“Clearly it’s nothing alarming … It’s only Shakespeare”: Conjuring the Shakespeare Specter in Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be

“… We’re in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. It’s August 1939. Europe is still at peace. At the moment, life in Warsaw is going on as normally as ever. But suddenly something seems to have happened. Are those Poles seeing a ghost? Why does this car suddenly stop? Everybody seems to be staring in one direction. People seem to be frightened, even terrified. Some flabbergasted. Can it be true? It must be true, no doubt. The man with the little moustache, Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler in Warsaw when the two countries are still at peace and all by himself? He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he’s causing. […] How did he get here? What happened? Well, it all started in the general headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin.”

Thus begins the structurally dizzying opening to Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 film, To Be or Not To Be, a film concerned simultaneously with the ghosts of Hitler and Shakespeare. The film opens on the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.¹ Through a series of misdirections, Lubitsch plants an actor playing Hitler on the streets of Warsaw days before the September Campaign, and the narrator frames this as an appearance of a “ghost,” a ghost that the Poles may or may not have been expecting. Thus, like Hamlet, the film begins with waiting and expectation. Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, writes that in Hamlet, “everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. […] Still more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play” (2). Derrida’s specter is outside of time, and its appearance is concomitant with its re-appearance. For Lubitsch’s setting of 1939 Poland, the specter of Hitler is particularly vexed; in the imminence of war, the Poles are “waiting for this apparition.” Yet, in the film’s diegesis, that specter has arrived and stands placidly outside of a delicatessen. Yet again, the final reveal demonstrates that this is not, in fact, the “man with the little moustache” himself. Rather it is an actor, Bronski, out to prove a point about doubling and representation: his director, Dobosh, has questioned whether Bronski really resembles Hitler. The possibility for likeness is deferred repeatedly; when Dobosh says that Bronski should look more like the on-stage photograph of Hitler, Bronski retorts that the photo was taken of him. Here, as Derrida remarks in Of Grammatology, “Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where […] one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer” (36). In this film, then, Hitler is conceived of as a shadow, or ghost, of Bronski. And this ghost is doubled yet again when Bronski is compared to his own photograph.

This type of spectral appearance and deferral of identification and presence appears frequently in Lubitsch’s film in the context of not only Hitler but also Shakespeare. The film repeatedly appropriates the mechanism of the joke in order to continue this deferral of meaning and play of presence and absence. By deploying similar strategies in how it copes with the “imminence” of Hitler’s arrival and the arrival of Shakespeare by way of quotation and citation, the politics of To Be or Not To Be arrive through, not in spite of, its humor. Though the film’s early critics accused it of insensitivity regarding Poland, this insensitivity paradoxically yields a more sympathetic understanding of Polish miseries.² The presence of jokes about Hitler and Shakespeare reflect the political and adaptive resistance of the film so that by engaging with these figures through two repeated gags—a joke comparing Hitler with a piece of cheese and the humorous interruption of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy—the film foregrounds an atmosphere of death. That these jokes are not just told but retold, recontextualized, and subsequently repressed...