke and Dundes, "More on Auschwitz Jokes," Folklore 99, no. 1 (1988): 3-10
28. and Dundes and Hauschild, "Kennt der Witz kein Tabu? Zynische Erzählformen als Versuch der Bewältigung nationalsozialistischer Verbrechen," Zeitschrift fiir Volkskunde 83, no. 1 (1987): 21-31
29. See also Paul Lewis, 'Joke and Anti-Joke: Three Jews and a Blindfold," Journal of Popular Culture 21 (Summer 1987): 63-73
30. See my Jews in Today's German Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1995), as well as Miriam Maltz, "Depicting the Holocaust: Literary Techniques in Leslie Epstein's King of the Jews," Jewish Affairs 47 (May 1992): 79-85
31. Journal of American Culture 18 [Spring 1995]: 35). (This seems not to be true of George Stevens's film The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] in which humor is clearly absent from Millie Perkins's version of the title figure.) Cory correctly indicates the difference between the function of humor and coping between Holocaust survivors (such as Hilsenrath) and their Americanized children (here he takes Spiegelman as an example). And yet he misses the point that the expectation is not that the audience laughs. The nature of "humor" even in Cory's account is highly marginalized and seems to serve only a minimal function in providing a model of the control of the uncontrollable. It is, by definition, condemned to failure
32. See Hans-Jochen Gamm, Der Flüsterwitz im Dritten Reich (Munich, 1963), and Steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale, N.J., 1991)
33. The most succinct summary of this view (on which many books have been written) is Irving Saposnik, "The Yiddish Are Coming! The Yiddish Are Coming! Some Thoughts on Yiddish Comedy," in Laughter Unlimited: Essays on Humor, Satire, and the Comic, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison, Wise, 1991), pp. 99-105
34. See especially Tony Barta, "Film Nazis: The Great Escape," in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Barta (Westport, Conn., 1998), pp. 127-48, and Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on "Schindler's List," ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington, Ind., 1997)
35. See also Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998)
36. Ilan Avisar, "Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Collective Memory," in Thinking about the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), pp. 38-58
37. Janet Lungstrum, "Foreskin Fetishism: Jewish Male Difference in Europa, Europa," Screen 39 (Spring 1998): 53-66
38. Morris Zyrl and Saul S. Friedman, "The Holocaust as Seen in the Movies," in Holocaust Literature: A Handbook of Critical, Historical, and Literary Writings, ed. Saul S. Friedman (Westport, Conn., 1993), pp. 604-22
39. See A. Roy Eckardt, "Comedy Versus Tragedy: Post-Shoah Reflections" (Oxford, 1990), and Carol Faye Stern Edelman, "(1) Attitudes Toward Violence the Subculture of Violence Revisited; (2) Conflict and Control Functions of Sexual Humor; (3) Resistance to Genocide: Victim Response During the Holocaust" (Ph.D. diss., University of Arizona, 1987)
40. For the general context, see Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood's Image of the Jew (New York, 1982)
41. Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, 1988)
42. and Mark Winocur, American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Film Comedy (New York, 1993)
43. Quoted in David Robinson, Chaplin: His Life and Art (New York, 1985), p. 485
44. Quoted in.Leland A. Poague, The Cinema of Ernst Lubitsch: The Hollywood Films (Cranbury, N.J., 1978), p. 90
45. Uwe Naumann, Zwischen Tränen und Gelächter (Köln, 1983), p. 292
46. William Paul, Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy (New York, 1983), p. 243
47. See Mordecai Newman, "Naughty Nazis: A Review of 'To Be or Not to Be,'" Jewish Frontier 51 (Mar. 1984): 24-26
48. See Caroline Alice Wiedmer, "Reconstructing Sites: Representations of the Holo-caust in Postwar Literary, Cinematic, and Memorial Texts" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1994)
49. See Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley, 1995)
50. For the context, see Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persuasion, Rescue, Survival (New York, 1987)
51. Beth Pinsker, "Did Another Shoah Comedy Inspire Benigni?" Forward, 5 Feb. 1999, p. 1
52. See Alan Riding, "German Films at Festival Treat Nazis More Freely," New York Times, 18 Feb. 1999, pp. El-2. The light touch in this film answers the rather more serious version of the making of the most repulsive of the pseudo-documentary anti-Semitic films of the Third Reich, Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (1940) in which Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were made to "star." A further theme was the accusation about Hitler's favorite director Leni Riefenstahl's film Tiefland (1940-45; released 1954). She was accused of having gotten Gypsy extras from a concentration camp to act in the filmed operetta, some of whom were later murdered there. This is echoed in the "half-Jewish director Thomas Brasch's Der Passagier-Welcome to Germany (1988). There Tony Curtis plays the adult director who had been a child actor in the Nazi film. As a German film about the Shoah, the taboo of the comic is firmly in place
53. See David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-45 (Oxford, 1983), and Yizhak Ahren, Stig Hornshøj-Møller, and Christoph B. Melchers, "Der ewige Jude" oder wie Goebbels hetzte: Untersuchungen zum nationahozialistischen Propagandafilm (Aachen, 1990)
54. Roberto Benigni, "Life Is Beautiful: An Interview with Roberto Benigni," interview by Prairie Miller, http://allmovie.corn/cg/x.dIl?UID=8: 20:45|AMamp;Pp=avgamp;sql=M1P|81377
55. See for example the discussion in Ralph Tutt, "Seven Beauties and the Beast: Bettelheim, Wertmuller, and the Uses of Enchantment," Literature/Film Quarterly 17 (July 1989): 193-201
56. Quoted in Erika Milvy, "I Just Wanted to Make a Beautiful Movie,'" Salon, 30 Oct. 1998, http://www.salonmag.coni/ent/niovies/int/ 1998/10/30int.htrnl
57. Bruce Weber, "What's So Funny?: Decoding That Enigma Called Humor and Failing Gleefully," New York Times, 9 Mar. 1999, p. B9
58. See Pinsker, "Did Another Shoah Comedy Inspire Benigni?" Forward, p. 14
59. Jurek Becker, Ende des Grössenwahns (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), pp. 11-12
60. See Briefe am Litzmannstadt, trans. Peter Lachmann and Arnfrid Astel, ed. Janusz Gumkowski, Adam Rutkowski, and Astel (Cologne, 1967), pp. 30, 58
61. Jurek Becker, ed. Karin Graf and Ulrich Konietzny (Munich, 1991), p. 59
62. See Jurek Becker, ed. Carl Paschek (exhibition catalog, Stadtund Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main, 24 May-30 June 1989), p. 49
63. Theodor W. Adorno, "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit," Eingriffe (Frankfurt am Main, 1968), pp. 143-44
64. quot;Jakob the Liar: Behind the Scenes and Cast Bios," http://www.spe.sony.com/movies/ jakobtheliar/cast.html u http://www.spe.sony. com/movies/ jakobtheliar/cast.html