Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein Phyllis Lassner (bio) Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany. By Valerie Weinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. xi, 281 pp., ISBN 978-0-253-04071-8 (pb), US $36.00. Comic representations of Hitler and his minions first became a staple of Hollywood and British films when his rise to power consolidated, and then loomed, as a global threat. Iconic examples are Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 film The Great Dictator and Leslie Howard’s 1941 Pimpernel Smith, both of which were designed and have been studied as using comedy to build audience morale as the Third Reich was executing its lethal imperial and racialist designs. Chaplin and Howard satirize Hitler and his high command as nasty buffoons who mask their inept calculations of the Allies’ stalwart heroism with crazed racist rants. Chaplin’s Adenoid Hynkel and Howard’s General von Graum are outwitted by weaponizing the humanity of Hitler’s Jewish victims, and the British gift of withering wit. Although these films and German film comedies from 1933 to 1945 have not been studied comparatively, the Nazi propaganda machine also used film comedy to build morale. Whereas British and Hollywood comedies lampooned Nazi ideologies, practices, and leadership, and Chaplin in particular mocked Hitler’s antisemitic beliefs, German films elevated the Reich’s self-image by affirming the German people’s superior moral, cultural, and psychological [End Page 232] character in contrast to the Jews’ omnipresent power and degeneracy. While Nazi films have received scholarly attention from various cultural and historical perspectives, Valerie Weinstein’s monograph, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, is a significant contribution to the related fields of interwar and World War II film and cultural studies, German-Jewish Studies, and in particular, for its comprehensive research on the multifaceted nature and cultural expression of Nazi antisemitism. Pointedly, Weinstein demonstrates that “Antisemitism left an indelible mark on Nazi-era film comedy” (2). Weinstein provides a comprehensive cultural historical background to her study, situating Nazi comic cinema in its development out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression and its goal of competing successfully with Hollywood film production and distribution. The vigorous support of Josef Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry led to unprecedented growth in cinema audiences, in part as a result of his banning American films. Under his tutelage, Nazi films were designed to teach audiences to identify with an idealized representation of German Volk and culture, the Volksgemeinschaft, “a national community unified by race, rather than divided by class or creed” (8). Pairing different modes of Nazi film comedy, Weinstein demonstrates how Volksgemeinschaft could be achieved by expressing the seriousness of ideology and instilling the social and cultural norms of Nazism through the use of various comic conventions. “Jokes, gags, stock characters, and narrative structures” encouraged audiences to identify with such prescribed values as pitting insider against outsider while creating a community of Germanness (9). Jews were the quintessential unwanted outsiders and Nazi comic films plotted audience acceptance of their antisemitic representations in a trajectory from overt to indirect forms. Weinstein develops her analysis through the concept of “inferential antisemitism” consisting of “humor, indirect coding, absences, and substitutes [that] helped spectators imagine an abstract Jewishness and a German identity and community free from it” (2). Although her introductory discussion is a bit belabored in its summaries of theories, her close readings of both German cinema’s overt antisemitism and evolution into embedded innuendos, gaps, and displacements are sharply honed, critically insightful, and illustrated with lively detail. She argues persuasively that the use of comedy presented German film audiences with an organic process that played to their presumed attitudes, to complacency in an urgent time, and welcoming a comedy of antisemitic [End Page 233] manners. Purging the German national ethos of a broadly conceived Jewishness began with extricating comic forms identified as Jewish, such as the kind of wit Leslie Howard personified, and thereby opened creative spaces for, humor that would be presented as purely German. In this way, Nazi cultural production became a powerful purveyor of models for Aryan identification and Jewish extermination. With astute linkages between political and cultural history, she

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