



Horror of the Nazis has no place in comedy shows


Dvir Abramovich

Danger 5, the Nazi sci-fi spoof being screened on SBS.


Seventy years ago, in a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, in a meeting chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS secret police, and attended by Adolf Eichmann along with 15 high-ranking representatives, the mechanisms for the ‘‘final solution’’, the systematic, industrialised genocide of 11 million Jews living in Europe was put into play. Anyone reading the minutes from that gathering, in which gourmet cuisine and fine wine were served, is left breathless by the unimaginable and unbelievable horrors decided there.

Who would have thought that in the 21st century respect for Holocaust memory and for its victims in the entertainment field would be so jettisoned. Hitler is no longer the evil tyrant responsible for the deaths of 11 million people, but an abstraction, a convenient material for comedy, an easy reference for people to make inappropriate comparisons. The trivialisation and merchandising of the Holocaust is everywhere.

There is a new Nazi-chic fad in Thailand, for example. More and more teenagers are wearing T-shirts with cartoonish images of the German dictator. Designs include Hitler as Ronald McDonald, as a pink Teletubby with a swastika as an antennae, and in a panda costume with a Nazi armband. In London’s Madame Tussauds,  tourists have their pictures taken beside a waxwork of Hitler, many doing Nazi salutes.

And comedian Ricky Gervais, following his hosting of the Golden Globes, posted on his Twitter account photos of himself dressed up as Hitler and wearing a swastika.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find Hitler and the murder of millions funny.

The creators of the SBS comedy program Danger 5, Dario Russo and David Ashby, have recently pushed the envelope of Holocaust commodification and trivialisation.

I wonder whether Russo and Ashby thought about the feelings of Holocaust survivors and their children when they came up with their Nazi sci-fi spoof. The twenty-something writing team quote Mel Brooks, who “believes it’s everybody’s right to portray the Nazis as idiotically as possible … to make fun of them’’.

What they should have quoted is Charlie Chaplin’s 1964 autobiography in which he says that if he had known of the true horrors of the Nazis, he could not have made The Great Dictator.

The first episodes of Danger 5 mix a lascivious Hitler, a buffoonish Mengele, Nazis, eroticised wrestling, bedroom scenes, cartoonish violence and lots of sex. Television critic Graeme Blundell has written: “I can’t get enough of this nutty action/comedy series.”

I find it disturbing that Russo and Ashby, and by extension SBS, The South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Festival, who financially backed the series, felt it was OK to capitalise on the Shoah for entertainment and cheap laughs. Danger 5 and other films, musicals and books of its ilk are not just in bad taste, they are  morally wrong because they exploit the horrendous killings of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other ‘‘undesirables’’, and use them as backdrop for their comic payoff.

Russo and Ashby are not alone. Iron Sky, a Finnish-Australian comedy about Nazis living on the dark side of the moon who plan to invade Earth to avenge their loss in World War II, was a hit in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.

We are now reaching a stage where entertainment and commerce have come together to diminish the crimes of the Nazis by using them for money-making entertainment.  What frightens me is that distasteful comedies such as Danger Five will redefine and shatter the memory of just who the Nazis really were, desensitising audiences and causing cultural and historical amnesia.

Ask yourselves: is it really appropriate for us to laugh about a man who is responsible for the death of millions and who devastated Europe?  Or to reduce the memory of genocide to comic fodder?

For me it is clear that you don’t laugh about the suffering, torture and death of so many.

The prevailing view seems to be that as long as it’s funny, as long as the audience is getting its money’s worth, who cares if Hitler’s barbaric actions are reduced to a harmless romp.

So, is anything taboo any more? It is not unreasonable to ask whether future television shows may include episodes that poke fun at Jews being gassed, or their bodies burned at the crematorium, or parents and children shot in the fields by the mobile execution units, or babies’ heads being smashed against the wall, or the medical experiments Mengele conducted on his victims.

What facet of the Nazis’ monumental crimes is beyond laughter and fun?

Vulgar and offensive comedies such as Danger 5, whose sole purpose is to wring a chuckle from viewers, pollute society’s understanding and sense of the Holocaust. The problem with Danger 5, as well as with music cartoons, video clips, exhibitions and stand-up comedians who try to make us laugh about the Holocaust is that they are eviscerating history by taking Hitler and the Nazis out of context, stupidly diluting the evil they spawned and throwing away the past.

Given that more and more people learn their history from popular culture, and given that crass comedies and art about the Holocaust are proliferating,  I have real concern that schoolchildren will not know what happened in the Holocaust. At the end, youngsters may not believe that Hitler is guilty of what he did, or believe the Holocaust wasn’t so bad after all.

The Holocaust is such a vast tragedy, still affecting lives today, that anyone wanting to approach it must do so with great emotional respect, historical authenticity, humility and caution.

And for the record, I would say the same thing if a comedy about the Cambodian killing fields, Bosnia, Rwanda or Darfur were screened by SBS.

Dr Dvir Abramovich is director of the centre for Jewish history and culture, the University of Melbourne. He is the editor and author of three books.

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