Dec 30, 2025
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Holocaust Films/Books: What’s Been Achieved/Missed
by Doniphan Blair
In his brief Oscar acceptance speech, 'Son of Saul' director László Nemes thanked his lead, Géza Röhrig, the 'incredible cast and crew,' and said, 'in the darkest hours of mankind, there might be a voice within us, that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film.' photo: Variety/illo: D. BlairJump to Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 or Chapter 5.
Dedicated to Pablo Royal
With the arrival of "Son of Saul", the stunning new film from first-time feature director László Nemes, which won the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (Hungary's second), and the emergence of a mini-world war in the Middle East, which could culminate with an all-out attack on Israel, and the re-emergence of serious anti-Semitism in Europe…
“What more can be achieved by Holocaust films and books?” it is not unreasonable to ask.
Was Nazism cured by “art war” in addition to regular war, war crimes trials and America's Marshall Plan? Were German writers and filmmakers, and artists from other countries—like The Beatles, who literally launched the '60s “romantic revolution” from Hamburg, Germany, in August, 1960—instrumental, so to speak, in that nation’s surprisingly swift recovery from the depths of depravity?
Amidst all of today's current crises, is humanity helped by an increased awareness of the Holocaust and its Siamese twin, Nazism (pronounced "NAT-zism," from Nationalsozialismus, the political party's name), or the complex context of European history?
Certainly, the near-collapse of Western Civilization only 75 years ago, in a scant twelve years, half of which involved vast conflagration and killing, suggests an Achilles's Heel worthy of investigation. No wonder World War Two (WWII) has become the biggest film-book cash cow in, as well as about, history, indicating an almost insatiable “Why?” with the Holocaust a bonus enigma, an extra, extreme butchery at the center of a conflict which killed OVER 73 million human beings (according to Wikipedia).
In the end, however, can there be satisfactory answers? Can irreducible human truths be gleaned from grey-faced inmates, black-uniformed perpetrators, sardine-packed cattle cars or the camps' near-infinite brutality? If so, could Auschwitz be for psychology, philosophy, evolution theory—religion and mysticism even, what particle accelerators are for physics?
“Thanks but no thanks,” say many perfectly decent people, including friends of mine, when informed of the next Holocaust offering, no matter how well done, which can, admittedly, make it harder to stomach. “I can’t sleep for days afterwards,” they say, or “I saw ‘Schindler’s List’ [1993] and I am still thinking about it,” or “I know all about the Holocaust.” While the last remark is worrisome, entering “anus mundi,” Latin for "asshole of the world"—as Wiesław Kielar, a Polish-Catholic filmmaker and long-term Auschwitz inmate, called it in his 1966 book of the same name—MUST BE voluntary.
'Son of Saul' lead, Géza Röhrig, amidst a back-breaking 12-hour shift emptying bodies from the gas chamber. photo courtesy: L. NemesIf "history is prenatal psychology," as the saying goes, with the experiences of one generation inevitably passing to and injuring the next, isn’t some familiarity with the Holocaust well-advised to becoming a citizen of the 21st century? Traumatizing as it may be, and hard, if not impossible, to understand, the Holocaust continues to have ramifications across the world as well as the Middle East and Europe, politically and morally but also metaphysically—the shaman's meditation on death. For this reason, “the 'show-ah' must go on,” as has been quipped by some cynical media types (read Jews), "shoah" being Hebrew for "holocaust," which, in turn, derives from the Greek "holokaustas," meaning “sacrificial burnt offering,” a rather precise word for the Jewish experience of WWII. Indeed, as with the classics of film and literature, each generation needs its own interpretation of Anus Mundi for a fresh avenue towards understanding. Now the millennials have theirs: “Son of Saul” (2015).
In addition to an innovative script co-written with Clara Royer, László Nemes developed a distinctive style and fantastic production values, starting with his masterful 2007 short, "With a Little Patience". About a secretary working in the front office of a concentration camp, oddly enough, it was also shot with a slightly bleached-blue look by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and worked on by "Son of Saul"'s Hungarian crew. Nemes did copious research for his feature, including close readings of recently unearthed caches of color photos of the ghettos and camps taken by Germans. "Son of Saul" is also well-served by its lead, Géza Röhrig, despite his only prior professional acting experience being on a Hungarian television show in 1989. Also a Hungarian Jew, if now residing in the modern Jewish ghetto of Manhattan's Upper West Side, Röhrig became Nemes's Hebrew everyman, or "mensch" in Yiddish, after meeting him when Nemes did a year at NYU Film School. Not only does Röhrig appear in almost every shot, filling the frame with his expression-less, yet watching-like-a-hawk face, or back of head, he was something of the production’s poetic muse. When visiting Poland as a twenty-something in the mid-1990s, he cancelled his tour to stay for a month near Krakow in the village of Oświęcim—called Auschwitz by the Germans—pilgrimaging daily to the “work camp” one mile out of town or a mile further to the “death camp," called Birkenau, to contemplate and write poetry. Evidently, Röhrig had not yet read the admonition of Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist and composer (1903-69):
“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
In keeping with Adorno, however, “Son of Saul” is affectless, prosaic, post-modern even, although Nemes rejects that categorization, as he does ALL previous Holocaust films! “Negative inspiration,” he called them during my December, 2015, interview with him and Röhrig. “It is very humanistic,” he said about his film, “pre-industrial, in a way.” Be that as it may—and “Son of Saul” does open with a long, evocative shot of the forest and returns to similar imagery in its ending—the film features a very modern technique, extreme shallow focus, which provides a crisp view of Röhrig’s Saul while blurring the monstrosities swirling around him during his 12-hour shifts in an unnamed camp (if much like Birkenau). Although the ending is modestly redemptive, according to Nemes (Röhrig disagrees), the film downplays dramatic arc, which, along with its tight focus and framing, makes the on-screen horror a tad easier to take—good news for our “holophobic” friends!
Indeed, “Son of Saul” received numerous laudatory reviews and awards, including the 2015 Grand Prix at Cannes, as well as the 2016 Foreign Oscar, and opened on January 15th, 2016, to good attendance in art houses across the United States. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Landmark Theater had better than average matinees, an employee told me, due to the older crowds, including some octogenarian Holocaust survivors straggling in to see if a filmmaker finally got their story right.
'Son of Saul''s Nemes and Röhrig ranged widely across Holocaust history, Shoah cinema and their own film in their interview with CineSource. photo: D. BlairDespite its blurry backgrounds, “Son of Saul” is hardly easy viewing, given it transpires beneath Dante's "ninth circle of hell" among the “Sonderkommando.” Forced to load, unload and clean the gas chambers and crematoria, collecting and sometimes pocketing the victims' valuables, the Sonderkommando would get gassed every few months to prevent their secrets, stashes or selves from escaping, although—in a tip of the hat to traditional heroics— Saul and his comrades plan to do exactly that. Until, while emptying a gas chamber of corpses, Saul comes upon the body of his son, the film's title character. Despite the wellknown rabbinical waiver of abiding Jewish law if it endangers life, Saul sets out to find a rabbi to perform his son's last rites. In this manner, Nemes, Röhrig and associates resurrect not only the individuality and spirituality obliterated in the camps but human culture itself, which started with Paleolithic burial rites some 50,000 years ago. As such, Saul’s desire to reestablish Jewish “halakhic law” makes “Son of Saul” an appropriate eulogy for the Jews who didn't survive—who were torturously butchered, in fact, and whose story, according to Nemes, has been passed over by most of Shoah cinema as well as Western Civilization.
Does this mean all previous Anus Mundi movies are, well, crap?
The vast majority of Holocaust survivors I have read books by, seen or heard interviews with, or interviewed or spoken with myself at family gatherings, by appointment or at international conferences (which started in 1981), credit sheer luck above all. "They were going down the line, shooting every tenth man," I was told by my second cousin, Joseph Plonski, a Polish-Jewish-American survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, "I was the seventh or eighth guy." Alas, random chance doesn't make for great drama or insightful research: the dead don't add details, merely statistics. Hence, almost all Holocaust films, plus much of the literary and academic output, focus on those who lived, making them de facto “survival of the fittest” stories. This puts them in odd alignment with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which was central to the worldview of the National Socialist Party, no matter how catastrophically the Nazis failed to comprehend it. Indeed, near the end of the war, a Nazi pseudo-scientist is said to have remarked something like: Hey, I just realized, if we don’t kill every single, last Jew, and the survivors reproduce, we will have bred a super-race! Obviously, the Nazis also didn’t get the gist of, let alone read, Darwin’s second world-changing book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871), which investigates sexual selection and how species reproduce and nurture their own. As important to evolution as simple endurance, sexual selection can be called “survival of the lovingest.” Indeed, along with luck, which is a stand-in for "nature" or "god," survivors almost always thank altruism and assistance from others, which means "nurture."
Nemes’s youthful exuberance for his new interpretation of Anus Mundi aside, does “Son of Saul” surpass the entirety of the enormous Shoah genre, including the titanic “Shoah” itself, the nine-and-a-half hour art house documentary by the French Jew Claude Lanzmann (1985), or “The Pianist" (2002), which figures first on many “Best Of” Holocaust film lists and took two Oscars? Based on a memoir of the same name by Warsaw pianist Władysław Szpilman and starring Adrien Brody, who becomes preternaturally thin by the end of the film, it was directed by the Polish-Jewish-American-French Roman Polanski, famous/notorious for “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), the Manson murders of his wife, Sharon Tate (1969), “Chinatown” (1974) and assaulting an underage woman in 1977. He is also a Holocaust survivor from Krakow, Poland.
Pro-Palestinian protest in Paris veers anti-Semitic with chants of 'death to the Jews' and swastikas, July 26, 2014. photo: courtesy Vanity FaireGiven the release of “Son of Saul”, the revival of violent anti-Semitism in Europe (traditional hard right prejudices and leftist ideologies hybriding with new Muslim ones), and that the last of the survivors are quite elderly, while kids today, although laudably familiar with the Holocaust, are not aware of how it was largely invisible before 1978 (hence could fade), perhaps this is a good time to sit down and take a long look at the films, books, art and philosophies of “holocology,” as the field can be called, after a substantial academic sector emerged in the 1980s. If we can identify the failures, chart the successes and uncover ignored aspects worthy of research, art or contemplation, perhaps critical new, life-saving and even mystical insights can be gleaned.
Au contraire Adorno, who was referring to poetry in its 19th century, civilization-supporting sense—and that certainly crashed and burned in WWII, if not WWI and its associated art movements (Dadaism and Surrealism)—art is essential to digesting our most extreme experiences. Long before Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies' declaration of "victory day" (V-Day) on May 8th, 1945 (in the European theater, August 15th, in the Pacific), filmmakers, writers and other artists were hard at work, some even creating and secreting away art in the camps themselves. And, every few years since, as Nemes has done with "Son of Saul", they have invented new pathways into, if not through, the Holocaust’s forbidding territory. Indeed, even as the Allies were liberating the camps, the beleaguered Soviet Army at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 (now International Holocaust Remembrance Day) and the much better-equipped US Army at Dachau, near Munich, three months later on April 26th, including the highly-decorated Japanese-Americans of the 522nd Battalion, who enlisted out of internment camps (low-security prisons where 115,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated as "security risks"), Russian, English and American soldiers were shooting away—with cameras not guns—well aware that the crime had to be fully documented to be partially believed.
Back in London, the cream of cinema's crop, notably the “Master of Horror” Alfred Hitchcock, who came home from Hollywood precisely to assist on such a production, were hard at work editing atrocity footage into coherence. The principle film, the prosaically titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” (see CS article), English Prime Minister Winston Churchill hoped would finally answer "Why We Fight", the title of an American newsreel series. But, by the time "Camps Factual Survey” was ready, replete with walking skeletons, Allied soldiers bulldozing body piles and bone-dry narration, plus the long takes Hitchcock recommended to refute accusations of image doctoring, the world was partying hardy, a celebratory bacchanal that went on for years. My mother, a 21 year-old Polish-Jewish survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, fondly recalled being in Paris on V-Day's third celebration in 1947, when she was "embraced, twirled and kissed," while my father, an air force photographer in town for the fourth anniversary, told me festivities were "carrying on apace." After the killing comes the rebirth. Indeed, those celebrations, notably the "night work" generating the Baby Boom, equaled if not exceeded those of the '60s, which were, in fact, a gift to the post-war kids from their parents, the '40s "lost youth generation," also called the Greatest Generation.
British soldiers on body-digging duty in 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey', an unreleased 1945 newsreel. photo: courtesy A. Singer Too much of a downer, explained Allied authorities (albeit in army speak), when they cancelled "Camps Factual Survey", essentially agreeing with people who eschew Holocaust material today. Nazi atrocities were highlighted at Nuremberg (1945-6) and other trials, and individual nations held their own indictments, almost always concluding with death sentences. But the Allies decided to forgo adjudicating endless war crimes and take into consideration Germany's over five million dead and over eight million Nazi party members, who simply couldn't be all arrested and tried, especially given the pressing need to standup a labor force and government in a bombed-flat, service-less and completely chaotic country. The Marshall Plan (1947) institutionalized notions of fair-play and forgiveness, switching out the punishment and penury of the Versailles Treaty (1919) or the Morgenthau Plan (1944) for the aid, rebuilding and nurture proposed by President Harry Truman's State Department and spearheaded by its secretary and eloquent advocate, General George Marshall. Although Marshall was the five-star general who managed the entire war and America's military expansion to world dominance, he became the great peacemaker and was considered “the greatest man I ever met,” by the radical film artist Orson Welles. England received the lion's share of American largess but Germany got critical assistance (11% of total, almost a billion 1947 dollars), as did the rest of Europe outside the Soviet sector, where aid was offered but rejected. Alas, the Cold War was already cooking; West Germany was a front-line state; the Allies brought in hundreds of German scientists (mostly Nazis); and they feared “Camps Factual Survey” would alienate average Germans while grossing out everyone else. Fragments were pulled from London's Imperial War Museum over the years, including the grotesque shots we have all come to know, and longer segments for a 1985 television show, but it was only recently restored in full. The informative documentary about it, "Night Will Fall", by Andre Singer and his family, with many original sequences, finally aired in 2015 (HBO).
While “Camps Factual Survey”'s images of industrialized murder were mind blowing, there was nothing new about the rabid anti-Semitism, around since the Middle Ages. Those assuming anti-Semitism would fade in the face of democracy and the Industrial Revolution were rudely awaken by the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), the trial and retrials of a French-Jewish officer accused of spying for Germany (eventually exonerated, he served in WWI), which violently divided the French. Indeed, the Impressionist painters were almost evenly split for and against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the latter including the elderly Paul Cézanne, creator of Cubism-esque country scenes, and Edgar Degas, painter of cafes and ballerinas, who turned on his friend, Camille Pissaro, the one Jew among the Impressionists. When thousands of Parisians marched in the streets chanting “Death to the Jews,” the Hungarian-Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), there covering the proceedings, abandoned his career and dedicated his few remaining years to establishing a state for Jews, who, he suddenly realized, were still essentially stateless. After the Dreyfus Affair, many assumed that if "pogroms" (the medieval massacres of Jews) were to return to Western Europe, as they had to Russia in the 1880s, it would be in France, not a Germany already famous for its music, philosophy, technology and social services, if not democracy. Indeed, until the US' late entry into WWI in 1917—involvement was adamantly opposed by devout Protestants, leading suffragettes, Irish Democrats (who wanted to punish England) and President Woodrow Wilson (until he became not just pro-war but an avid civilization builder, see League of Nations)—most American Jews supported the Germans' fight against Tsarist Russia, where some five million Jews lived as second-class citizens in the Pale of Russia, a nation-sized ghetto stretching from Lithuania to The Ukraine.
1898 cartoon of novelist Emile Zola accusing the French Army of scapegoating Dreyfus. illo: Plain DealerAnti-Semitism was essential to enacting the Holocaust, obviously, but less well known is that it underpinned Nazi strategy for seizing power. Called “the socialism of fools,” by German Marxist August Bebel, anti-Semitism went much further, unifying leftists with rightists, petite bourgeois, monarchists, pseudo-scientists and actual Sadists under one highly graphic flag, although Nazi stereotyping of Jews as both ruling industrialists AND radical communists required some fudging. Hitler made few other coherent, larger points in his rambling, malevolent and often ungrammatical “Mein Kampf” (1925) but it remains a critical historical document—finally unbanned in Germany and re-released with extensive annotation in 2016 (it became a minor bestseller)—for what it reveals about his occasionally astute political analysis, his opportunist, predatory tactics and his megalomaniac self-image. One of his recommendations: limit blanket animosity to a single enemy to avoid confusing the haters, hence his endless harping on “Jewish-Bolsheviks,” which did square the circle of contradicting stereotypes; another, deploy the “big lie.” Average people “often tell small lies in little matters,” he claimed, “but… they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.“ A third concerns the scientific application of terror: “I understood the infamous spiritual terror the [Nazi] movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally or mentally equal to such attacks… I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror to the individual and the masses.” Not to forget his piece de resistance, unrelenting, over-the-top anti-Semitism: “In his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” ("No one says it quite like Uncle Adolf...")
While anti-Semitism was central to Nazi strategy, it was likewise to their defeat. You might think destroying the Jews, less than one percent of the German population, would figure fairly small in a world war between industrial superpowers but the so-called Third Reich—the first was the Holy Roman Empire started by Charlemagne, a matriarchal-minded warrior, which did in fact last exactly one thousand years (800-1806); the second was the Kaisers,1870-1919, devised by German founding father Otto "Iron Chancellor" von Bismarck, a brilliant statesman—devoted an inordinate amount of energy to genocide. They elevated the Jews to their third front, diverting trains and troops from other fronts, which made it an expensive fight, no matter how one-sided, in terms of men and materiel but also lost opportunities.
Although there could be no Nazism without anti-Semitism, counter-factually, had the Nazis embraced their Jewish neighbors of 17 centuries, with whom they shared language (Yiddish derives from 10th c. Middle High German), culture and family and battlefield camaraderie (there were many intermarriages and Jewish soldiers by WWI), they would have enjoyed outsized Jewish efforts on their behalf, surely including a military miracle or two, just like those delivered during WWI. The Nazis invented jet propulsion but they rejected nuclear research as "Jewish science," due to the predominance of Jews among its pioneers, despite having the world-class physicist Werner Heisenberg at their disposal. Friends with many of those Jewish scientists, Heisenberg evidently acted morally, playing down his abilities and up the project's long time frame, which precluded nuke development for the V-1 and V-2 rockets that rained death on England much of the war's last year. During WWI, on the other hand, German-Jews were held in high regard, notably Walther Rathenau, the industrialist who redesigned the army's supply chain, saving millions, and the chemist Fritz Haber, who co-invented the ammonia synthesis process for making nitrogen, the main ingredient in the mystically-mirroring life-enhancing fertilizers AND life-destroying explosives. Explosives had depended on the saltpeter imports from Chile interrupted by Allied domination of the Atlantic, which could have ended outright Germany's war-fighting capacity. Haber also developed chlorine gas, the first of such WWI scourges, which brought war crime charges, although the case was dropped after the war and, instead, he was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry! Admittedly, nitrogen-based fertilizers did help feed billions and remain in use today, despite periodic diversion into munitions (like the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing and other terror attacks). Regardless of so much Jewish support, the Big Lie in Germany post-war was that their defeat was not due to having exhausted munitions, men and food, with some civilians eating sawdust-infused bread, nor the arrival of the Americans, who finally marched down into the Western Front's grotesque trenches in the summer of 1918, but THE JEWS! Supposedly, German Jews not only shirked front-line duty for cushy desk jobs but secretly negotiated an unjust surrender and foisted it on the unsuspecting Germans—the so-called “stab in the back” conspiracy. In point of fact, as most Germans were well aware, Haber had literally “loaded the gun in the front” with inventions for his beloved fatherland so phenomenal yet frightening that his wife—ALSO a Jewish chemist—despaired and killed herself.
Jewish chemist Fritz Haber shows German soldiers how to use the chlorine gas he developed in WWI. photo: courtesy Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, BerlinFew today recall that Big Lie but another starring the Jews is very much with us: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders, to set bank interest rates, destabilize countries and the like, it remains a bestseller today in the Arab World and among neo-Nazis and the prototype for conspiracy theories like 9/11 and Holocaust denial. Concocted around 1903 by the Tsar’s secret police, to deflect outrage against the tyrannical and troubled, four century-old Russian monarchy, “The Protocols” were put to immediate Stab-in-the-Back use. How did barely-industrialized Japan defeat Russia's massive military in 1904? What triggered the democratic Russian revolution of 1905 and the communist one of 1917? The Jews, of course, although exactly how they profited from such upheavals was obscure while their suffering from them was obvious. Indeed, the Russian Revolution and civil war triggered terrible deprivations and waves of refugees, some of whom carried “The Protocols” west, where a Times of London reporter, Lucien Wolf (Jewish, as it happened), exposed it not only as a forgery but plagiarism (1921). Many paragraphs were identical to a 1870 French political satire by Maurice Joly, just with the word "Jew" switched in. “The Protocols” easily eclipsed the drawn-out Dreyfus Case and inflamed anti-Semitic imaginations far beyond France and Europe, especially around a mystery that continues apace today: What’s with the Jews and moneylending? Churchill, a respected journalist at that time, alluded to "The Protocols" in an article but rapidly retracted after The Times' expose. Henry Ford, however, stood by "The Protocols", serialized it in his newspaper and distributed it as a book and in his four-volume, fraud- and hate-filled extravaganza, "The International Jew" (1922). "The Protocols" was endorsed by the Vatican, publicized by the Catholic press and the Nazis mandated its inclusion in German history curriculum.
By the supposedly-swinging 1920s, the ancient accusation against the Jews of murdering god (they only condemned Christ, according to the "New Testament", while the Romans actually crucified him) faded as the Christians finally accepted Christ's famous forgiveness and some scientific rationalism. Meanwhile, the medieval calumny of Jews killing Christian children to make Passover matzo, the notorious Eastern European “blood libel,” also passed its statute of credulity limitations. ("Wouldn’t blood turn white matzo red? Cannibalism, really?!?") Indeed, the last Blood Libel, "The Beilis Affair," was actually litigated in court in 1913, in Kiev, Russia, and ended in acquittal of its defendant, Menahem Mendel Beilis, despite the anti-Semitism of some jurors. ("Score one for civilization...") Nevertheless, 20th century allegations that Jews controlled the world, largely through the banking systems, which medieval moneylending allowed them to get in on early, supposedly substantiated by “The Protocols”, could not easily be converted or proven away. What is difficult to discern is equally hard to disprove as prove. By virtue of this epistemological trick, European anti-Semitism completed its long, multi-stage journey from primitive, religious and tribal to modern, zoological and eliminationist.
Such a reinvigorated anti-Semitism was so pervasive and palpably strange that most of modernism’s early literary giants—Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller—addressed it one way or another in their first big books: “Metamorphosis” (1915), “Ulysses” (1922), “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) and “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), respectively (George Eliot also did so in her "Daniel Deronda", 1876). Admittedly, the first offering from revered anti-Fascist and futurist George Orwell (1903-50), “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933), was lousy with anti-Semitic slurs but he redeemed himself in his 1945 essay “Antisemitism in Britain”: “The two current explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that antisemitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism… and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat we do NOT YET know,” (my emphasis).
Paris in the '30s with writer Henry Miller and Anais Nin, friend, feminist author and publisher of his novel, 'Tropic of Cancer' (1934), which was inordinately concerned with Jews. photo: courtesy Henry Miller LibraryConversely, the French doctor-writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961) barely mentions Jews in his first two books, the biting and bleak but also funny and respected “Journey to the End of the Night” (1934) and “Death on the Installment Plan” (1936), even though he started hysterically scapegoating Jews for EVERYTHING a few years later! He left racist rants out of his literature because, paradoxically, he was a great enough of a writer to know novels are explorations not lectures. Vigorously pumping out anti-Semitic screeds by the time the Germans took Paris—without a fight—on June 14th, 1940, Celine tried to enlist with them but was rejected—too crazy even for the Nazis, despite being a doctor! Tried and convicted by French authorities, in absentia after the war, Celine did no time and was re-accepted by the literati, notably the Jewish-American poet and beatnik cheerleader, Allan Ginsberg, who felt Celine's contributions to culture and public health (he was dedicated to doctoring the disenfranchised, ironically) made up for his world-class misanthropy and Hebrew-hatred. The ever-tolerant Ginsberg also visited Ezra Pound, the American poet, classicist and around-town hipster (friend and booster of almost every 1920-'30s writer of note), during his 14 years in jail in Washington DC for not only living in and supporting Italy during the war but doing pro-Fascist and -Nazi and virulently anti-Semitic radio broadcasts. Regardless of Ginsberg's goodwill, Pound continued to associate Jews with money and greed, only recanting late in life with the feeble excuse that he had mistaken the symptom for the cause.
Brooklyn-born Henry Miller (1891-1980), who lived in Paris, 1930-39, knew Pound and admired the novels of Celine (who refused to see him, ridiculing him as an intellectual), addressed the new anti-Semitism, Nazism and "all the 'isms,'" as he called them, through irony, extreme individualism, surrealism, reverse psychology and zeitgeist excavations. Miller even painted himself as a “Jew hater,” which baffles critics to this day, although if he was so anti-Semitic, why does he fall madly in love with and write almost exclusively about Jews, including his main muse, second wife Mona? His pioneering, plot-less and hallucinatory, yet slice-of-life autobiographical novel, “Tropic of Cancer", was one of the loudest wake-up calls of the '30s, and recognized as such by other writers, including Pound and TS Eliot, who may not have gotten his ironic anti-Semitism. After "Cancer"'s opening pages jokes about his X-rated passions for Tania, a married Jewess (Jewish woman), he notes more modest affections for "almost all Montparnasse [Paris, which] is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse," and that he himself is "as ugly as a Jew. And who hates the Jew more than the Jew" (a reference to Hitler's suspect lineage). On page nine, Miller warns: “For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. Standing there helpless, the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion has heard of Spinoza. Spinoza?” (For others who may not have heard: Spinoza was the 17th century Dutch-Jewish philosopher who kicked off the Enlightenment, developed multicultural deism and was excommunicated by the rabbis.) After warning of WWII in his "Open Letter to Surrealists" (1937), Miller escaped Europe through Greece just before the deluge. Although "Cancer" was dismissed by American academics and banned by its courts for raving and porn, respectively, intellectuals and soldiers alike smuggled cheap paperbacks back to the States where its literary Cubism made "Cancer" an early beatnik bestseller worshiped by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Mailer. Finally landing in the wilderness of Big Sur, California, Miller lived in impoverished, if "high hippie" circumstances, until a judge ruled in 1962 that "Cancer" had "literary merit," leading to his first royalty check (age 71, hundreds of thousands). Beneath Miller's anti-Semitic spoofing, his sarcastic flights of fancy and exaggerated misogyny, however, was a life-positive romantic and mystic, whose slogan his Paris Days was "Ever merry and bright."
A similar, if less surreal, tack was taken by Gregor von Rezzori (1914-98) in his brilliant “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite” (1969), a series of humorous interlocking tales about growing up in an Austro-Hungarian backwater with various Jewish friends and lovers but also a fallen-aristocrat father, who would go apoplectic if Jews entered his hunting club or committed other “crimes.” There's nothing like the chapter opener where "the big something falling from the floor above my grandmother's [Vienna] apartment," is "the young Raubitschek girl," Minka, committing suicide. She survives and the young Rezzori who falls madly in love, despite her acquisition of a pronounced limp. One of the few German authors to expose Jews as well Germans, not to mention himself, to brutally honest assessment, “Memoirs” is a rollicking good read and rather revealing sociologically. One of the many terrible things about the Holocaust, von Rezzori once mused: We are no longer allowed to discuss "the Jewish Question."
Kafka and his modernist masterpiece, 'Metamorphosis' (1915), better translated 'The Transformation', on which he forbade the use of a bug image. photo: Kafka EstateAlready way down that ironic, surrealist road, however, was arguably the greatest—as well as the earliest—literary modernist, and the movement's only Jew, along with Marcel Proust: Franz Kafka of Prague, Czech Republic (1883-1924). Miller's stylistic opposite, Kafka used faux-classical storytelling, more extreme surrealism and stand-ins for Jews—without mentioning the word—who turn out to be almost all his protagonists. In addition to Gregor Samsa, the salesman-cum-cockroach in “Metamorphosis”, there's the hapless anti-heroes caught in the incomprehensible systems of “The Trial” (1925) and “The Castle” (1928), and even the cute, little “mouse folk” singer, Josephine (1924 short story). Kafka modeled Samsa almost entirely on himself, starting with his surname's length and letters but extending to the entire backstory: Samsa is also a traveling salesman and his family's breadwinner, with an overbearing father and one sister he's close to. Overshadowing everything of course is Samsa's shape-shifting into an insect, which highlights the acute alienation of the Jew—but also any sensitive person—before the story plummets into a truly cracked universe where people are vermin which must be exterminated for the human family to return to normal, perfectly prefiguring the Third Reich. One of Kafka's last stories, before dying from tuberculosis at 40, concerns a "hunger artist," from the eponymously-titled story (1922), who performs by fasting nearly to death, while on display in a cage, much like Miller's “Lion's cage Jew,” even as public interest wanes. Oddly enough, Kafka himself burned some 90% of his own writing. Even “The Trial” and “The Castle” would have gone up in smoke had not friend and executor, Max Brod, not only ignored his final directive to destroy all diaries and unpublished pieces but escaped to Palestine with a trunk-load of manuscripts in 1939, minutes before the Nazis slammed shut the Czech border. Despite dismal views of his unfinished work, Kafka's themes and “second-level" metaphoring was so spot on that, while critics have long argued over his incorporation of Jewish ideas in various texts, NOT A SINGLE ONE has noted his oeuvre-wide trope, smuggled into world-wide consciousness by beguilingly simple, if strange, stories.
Given such Semite prescience, it's no surprise “Kafkaesque” not only entered common usage but became the number one adjective for describing the nearly-indescribable Nazi Anus Mundi. “The word has become the representative adjective of our times,” notes biographer Frederick Karl, including in his title "Franz Kafka: Representative Man" (1991), despite missing his Judifying of protagonists. Precise language is a prerequisite to cracking the code of complex events, which is the ONLY way to avoid repeating them, as more eloquently expressed in the famous dictum by George Santayana (or Burke, a century earlier). Words always fight the last war, except from a Churchill, indicating that edge-pushing ideas and art predicting the future and new concepts is as critical as rigorously researched history depicting the past.
Indeed, a century before Kafka, the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was already enema-ing the bowels of anti-Semitic hypocrisy with chivalrous love poesy parodies, notably “Donna Clara” (1823). Here we find a noble knight and lovely maiden fleeing a fiesta to steal kisses in the moonlight, until she suddenly whispers, "Yes, I love thee, oh my darling; And I swear it by our Savior; Whom the accursed Jews did murder; Long ago with wicked malice." After trying to woo her off such idiocy, the knight shuts her down with: “I am the son of the Grand Rabbi, Israel of Saragossa!” Although Heine converted to Protestantism, as did many Jews for career advancement, but he remained culturally Jewish and was a prime example of what the brilliant German-Jewish-American historian Hannah Arendt called a "conscious pariah," someone sitting outside but bridging two cultures (Kafka was another). A radical thinker as well as fierce poet, Heine adjusted the ancient conflict between Judaism and Hellenism—the struggle between morality and mysticism, on the one hand, and beauty, art and science—and integrated French Revolutionary ideas. Many of his poems were set to music, making them even better known. Heine went so far as to warn in 1821, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people,” a timetable the Nazis abided scrupulously, first torching his books—which they reviled, since he was Germany’s foremost poet after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)—and, a decade later, his descendants. Unable to erase his poems from Germany's collective consciousness or poetry anthologies, the Nazis credited them to anonymous, despite common knowledge they were Heine's.
Chaplin and Reginald Gardiner before their escape in 'The Great Dictator'. photo: courtesy C. ChaplinWith satire starting in ancient Egypt but blossoming in the burlesque of the Swinging '20s, not to mention the futility of critiquing psychopaths to their face, it’s only natural that the first film to confront the Nazis and their crimes against the Jews was a masterpiece of the genre: “The Great Dictator” (1940), by Charlie Chaplin, Hollywood's biggest star, who directed, wrote and scored as well as clowned.
Jewish artists and entrepreneurs flocked to the fledgling film industry—as they did to any new opportunity for their repressed talents and desperate finances—and cinema was a perfect fit for writing skills honed over three millennia and negotiation tactics developed during the work and travel restrictions of the Middle Ages. Aside from 20th Century-Fox, the one studio run by "goys" (Yiddish for non-Jews), Hollywood was largely created by Louis Mayer, Marcus Loew, the Warner brothers and a host of other under-educated, street-savvy but culturally-astute Jewish immigrants, as enumerated in "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" (1988, Neal Gabler). Their media empire expanded across the country and then the globe, bringing them vast wealth, but they retained the arriviste's fear of rocking the boat and the businessman's preference for cozying up to the dominant culture and majority of ticket-buyers. This was not true of the Jewish writers or directors, however, like the German-Jewish-American Ernst Lubitsch, considered to be Hollywood’s master of the romantic comedy, or Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957), who anointed himself with a "von" even though he barely spoke German (he was a "yiddling" Austrian Jew, like Rezzori's buds). Von Stroheim's thick accent in German as well as English didn't stop him from becoming a star of the silents, first in Germany, then in Hollywood, and one of the first auteur directors, obsessed with every detail of production, as indicated in his ten-hour epic "Greed" (1924). About a San Francisco dentist's descent into evil, and an obvious standin for America, "Greed" was not to the taste of its producer, Irving Thalberg, who ordered it cut to three hours, ending von Strohiem's directing career, although other directors continued to revere him, giving him bit parts in homage.
Chaplin, on the other hand, was NOT Jewish, was his own studio boss (founding partner of United Artists)—making him THE first auteur—not to mention he resembled Hitler, from the mustache and short stature to date of birth, four days difference. Of course, Chaplin's screen personae, the "Little Tramp," was the opposite of the belligerent dictator and even considered Jewish by many, including Jews, a characterization he didn't disavow (his half-brother was Jewish). As it happens, Jewish culture is chock-a-block with Chaplin-esque types and, as with the Inuit's 50 words for snow, Yiddish has many terms for them. (Here's a mnemonic trick for remembering those starting with "S": A "schlemiel" [clumsy] carrying a pot of hot soup trips and spills it all over a "schlimazel" [unlucky] and the floor, where a "schmegegge" [stupid] slips, causing everyone to laugh, save the "schmendrick" [non-entity], who wonders “What's so funny?”) Given his schlimazel screen character and underdog empathy, derived from his impoverished upbringing, on top of the recalcitrant Jewish studio heads with whom he was friendly, Chaplin must have long realized it would be up to him to do artistic take down of his demonic doppelganger.
After studying Hitler newsreels, Chaplin rehearsed and shot extensively—production hit 533 days—while rewriting furiously, since his preferred method was ad lib and reshoot to fit, not to mention the war started in the middle. The story concerns a poor, timid barber in Tomainia (referencing ptomaine poisoning and Germany's Pomerania province), who resembles the country’s dictator, Hynkel, a plot driven by Chaplin's mystical mirroring of Hitler, while conveniently allowing him to play both parts. After induction into the army, Chaplin works his physical comedy magic, running about following idiotic orders, riding an artillery piece like a bucking bronco, and, as the dictator, doing a long, perfectly choreographed dance with a big, globe balloon (see clip), which references world conquest while making him look a tad gay. The barber also saves a pilot, Schultz, the handsome lead common to Chaplin films, who returns leading the soldiers seizing the barber's ghetto. When Schultz refuses to attack them and protests the treatment of the Jews—called Jews, not some euphemism—he's arrested. The film also includes a Mussolini-like character and the Anschluss, Germany’s “peaceful absorption” of Austria, albeit hardly peaceful for the Jews, who were beaten, barred from school and work and pressed into forced labor. Then, in a complete script-flip, the dictator goes duck hunting in civilian clothes, is mistaken for the barber and arrested. This inspires Schultz, who escaped jail and hid in the ghetto, to convince the barber to impersonate Dictator Hynkel, and deliver the already-scheduled big speech. Suddenly dropping all allegorical pretenses, Chaplin has his barber-cum-dictator confess a change of heart and launch into a long plea for peace. "That speech should be trimmed or edited out entirely, advised his Hollywood buddies, one even predicting he would “lose a million for every minute,” but Chaplin carried on regardless, especially after President Franklin Roosevelt called personally to offer encouragement.
Chaplin's barber-as-dictator has a new plan—peace—as 'The Great Dictator' leaps from satire to farce and, finally, heartfelt appeal. photo: courtesy C. ChaplinIf “war is a mere continuation of politics by other means," according to the oft-quoted dictum of Germany’s premier military strategist, Carl von Clausewitz (whose 1832 "On War" would have disappeared if not published posthumously by his wife), then Art War is politics by still other means. It starts with propaganda posters, radio broadcasts and newsreels, but extends into films, books and high art. Although Chaplin insisted he would've cancelled “The Great Dictator” had he known the extent of German atrocities, soldiers who saw the film said they thought Hitler was undefeatable until Chaplin's massive mocking take down. Indeed, it became not only the triumph of a masterpiece-studded career but a metaphorical bludgeon with which to beat the Nazis: satire broadening into farce until, at the film's denouement, Chaplin reverses course, faces the camera and makes a heartfelt, humanist appeal. One of history's greatest Art War hits, in both senses of the word, the film made tons of money while delivering to audiences healing laughter at the expense of the death mongers out to annihilate them. Sadly, when his next film, ”Monsieur Verdoux” (1947), went further into biting, black-comedy and the ‘50s Red Scare began to roll, Chaplin was savaged by rightwing politicians and the press and, having never secured an American citizenship (he was English), hounded into self-exile to Switzerland.
Not coincidentally, Hitler himself was a film fanatic, on top of the painterly pretensions he assumed during his dissolute Vienna youth. Once in power, he often watched one or more films a night, with discussion after, keeping early-rising generals sleep deprived. In a bizarre twist of mystical-mirroring, Hitler ADORED Chaplin, despite assuming he was Jewish (there’s no evidence he stole Chaplin’s signature painted-on mustache for his bigger “toothbrush” version). Trag-ironically, Hitler fraternized with some Jewish artist-types in Vienna, one even helping him hawk his dour, dun-colored and people-less paintings. Alas, others worked at the Vienna Academy of Arts, which rejected him, obviating any good will. Unable to take a joke, by definition, the Nazis banned “The Great Dictator” (as did the English, abiding their 1938 appeasement agreement with Germany). But, unable to resist the lure of his idol’s latest, Hitler had a copy delivered via Portugal and viewed it—twice! While he was impervious to its charms, “The Great Dictator” swayed opinions world-wide and even wielded influence on the ground. One heart-warming story has Serbian resistance fighters switching in “Great Dictator” reels to a theater of unsuspecting German soldiers, just like in Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), although the real-life ones stormed out, pistols blazing (for more "Great Dictator" trivia, go here).
Another monumental wartime contribution to the “ridicule-the-Nazis” genre was “To Be or Not to Be” (1942) by Lubitsch, who started directing silents for Mary Pickford but earned his stripes satirizing the Soviets with "Ninotchka" (1939), starring Greta Garbo and penned by Billy WIlder, yet another Austrian-Jew who became another great American comic director. Imagine, while WWII is raging, catching a comedy about a Warsaw theater company run by a husband-wife team during the German invasion (lighter fare is common in war time, including in Germany and Russia). A rom-com as well as a satire, it soon segues to the wife’s infidelities, which puts her in close contact with a young Polish resistor and then an older double agent, setting up some great politically-incorrect cracks: “Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?” “No, I prefer a slow encirclement;” or “We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." ("Barump... boom!") The high jinks grow ever more outrageous as they employ their acting and costuming skills to manipulate the double agent and then Hitler himself, who shows up for the performance of "Hamlet" (1600) referenced in the title. (“The Fuhrer ADORES live theater…") Along with a serious subplot about saving Jews, there’s an extended riff on a Jewish-looking actor who hopes, before he dies (which may well be soon), to play Shylock, Europe's most famous Jewish character, from Shakespeare’s presumed anti-Semitic play, “Merchant of Venice” (1605). The gag climaxes when he finds himself onstage, before Hitler, doing “Merchant”’s surprisingly pro-Semitic speech: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
Carol Lombard and Jack Benny are Polish actors fooling Nazis and aiding resistors in 'To Be Or Not To Be' ('42). photo: courtesy E. LubitschAlthough Lubitsch’s is better, “To Be or Not to Be” was remade in 1983 by the inveterately irreverent Mel Brooks (with him as hubby and his wife, Anne Bancroft, as wifey). Of course, Brooks had already done “The Producers” (1968), a Ridicule-the-Nazis tour de force, which he doubled down on in 2001 with the remake—as a live musical, no less—which swept the Tony Awards. “The Producers” concerns two theater guys (read Jews), who scheme to bilk their investors by mounting a massive flop. After a search, they find a guaranteed bomb, “Springtime for Hitler”, by an ex-Nazi living in Queens, who tells them, “Not many people knew about it, but the Fuhrer vas a terrific dancer.” That remark draws a broad grin from the head producer, played by Zero Mostel, who overacts, Yiddish theater-style, parodying Jewish producer-types as well (in contrast, his accountant, played by the late Gene Wilder, 1933-2016, underacts). Mostel could go broad with aplomb, however, having just starred in the mega-award-winning “Fiddler on the Roof” (1964), a fantastic musical, which also tells the story of the Holocaust. It closes with Mostel's Tevye and his lovable fellow villagers, forced to flee with a few possessions by the Tsar's soldiers. Although "The Producers"'s producers saw "Springtime for Hitler" as horribly grotesque, with its hyperbolic dance numbers and lyrics like, “We're marching to a faster pace; Look out, here comes the master race" (masterfully rendered in Brooks's remake), jaded New Yorkers found it quality farce, precipitating both a hit and their arrest for embezzling.
While these films showcased satirical side of Art War, there was an equally strong dramatic front, which Hitchcock highlights in his 1943 “Shadow of a Doubt”, right from the opener of a bespectacled girl who refuses to stop reading her book to answer the phone until she walks over, climbs a stool and lifts the receiver. Said to be Hitchcock’s fave from his own catalog, “Shadow” stars Joseph Cotton, as an obvious Nazi stand-in, who pays a visit to his sister’s family in Small Town, USA (Santa Rosa, N. California), while on the lam for seducing, robbing and murdering widows. Indeed, Hitchcock often placed smart, powerful women not only center screen and story but ethical considerations, in stark contrast to his unconscionable abuse of actress Tippi Hedren while making "The Birds" and "Marnie" (1963-4, see CS article). In “Shadow”, Hitch has the bookworm’s older sister, a rambunctious Teresa Wright, warmly invite her uncle into the family but then wise up way ahead of the cops or her oblivious parents. “So go away, I'm warning you,” she coolly informs him. "GO AWAY or I'll kill you myself!” Despite Cotton's attempt to convince her that everyone is venal and corrupt—“Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off these houses, you'd find swine?”—and then murder her himself, she makes good on her threat, turning “Shadow of a Doubt" into a loud shout out to the many underdogs of the 1940s up to their eyeballs in Nazis.
Wright also featured in the Oscar-winning “Mrs Miniver” (1942) by William Wyler, yet another German-Jewish-American director, who started in Westerns but soon graduated to bigger Hollywood fare. It follows an English family, making due and doing their part, with Wright’s husband becoming a pilot, her father-in-law using his yacht to save soldiers trapped in the "Debacle of Dunkirk" and her mother-in-law capturing a German parachutist. While fairly routine activities, in movies at least, the two Mrs. Minivers exemplify the hard work, encouragement and grace under fire—until that fire kills Wright's character—which can be called the “women’s way of war." At her funeral, the vicar eulogizes her indomitable spirit by paraphrasing Churchill's greatest darkest-hour speech (May, 1940): "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills—we shall NEVER surrender!" (which proved the ability of art to marshal armies). Wyler himself made movies for the US Army, notably "Memphis Belle"(1943), about the last run of a B-17 bomber crew, which he flew on (indeed, he went deaf on a B-25 bomber run).
Jan Karski, the Polish spy who witnessed the Holocaust, snuck out and reported to Allies, but was often disbelieved (circa when he was honored by Israel, 1994). photo courtesy J. KarskiAdmittedly, there was not a lot of publicity about Nazi people-burning during the war, although claims there was none are refuted by the 1943 “Black Book of Polish Jewry”, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, and its surprisingly-accurate accounts. In fact, US intelligence was apprised by 1942, just months after Auschwitz fired up its ovens. Central to their intelligence was a report by Jan Karski (1914-2000), a young Polish-Catholic diplomat of patrician stock but also the resistance, who incognito-ed his way across Germany, with a medically-induced swollen jaw to cover his accent, and over the Pyrenees to Portugal. Meeting with Churchill, Parliament (which stood for a minute of silence), Roosevelt and the O.S.S. (precursor to the CIA), Karski told them what happened after he donned a Jewish star and crawling through a tunnel into the Warsaw Ghetto: sepulchral streets stinking of rotting corpses and jammed with emaciated, hollow-eyed people, Hitler Youth wandering about, killing for sport. “We passed a miserable replica of a park… Mothers huddled close together, nursing withered infants,” writes Karski in his 1944 “Courier from Poland: The Story of a Secret State”, which sold 400,000 copies, was excerpted in Collier's Magazine and only republished in 2014 (prefaced by the first female Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, a Czech child refugee, who learned she was Jewish late in life). “Children, every bone in their skeletons showing through their taut skins, played,” Karski continues. “‘They play before they die,’ my guide said, his voice breaking with emotion.” Disguised as a Ukrainian soldier, Karski also entered a pre-Auschwitz killing field, site of hysterical screaming as they savagely herded Jews into pens and poisoned them with quick lime or carbon monoxide in closed trucks. More insane and excruciating than a “regular” death camp, if that were possible, Karski reports vomiting for days after. Indeed, his trauma only expanded as he was listened to politely, disbelieved outright, including by Jews, or accused of exaggeration to increase aid to Poland, even though he carried corroborating microfilm evidence, not to mention, NOTHING WAS DONE! Although Karski learned to live with that somehow, settling in the US capital and teaching at Georgetown University, when I saw him speak, at a San Francisco synagogue's Shoah memorial, his eyes burned and he could not stand still as he recounted the horror of what he'd witnessed AND of not being believed.
Continued in Holocaust Film/Books Chapter 2
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 29, 2016 - 08:41 AM
by Doniphan Blair
In his brief Oscar acceptance speech, 'Son of Saul' director László Nemes thanked his lead, Géza Röhrig, the 'incredible cast and crew,' and said, 'in the darkest hours of mankind, there might be a voice within us, that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film.' photo: Variety/illo: D. BlairDedicated to Pablo Royal
With the arrival of "Son of Saul", the stunning new film from first-time feature director László Nemes, which won the 2016 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film (Hungary's second), and the emergence of a mini-world war in the Middle East, which could culminate with an all-out attack on Israel, and the re-emergence of serious anti-Semitism in Europe…
“What more can be achieved by Holocaust films and books?” it is not unreasonable to ask.
Was Nazism cured by “art war” in addition to regular war, war crimes trials and America's Marshall Plan? Were German writers and filmmakers, and artists from other countries—like The Beatles, who literally launched the '60s “romantic revolution” from Hamburg, Germany, in August, 1960—instrumental, so to speak, in that nation’s surprisingly swift recovery from the depths of depravity?
Amidst all of today's current crises, is humanity helped by an increased awareness of the Holocaust and its Siamese twin, Nazism (pronounced "NAT-zism," from Nationalsozialismus, the political party's name), or the complex context of European history?
Certainly, the near-collapse of Western Civilization only 75 years ago, in a scant twelve years, half of which involved vast conflagration and killing, suggests an Achilles's Heel worthy of investigation. No wonder World War Two (WWII) has become the biggest film-book cash cow in, as well as about, history, indicating an almost insatiable “Why?” with the Holocaust a bonus enigma, an extra, extreme butchery at the center of a conflict which killed OVER 73 million human beings (according to Wikipedia).
In the end, however, can there be satisfactory answers? Can irreducible human truths be gleaned from grey-faced inmates, black-uniformed perpetrators, sardine-packed cattle cars or the camps' near-infinite brutality? If so, could Auschwitz be for psychology, philosophy, evolution theory—religion and mysticism even, what particle accelerators are for physics?
“Thanks but no thanks,” say many perfectly decent people, including friends of mine, when informed of the next Holocaust offering, no matter how well done, which can, admittedly, make it harder to stomach. “I can’t sleep for days afterwards,” they say, or “I saw ‘Schindler’s List’ [1993] and I am still thinking about it,” or “I know all about the Holocaust.” While the last remark is worrisome, entering “anus mundi,” Latin for "asshole of the world"—as Wiesław Kielar, a Polish-Catholic filmmaker and long-term Auschwitz inmate, called it in his 1966 book of the same name—MUST BE voluntary.
'Son of Saul' lead, Géza Röhrig, amidst a back-breaking 12-hour shift emptying bodies from the gas chamber. photo courtesy: L. NemesIn addition to an innovative script co-written with Clara Royer, László Nemes developed a distinctive style and fantastic production values, starting with his masterful 2007 short, "With a Little Patience". About a secretary working in the front office of a concentration camp, oddly enough, it was also shot with a slightly bleached-blue look by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély and worked on by "Son of Saul"'s Hungarian crew. Nemes did copious research for his feature, including close readings of recently unearthed caches of color photos of the ghettos and camps taken by Germans. "Son of Saul" is also well-served by its lead, Géza Röhrig, despite his only prior professional acting experience being on a Hungarian television show in 1989. Also a Hungarian Jew, if now residing in the modern Jewish ghetto of Manhattan's Upper West Side, Röhrig became Nemes's Hebrew everyman, or "mensch" in Yiddish, after meeting him when Nemes did a year at NYU Film School. Not only does Röhrig appear in almost every shot, filling the frame with his expression-less, yet watching-like-a-hawk face, or back of head, he was something of the production’s poetic muse. When visiting Poland as a twenty-something in the mid-1990s, he cancelled his tour to stay for a month near Krakow in the village of Oświęcim—called Auschwitz by the Germans—pilgrimaging daily to the “work camp” one mile out of town or a mile further to the “death camp," called Birkenau, to contemplate and write poetry. Evidently, Röhrig had not yet read the admonition of Theodor Adorno, the German-Jewish philosopher, sociologist and composer (1903-69):
“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
In keeping with Adorno, however, “Son of Saul” is affectless, prosaic, post-modern even, although Nemes rejects that categorization, as he does ALL previous Holocaust films! “Negative inspiration,” he called them during my December, 2015, interview with him and Röhrig. “It is very humanistic,” he said about his film, “pre-industrial, in a way.” Be that as it may—and “Son of Saul” does open with a long, evocative shot of the forest and returns to similar imagery in its ending—the film features a very modern technique, extreme shallow focus, which provides a crisp view of Röhrig’s Saul while blurring the monstrosities swirling around him during his 12-hour shifts in an unnamed camp (if much like Birkenau). Although the ending is modestly redemptive, according to Nemes (Röhrig disagrees), the film downplays dramatic arc, which, along with its tight focus and framing, makes the on-screen horror a tad easier to take—good news for our “holophobic” friends!
Indeed, “Son of Saul” received numerous laudatory reviews and awards, including the 2015 Grand Prix at Cannes, as well as the 2016 Foreign Oscar, and opened on January 15th, 2016, to good attendance in art houses across the United States. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Landmark Theater had better than average matinees, an employee told me, due to the older crowds, including some octogenarian Holocaust survivors straggling in to see if a filmmaker finally got their story right.
'Son of Saul''s Nemes and Röhrig ranged widely across Holocaust history, Shoah cinema and their own film in their interview with CineSource. photo: D. BlairDoes this mean all previous Anus Mundi movies are, well, crap?
The vast majority of Holocaust survivors I have read books by, seen or heard interviews with, or interviewed or spoken with myself at family gatherings, by appointment or at international conferences (which started in 1981), credit sheer luck above all. "They were going down the line, shooting every tenth man," I was told by my second cousin, Joseph Plonski, a Polish-Jewish-American survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, "I was the seventh or eighth guy." Alas, random chance doesn't make for great drama or insightful research: the dead don't add details, merely statistics. Hence, almost all Holocaust films, plus much of the literary and academic output, focus on those who lived, making them de facto “survival of the fittest” stories. This puts them in odd alignment with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which was central to the worldview of the National Socialist Party, no matter how catastrophically the Nazis failed to comprehend it. Indeed, near the end of the war, a Nazi pseudo-scientist is said to have remarked something like: Hey, I just realized, if we don’t kill every single, last Jew, and the survivors reproduce, we will have bred a super-race! Obviously, the Nazis also didn’t get the gist of, let alone read, Darwin’s second world-changing book, "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871), which investigates sexual selection and how species reproduce and nurture their own. As important to evolution as simple endurance, sexual selection can be called “survival of the lovingest.” Indeed, along with luck, which is a stand-in for "nature" or "god," survivors almost always thank altruism and assistance from others, which means "nurture."
Nemes’s youthful exuberance for his new interpretation of Anus Mundi aside, does “Son of Saul” surpass the entirety of the enormous Shoah genre, including the titanic “Shoah” itself, the nine-and-a-half hour art house documentary by the French Jew Claude Lanzmann (1985), or “The Pianist" (2002), which figures first on many “Best Of” Holocaust film lists and took two Oscars? Based on a memoir of the same name by Warsaw pianist Władysław Szpilman and starring Adrien Brody, who becomes preternaturally thin by the end of the film, it was directed by the Polish-Jewish-American-French Roman Polanski, famous/notorious for “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), the Manson murders of his wife, Sharon Tate (1969), “Chinatown” (1974) and assaulting an underage woman in 1977. He is also a Holocaust survivor from Krakow, Poland.
Pro-Palestinian protest in Paris veers anti-Semitic with chants of 'death to the Jews' and swastikas, July 26, 2014. photo: courtesy Vanity FaireAu contraire Adorno, who was referring to poetry in its 19th century, civilization-supporting sense—and that certainly crashed and burned in WWII, if not WWI and its associated art movements (Dadaism and Surrealism)—art is essential to digesting our most extreme experiences. Long before Germany's unconditional surrender and the Allies' declaration of "victory day" (V-Day) on May 8th, 1945 (in the European theater, August 15th, in the Pacific), filmmakers, writers and other artists were hard at work, some even creating and secreting away art in the camps themselves. And, every few years since, as Nemes has done with "Son of Saul", they have invented new pathways into, if not through, the Holocaust’s forbidding territory. Indeed, even as the Allies were liberating the camps, the beleaguered Soviet Army at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 (now International Holocaust Remembrance Day) and the much better-equipped US Army at Dachau, near Munich, three months later on April 26th, including the highly-decorated Japanese-Americans of the 522nd Battalion, who enlisted out of internment camps (low-security prisons where 115,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated as "security risks"), Russian, English and American soldiers were shooting away—with cameras not guns—well aware that the crime had to be fully documented to be partially believed.
Back in London, the cream of cinema's crop, notably the “Master of Horror” Alfred Hitchcock, who came home from Hollywood precisely to assist on such a production, were hard at work editing atrocity footage into coherence. The principle film, the prosaically titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” (see CS article), English Prime Minister Winston Churchill hoped would finally answer "Why We Fight", the title of an American newsreel series. But, by the time "Camps Factual Survey” was ready, replete with walking skeletons, Allied soldiers bulldozing body piles and bone-dry narration, plus the long takes Hitchcock recommended to refute accusations of image doctoring, the world was partying hardy, a celebratory bacchanal that went on for years. My mother, a 21 year-old Polish-Jewish survivor of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, fondly recalled being in Paris on V-Day's third celebration in 1947, when she was "embraced, twirled and kissed," while my father, an air force photographer in town for the fourth anniversary, told me festivities were "carrying on apace." After the killing comes the rebirth. Indeed, those celebrations, notably the "night work" generating the Baby Boom, equaled if not exceeded those of the '60s, which were, in fact, a gift to the post-war kids from their parents, the '40s "lost youth generation," also called the Greatest Generation.
British soldiers on body-digging duty in 'German Concentration Camps Factual Survey', an unreleased 1945 newsreel. photo: courtesy A. Singer While “Camps Factual Survey”'s images of industrialized murder were mind blowing, there was nothing new about the rabid anti-Semitism, around since the Middle Ages. Those assuming anti-Semitism would fade in the face of democracy and the Industrial Revolution were rudely awaken by the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), the trial and retrials of a French-Jewish officer accused of spying for Germany (eventually exonerated, he served in WWI), which violently divided the French. Indeed, the Impressionist painters were almost evenly split for and against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, the latter including the elderly Paul Cézanne, creator of Cubism-esque country scenes, and Edgar Degas, painter of cafes and ballerinas, who turned on his friend, Camille Pissaro, the one Jew among the Impressionists. When thousands of Parisians marched in the streets chanting “Death to the Jews,” the Hungarian-Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), there covering the proceedings, abandoned his career and dedicated his few remaining years to establishing a state for Jews, who, he suddenly realized, were still essentially stateless. After the Dreyfus Affair, many assumed that if "pogroms" (the medieval massacres of Jews) were to return to Western Europe, as they had to Russia in the 1880s, it would be in France, not a Germany already famous for its music, philosophy, technology and social services, if not democracy. Indeed, until the US' late entry into WWI in 1917—involvement was adamantly opposed by devout Protestants, leading suffragettes, Irish Democrats (who wanted to punish England) and President Woodrow Wilson (until he became not just pro-war but an avid civilization builder, see League of Nations)—most American Jews supported the Germans' fight against Tsarist Russia, where some five million Jews lived as second-class citizens in the Pale of Russia, a nation-sized ghetto stretching from Lithuania to The Ukraine.
1898 cartoon of novelist Emile Zola accusing the French Army of scapegoating Dreyfus. illo: Plain DealerWhile anti-Semitism was central to Nazi strategy, it was likewise to their defeat. You might think destroying the Jews, less than one percent of the German population, would figure fairly small in a world war between industrial superpowers but the so-called Third Reich—the first was the Holy Roman Empire started by Charlemagne, a matriarchal-minded warrior, which did in fact last exactly one thousand years (800-1806); the second was the Kaisers,1870-1919, devised by German founding father Otto "Iron Chancellor" von Bismarck, a brilliant statesman—devoted an inordinate amount of energy to genocide. They elevated the Jews to their third front, diverting trains and troops from other fronts, which made it an expensive fight, no matter how one-sided, in terms of men and materiel but also lost opportunities.
Although there could be no Nazism without anti-Semitism, counter-factually, had the Nazis embraced their Jewish neighbors of 17 centuries, with whom they shared language (Yiddish derives from 10th c. Middle High German), culture and family and battlefield camaraderie (there were many intermarriages and Jewish soldiers by WWI), they would have enjoyed outsized Jewish efforts on their behalf, surely including a military miracle or two, just like those delivered during WWI. The Nazis invented jet propulsion but they rejected nuclear research as "Jewish science," due to the predominance of Jews among its pioneers, despite having the world-class physicist Werner Heisenberg at their disposal. Friends with many of those Jewish scientists, Heisenberg evidently acted morally, playing down his abilities and up the project's long time frame, which precluded nuke development for the V-1 and V-2 rockets that rained death on England much of the war's last year. During WWI, on the other hand, German-Jews were held in high regard, notably Walther Rathenau, the industrialist who redesigned the army's supply chain, saving millions, and the chemist Fritz Haber, who co-invented the ammonia synthesis process for making nitrogen, the main ingredient in the mystically-mirroring life-enhancing fertilizers AND life-destroying explosives. Explosives had depended on the saltpeter imports from Chile interrupted by Allied domination of the Atlantic, which could have ended outright Germany's war-fighting capacity. Haber also developed chlorine gas, the first of such WWI scourges, which brought war crime charges, although the case was dropped after the war and, instead, he was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry! Admittedly, nitrogen-based fertilizers did help feed billions and remain in use today, despite periodic diversion into munitions (like the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing and other terror attacks). Regardless of so much Jewish support, the Big Lie in Germany post-war was that their defeat was not due to having exhausted munitions, men and food, with some civilians eating sawdust-infused bread, nor the arrival of the Americans, who finally marched down into the Western Front's grotesque trenches in the summer of 1918, but THE JEWS! Supposedly, German Jews not only shirked front-line duty for cushy desk jobs but secretly negotiated an unjust surrender and foisted it on the unsuspecting Germans—the so-called “stab in the back” conspiracy. In point of fact, as most Germans were well aware, Haber had literally “loaded the gun in the front” with inventions for his beloved fatherland so phenomenal yet frightening that his wife—ALSO a Jewish chemist—despaired and killed herself.
Jewish chemist Fritz Haber shows German soldiers how to use the chlorine gas he developed in WWI. photo: courtesy Archiv der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, BerlinBy the supposedly-swinging 1920s, the ancient accusation against the Jews of murdering god (they only condemned Christ, according to the "New Testament", while the Romans actually crucified him) faded as the Christians finally accepted Christ's famous forgiveness and some scientific rationalism. Meanwhile, the medieval calumny of Jews killing Christian children to make Passover matzo, the notorious Eastern European “blood libel,” also passed its statute of credulity limitations. ("Wouldn’t blood turn white matzo red? Cannibalism, really?!?") Indeed, the last Blood Libel, "The Beilis Affair," was actually litigated in court in 1913, in Kiev, Russia, and ended in acquittal of its defendant, Menahem Mendel Beilis, despite the anti-Semitism of some jurors. ("Score one for civilization...") Nevertheless, 20th century allegations that Jews controlled the world, largely through the banking systems, which medieval moneylending allowed them to get in on early, supposedly substantiated by “The Protocols”, could not easily be converted or proven away. What is difficult to discern is equally hard to disprove as prove. By virtue of this epistemological trick, European anti-Semitism completed its long, multi-stage journey from primitive, religious and tribal to modern, zoological and eliminationist.
Such a reinvigorated anti-Semitism was so pervasive and palpably strange that most of modernism’s early literary giants—Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller—addressed it one way or another in their first big books: “Metamorphosis” (1915), “Ulysses” (1922), “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) and “Tropic of Cancer” (1934), respectively (George Eliot also did so in her "Daniel Deronda", 1876). Admittedly, the first offering from revered anti-Fascist and futurist George Orwell (1903-50), “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933), was lousy with anti-Semitic slurs but he redeemed himself in his 1945 essay “Antisemitism in Britain”: “The two current explanations, that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory, though I admit that if one combines them they can be made to cover the facts. All I would say with confidence is that antisemitism is part of the larger problem of nationalism… and that the Jew is evidently a scapegoat, though for what he is a scapegoat we do NOT YET know,” (my emphasis).
Paris in the '30s with writer Henry Miller and Anais Nin, friend, feminist author and publisher of his novel, 'Tropic of Cancer' (1934), which was inordinately concerned with Jews. photo: courtesy Henry Miller LibraryBrooklyn-born Henry Miller (1891-1980), who lived in Paris, 1930-39, knew Pound and admired the novels of Celine (who refused to see him, ridiculing him as an intellectual), addressed the new anti-Semitism, Nazism and "all the 'isms,'" as he called them, through irony, extreme individualism, surrealism, reverse psychology and zeitgeist excavations. Miller even painted himself as a “Jew hater,” which baffles critics to this day, although if he was so anti-Semitic, why does he fall madly in love with and write almost exclusively about Jews, including his main muse, second wife Mona? His pioneering, plot-less and hallucinatory, yet slice-of-life autobiographical novel, “Tropic of Cancer", was one of the loudest wake-up calls of the '30s, and recognized as such by other writers, including Pound and TS Eliot, who may not have gotten his ironic anti-Semitism. After "Cancer"'s opening pages jokes about his X-rated passions for Tania, a married Jewess (Jewish woman), he notes more modest affections for "almost all Montparnasse [Paris, which] is Jewish, or half-Jewish, which is worse," and that he himself is "as ugly as a Jew. And who hates the Jew more than the Jew" (a reference to Hitler's suspect lineage). On page nine, Miller warns: “For the Jew the world is a cage filled with wild beasts. Standing there helpless, the door locked, he finds that the lions do not understand his language. Not one lion has heard of Spinoza. Spinoza?” (For others who may not have heard: Spinoza was the 17th century Dutch-Jewish philosopher who kicked off the Enlightenment, developed multicultural deism and was excommunicated by the rabbis.) After warning of WWII in his "Open Letter to Surrealists" (1937), Miller escaped Europe through Greece just before the deluge. Although "Cancer" was dismissed by American academics and banned by its courts for raving and porn, respectively, intellectuals and soldiers alike smuggled cheap paperbacks back to the States where its literary Cubism made "Cancer" an early beatnik bestseller worshiped by Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Mailer. Finally landing in the wilderness of Big Sur, California, Miller lived in impoverished, if "high hippie" circumstances, until a judge ruled in 1962 that "Cancer" had "literary merit," leading to his first royalty check (age 71, hundreds of thousands). Beneath Miller's anti-Semitic spoofing, his sarcastic flights of fancy and exaggerated misogyny, however, was a life-positive romantic and mystic, whose slogan his Paris Days was "Ever merry and bright."
A similar, if less surreal, tack was taken by Gregor von Rezzori (1914-98) in his brilliant “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite” (1969), a series of humorous interlocking tales about growing up in an Austro-Hungarian backwater with various Jewish friends and lovers but also a fallen-aristocrat father, who would go apoplectic if Jews entered his hunting club or committed other “crimes.” There's nothing like the chapter opener where "the big something falling from the floor above my grandmother's [Vienna] apartment," is "the young Raubitschek girl," Minka, committing suicide. She survives and the young Rezzori who falls madly in love, despite her acquisition of a pronounced limp. One of the few German authors to expose Jews as well Germans, not to mention himself, to brutally honest assessment, “Memoirs” is a rollicking good read and rather revealing sociologically. One of the many terrible things about the Holocaust, von Rezzori once mused: We are no longer allowed to discuss "the Jewish Question."
Kafka and his modernist masterpiece, 'Metamorphosis' (1915), better translated 'The Transformation', on which he forbade the use of a bug image. photo: Kafka EstateGiven such Semite prescience, it's no surprise “Kafkaesque” not only entered common usage but became the number one adjective for describing the nearly-indescribable Nazi Anus Mundi. “The word has become the representative adjective of our times,” notes biographer Frederick Karl, including in his title "Franz Kafka: Representative Man" (1991), despite missing his Judifying of protagonists. Precise language is a prerequisite to cracking the code of complex events, which is the ONLY way to avoid repeating them, as more eloquently expressed in the famous dictum by George Santayana (or Burke, a century earlier). Words always fight the last war, except from a Churchill, indicating that edge-pushing ideas and art predicting the future and new concepts is as critical as rigorously researched history depicting the past.
Indeed, a century before Kafka, the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was already enema-ing the bowels of anti-Semitic hypocrisy with chivalrous love poesy parodies, notably “Donna Clara” (1823). Here we find a noble knight and lovely maiden fleeing a fiesta to steal kisses in the moonlight, until she suddenly whispers, "Yes, I love thee, oh my darling; And I swear it by our Savior; Whom the accursed Jews did murder; Long ago with wicked malice." After trying to woo her off such idiocy, the knight shuts her down with: “I am the son of the Grand Rabbi, Israel of Saragossa!” Although Heine converted to Protestantism, as did many Jews for career advancement, but he remained culturally Jewish and was a prime example of what the brilliant German-Jewish-American historian Hannah Arendt called a "conscious pariah," someone sitting outside but bridging two cultures (Kafka was another). A radical thinker as well as fierce poet, Heine adjusted the ancient conflict between Judaism and Hellenism—the struggle between morality and mysticism, on the one hand, and beauty, art and science—and integrated French Revolutionary ideas. Many of his poems were set to music, making them even better known. Heine went so far as to warn in 1821, “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people,” a timetable the Nazis abided scrupulously, first torching his books—which they reviled, since he was Germany’s foremost poet after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)—and, a decade later, his descendants. Unable to erase his poems from Germany's collective consciousness or poetry anthologies, the Nazis credited them to anonymous, despite common knowledge they were Heine's.
Chaplin and Reginald Gardiner before their escape in 'The Great Dictator'. photo: courtesy C. ChaplinJewish artists and entrepreneurs flocked to the fledgling film industry—as they did to any new opportunity for their repressed talents and desperate finances—and cinema was a perfect fit for writing skills honed over three millennia and negotiation tactics developed during the work and travel restrictions of the Middle Ages. Aside from 20th Century-Fox, the one studio run by "goys" (Yiddish for non-Jews), Hollywood was largely created by Louis Mayer, Marcus Loew, the Warner brothers and a host of other under-educated, street-savvy but culturally-astute Jewish immigrants, as enumerated in "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" (1988, Neal Gabler). Their media empire expanded across the country and then the globe, bringing them vast wealth, but they retained the arriviste's fear of rocking the boat and the businessman's preference for cozying up to the dominant culture and majority of ticket-buyers. This was not true of the Jewish writers or directors, however, like the German-Jewish-American Ernst Lubitsch, considered to be Hollywood’s master of the romantic comedy, or Erich von Stroheim (1885-1957), who anointed himself with a "von" even though he barely spoke German (he was a "yiddling" Austrian Jew, like Rezzori's buds). Von Stroheim's thick accent in German as well as English didn't stop him from becoming a star of the silents, first in Germany, then in Hollywood, and one of the first auteur directors, obsessed with every detail of production, as indicated in his ten-hour epic "Greed" (1924). About a San Francisco dentist's descent into evil, and an obvious standin for America, "Greed" was not to the taste of its producer, Irving Thalberg, who ordered it cut to three hours, ending von Strohiem's directing career, although other directors continued to revere him, giving him bit parts in homage.
Chaplin, on the other hand, was NOT Jewish, was his own studio boss (founding partner of United Artists)—making him THE first auteur—not to mention he resembled Hitler, from the mustache and short stature to date of birth, four days difference. Of course, Chaplin's screen personae, the "Little Tramp," was the opposite of the belligerent dictator and even considered Jewish by many, including Jews, a characterization he didn't disavow (his half-brother was Jewish). As it happens, Jewish culture is chock-a-block with Chaplin-esque types and, as with the Inuit's 50 words for snow, Yiddish has many terms for them. (Here's a mnemonic trick for remembering those starting with "S": A "schlemiel" [clumsy] carrying a pot of hot soup trips and spills it all over a "schlimazel" [unlucky] and the floor, where a "schmegegge" [stupid] slips, causing everyone to laugh, save the "schmendrick" [non-entity], who wonders “What's so funny?”) Given his schlimazel screen character and underdog empathy, derived from his impoverished upbringing, on top of the recalcitrant Jewish studio heads with whom he was friendly, Chaplin must have long realized it would be up to him to do artistic take down of his demonic doppelganger.
After studying Hitler newsreels, Chaplin rehearsed and shot extensively—production hit 533 days—while rewriting furiously, since his preferred method was ad lib and reshoot to fit, not to mention the war started in the middle. The story concerns a poor, timid barber in Tomainia (referencing ptomaine poisoning and Germany's Pomerania province), who resembles the country’s dictator, Hynkel, a plot driven by Chaplin's mystical mirroring of Hitler, while conveniently allowing him to play both parts. After induction into the army, Chaplin works his physical comedy magic, running about following idiotic orders, riding an artillery piece like a bucking bronco, and, as the dictator, doing a long, perfectly choreographed dance with a big, globe balloon (see clip), which references world conquest while making him look a tad gay. The barber also saves a pilot, Schultz, the handsome lead common to Chaplin films, who returns leading the soldiers seizing the barber's ghetto. When Schultz refuses to attack them and protests the treatment of the Jews—called Jews, not some euphemism—he's arrested. The film also includes a Mussolini-like character and the Anschluss, Germany’s “peaceful absorption” of Austria, albeit hardly peaceful for the Jews, who were beaten, barred from school and work and pressed into forced labor. Then, in a complete script-flip, the dictator goes duck hunting in civilian clothes, is mistaken for the barber and arrested. This inspires Schultz, who escaped jail and hid in the ghetto, to convince the barber to impersonate Dictator Hynkel, and deliver the already-scheduled big speech. Suddenly dropping all allegorical pretenses, Chaplin has his barber-cum-dictator confess a change of heart and launch into a long plea for peace. "That speech should be trimmed or edited out entirely, advised his Hollywood buddies, one even predicting he would “lose a million for every minute,” but Chaplin carried on regardless, especially after President Franklin Roosevelt called personally to offer encouragement.
Chaplin's barber-as-dictator has a new plan—peace—as 'The Great Dictator' leaps from satire to farce and, finally, heartfelt appeal. photo: courtesy C. ChaplinNot coincidentally, Hitler himself was a film fanatic, on top of the painterly pretensions he assumed during his dissolute Vienna youth. Once in power, he often watched one or more films a night, with discussion after, keeping early-rising generals sleep deprived. In a bizarre twist of mystical-mirroring, Hitler ADORED Chaplin, despite assuming he was Jewish (there’s no evidence he stole Chaplin’s signature painted-on mustache for his bigger “toothbrush” version). Trag-ironically, Hitler fraternized with some Jewish artist-types in Vienna, one even helping him hawk his dour, dun-colored and people-less paintings. Alas, others worked at the Vienna Academy of Arts, which rejected him, obviating any good will. Unable to take a joke, by definition, the Nazis banned “The Great Dictator” (as did the English, abiding their 1938 appeasement agreement with Germany). But, unable to resist the lure of his idol’s latest, Hitler had a copy delivered via Portugal and viewed it—twice! While he was impervious to its charms, “The Great Dictator” swayed opinions world-wide and even wielded influence on the ground. One heart-warming story has Serbian resistance fighters switching in “Great Dictator” reels to a theater of unsuspecting German soldiers, just like in Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (2009), although the real-life ones stormed out, pistols blazing (for more "Great Dictator" trivia, go here).
Another monumental wartime contribution to the “ridicule-the-Nazis” genre was “To Be or Not to Be” (1942) by Lubitsch, who started directing silents for Mary Pickford but earned his stripes satirizing the Soviets with "Ninotchka" (1939), starring Greta Garbo and penned by Billy WIlder, yet another Austrian-Jew who became another great American comic director. Imagine, while WWII is raging, catching a comedy about a Warsaw theater company run by a husband-wife team during the German invasion (lighter fare is common in war time, including in Germany and Russia). A rom-com as well as a satire, it soon segues to the wife’s infidelities, which puts her in close contact with a young Polish resistor and then an older double agent, setting up some great politically-incorrect cracks: “Shall we drink to a blitzkrieg?” “No, I prefer a slow encirclement;” or “We do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." ("Barump... boom!") The high jinks grow ever more outrageous as they employ their acting and costuming skills to manipulate the double agent and then Hitler himself, who shows up for the performance of "Hamlet" (1600) referenced in the title. (“The Fuhrer ADORES live theater…") Along with a serious subplot about saving Jews, there’s an extended riff on a Jewish-looking actor who hopes, before he dies (which may well be soon), to play Shylock, Europe's most famous Jewish character, from Shakespeare’s presumed anti-Semitic play, “Merchant of Venice” (1605). The gag climaxes when he finds himself onstage, before Hitler, doing “Merchant”’s surprisingly pro-Semitic speech: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?"
Carol Lombard and Jack Benny are Polish actors fooling Nazis and aiding resistors in 'To Be Or Not To Be' ('42). photo: courtesy E. LubitschWhile these films showcased satirical side of Art War, there was an equally strong dramatic front, which Hitchcock highlights in his 1943 “Shadow of a Doubt”, right from the opener of a bespectacled girl who refuses to stop reading her book to answer the phone until she walks over, climbs a stool and lifts the receiver. Said to be Hitchcock’s fave from his own catalog, “Shadow” stars Joseph Cotton, as an obvious Nazi stand-in, who pays a visit to his sister’s family in Small Town, USA (Santa Rosa, N. California), while on the lam for seducing, robbing and murdering widows. Indeed, Hitchcock often placed smart, powerful women not only center screen and story but ethical considerations, in stark contrast to his unconscionable abuse of actress Tippi Hedren while making "The Birds" and "Marnie" (1963-4, see CS article). In “Shadow”, Hitch has the bookworm’s older sister, a rambunctious Teresa Wright, warmly invite her uncle into the family but then wise up way ahead of the cops or her oblivious parents. “So go away, I'm warning you,” she coolly informs him. "GO AWAY or I'll kill you myself!” Despite Cotton's attempt to convince her that everyone is venal and corrupt—“Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off these houses, you'd find swine?”—and then murder her himself, she makes good on her threat, turning “Shadow of a Doubt" into a loud shout out to the many underdogs of the 1940s up to their eyeballs in Nazis.
Wright also featured in the Oscar-winning “Mrs Miniver” (1942) by William Wyler, yet another German-Jewish-American director, who started in Westerns but soon graduated to bigger Hollywood fare. It follows an English family, making due and doing their part, with Wright’s husband becoming a pilot, her father-in-law using his yacht to save soldiers trapped in the "Debacle of Dunkirk" and her mother-in-law capturing a German parachutist. While fairly routine activities, in movies at least, the two Mrs. Minivers exemplify the hard work, encouragement and grace under fire—until that fire kills Wright's character—which can be called the “women’s way of war." At her funeral, the vicar eulogizes her indomitable spirit by paraphrasing Churchill's greatest darkest-hour speech (May, 1940): "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills—we shall NEVER surrender!" (which proved the ability of art to marshal armies). Wyler himself made movies for the US Army, notably "Memphis Belle"(1943), about the last run of a B-17 bomber crew, which he flew on (indeed, he went deaf on a B-25 bomber run).
Jan Karski, the Polish spy who witnessed the Holocaust, snuck out and reported to Allies, but was often disbelieved (circa when he was honored by Israel, 1994). photo courtesy J. KarskiContinued in Holocaust Film/Books Chapter 2
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer, musician and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached . Posted on Feb 29, 2016 - 08:41 AM
