Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein (review)

While lay audiences associate the cinema of Nazi Germany with its most overtly nationalistic and antisemitic films—think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (1940)—scholars of this dark chapter of German mass culture have long recognized that a more complete understanding means looking past the most tendentious productions of Goebbels's propaganda ministry. Pioneering scholarship by Eric Rentschler, Linda Schulte-Sasse, Sabine Hake, and others has demonstrated that relatively few films made in Nazi Germany wore their Jew hatred on their proverbial sleeves. Most that did tended to flop at the box office anyway. (Veit Harlan's Jew Süss [1940] was a notable exception). Because overt antisemitism characterizes only a few of the film comedies that comprised 48 percent of the 1,094 films produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945, many have maintained reputations as politically innocuous. Some have even become cult hits. Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944) inspires audience participation rituals akin to those at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. Münchhausen (1943) inspired Terry Gilliam's 1988 remake and is periodically screened on Turner Classic Movies.

But as Valerie Weinstein convincingly argues in Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, comedies may not have expressed antisemitism as conspicuously as other kinds of films, but they were still instrumental in normalizing and legitimizing it. Weinstein's work productively erodes the barriers between reified categories like "propaganda" and "entertainment" and the naive and dangerous commonplace that Nazi Germany's lighter fare is apolitical. Her theoretical framework for reading these comedies attends to what she terms their "inferential antisemitism." Unlike the conspicuous anti-Jewish vitriol in The Eternal Jew, Jew Süss, and The Rothschilds, inferential antisemitism "operates below the level of articulation" as an "insidious mode of representing Jewish difference" (14). In Weinstein's paraphrase of historian Lisa Silverman, Jewish difference is a conceptual model for understanding how the coding of certain discourses as Jewish creates a context whereby "both Jews and non-Jews shape ideals of the 'Jewish' and 'non-Jewish'" (13). In Nazi film comedies, inferential antisemitism manifested itself in "innuendos, gaps, and displacements," such as the rejection of irony, fast-paced repartee, and other "Jewish" strategies termed "wit," as opposed to genuine German "humor."

Inferential antisemitism made film comedies into weapons of mass ideological destruction. They were predicated on ideas about Jewishness and Germanness that were offered as axiomatic and beyond critique, thereby reinforcing them as common sense. In the pre-televisual media environment of Nazi Germany, film's role in such subliminal ideological conditioning was wide-reaching. Comedies contributed substantially to the project of using film to form a unified people's racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) out of the filmgoers who accounted for over a billion visits to the cinema in 1943.

After an introduction that effectively lays out the book's main argument, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany first turns to Nazi theoretical works on Jews, humor, and the film industry, particularly writings that claimed Jews had contaminated and commercialized German film. This discussion then analyzes how the film trade press translated these ideas in their "reviews" of films—to the extent genuine film reviewing even existed. Implicitly and explicitly, the film trade press "regularly maligned common comic strategies coded as Jewish, including wit, irony, intellectualism, exaggerated physicality, rapid rhythm, and superficial, rote comicalness" (45). The next six chronologically arranged chapters offer close readings of the strategies of film comedies, beginning with the overt antisemitism of early films such as Die Blume von Hawaii (1933) and Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne! (1935). Additional chapters unpack underexamined works like Wenn wir alle Engel wären (1936), while the films April! April! (1935) and Donogoo Tonka (1936) offer a "case study in how stock characters and disciplinary humor can result in inferential antisemitism" (155). A chapter on the Verwechslungskomödie (mistaken-identity comedy) Robert...