A Laughing Matter? The Role Of Humor In Holocaust .

A Laughing Matter? The Role of Humor in Holocaust NarrativebyHanni MeirichA Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirements for the DegreeMaster of ArtsApproved April 2013 by theGraduate Supervisory Committee:Daniel Gilfillan, ChairCarla GhanemAnna HolianARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITYMay 2013

ABSTRACTApproaches to Holocaust representation often take their cues from both academicand public discourse. General opinion demands serious engagement that depicts the fullrange of the brutality and inhumanity of the genocide and the victimization of targetedgroups perpetrated by the National Socialists. Such a treatment is considered necessary toadequately represent the Holocaust for generations to come.The analysis of four texts will show that humor is not only appropriate but is alsoan important addition to Holocaust discourse. This study argues that humor plays animportant role as a stylistic tool for discussing the Holocaust as well as for itsremembrance and representation. Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob der Lügner and RuthKlüger’s autobiography Weiter Leben: Eine Jugend are witness-texts by Jewish authors.Humor in these two works helps the authors engage and work their experiences. Klüger’sautobiography also utilizes humor to critically engage in the discussion of Holocaustrepresentation. This study also analyzes two non-witness Jewish texts: the stage playMein Kampf by George Tabori and the feature film Mein Führer, die wirklich wahrsteWahrheit über Adolf Hitler by Dani Levy. These two works utilize overt humor tochallenge established Holocaust representations.Drawing on ideas from Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Giorgio Agamben, thecore argument of this study demonstrates humor performs two main functions in theHolocaust literature and film chosen for this investigation. First, it restores a potentialloss of dignity and helps victims endure the incomprehensible. Second, it challenges theprevailing truth and the established order.i

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI would like to thank the members of my committee for their suggestions andinsights—I could not have completed this thesis without them. I would especially like tothank Dr. Daniel Gilfillan for sparking my interest in the topic of humor in the realm ofHolocaust studies during his Holocaust and the Media class and for supporting me to pursuethis interest further. I could not have wished for better support and guidance throughout theresearch and writing process.Next, I would like to thank the SILC staff for their assistance during the course of mystudies. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family. Without their love and support,I would never have accomplished so much. In particular, I would like to thank my husbandfor his love and his many valuable suggestions. Thank you.ii

TABLE OF CONTENTSCHAPTERPage1 INTRODUCTION. 12 HUMOR AND WITNESS NARRATIVES. 13Jureck Becker: Humor Hope and Self-Elevation.20Ruth Klüger: Humor and Holocaust Memory .333 HUMOROUS HITLER NARRATIVES FROM A JEWISH PERSPECTIVE47George Tabori’s Mein Kampf: Parodying Hitler’s Rise to Power.55Dani Levy: Mein Führer and the Caricature of History .634 CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK . 74REFERENCES . 80iii

CHAPTER 1INTRODUCTIONThe New York Times recently published an article by Eric Lichtblau titled “TheHolocaust Just Got More Shocking”. In an attempt to catalogue every Nazi ghetto andcamp, researchers have so far documented 42,500 of them throughout Europe. Thechosen headline and the article itself suggest that the information we previously hadabout the Holocaust inaccurately showed only a fraction of the suffering. Thedocumentation of the ghettos and camps is insofar important as it allows survivors to gainpublic recognition and it gives them the opportunity to receive restitution from Europeaninsurance companies like other survivors who were imprisoned in historicallydocumented sites. While the detailed research adds to a more accurate, factualdocumentation of the historical record, it does not necessarily add to a more refinedknowledge about Holocaust memory. The Holocaust, as one of the most brutal,devastating events in human history, continues to concern academics and artists almost70 years after the end of World War II. An assumed and unwritten moral code within uspresumes that the brutality and inhumanity of the National Socialist genocide andvictimization of targeted groups requires that only a serious engagement with the fullrange of atrocity can adequately represent it for generations to come.In the present study I engage the topic from a different perspective. “A LaughingMatter? The Role of Humor in Holocaust Narrative” explores the role of humor inHolocaust narrative through the examination of four primary “texts,” broadly defined: anautobiography, a novel, a stage play and a feature film. What is at stake in the closereading of these four examples is an understanding for the uses of humor within varying1

Holocaust representations, which move beyond an exploration of the comedic and the useof jokes. In attempting to define humor, it is almost impossible to come to acomprehensive conclusion as the editors of It's a Funny Thing, Humour: InternationalConference on Research into Humour and Laughter (1976), Anthony J. Chapman andHugh C. Foot, point out in their foreword. However, we can locate two poles of humor:the first describes the more comedic realm to which belong. for example. jokes, slapstick,or comedy, and the second which addresses a more nuanced notion of humor to which wecan count sarcasm, irony, satire, parody, or black humor.This study focuses on the second pole in which humor functions as a meaningfulprocess that challenges already accepted, highly serious representations of the Holocaust.By means of a close reading in dialogue with other academic and news articles, I analyzethe different forms and layers of humor found in each of these texts, and how thesevarying forms of humor ultimately change from one generation to the next. Jaye BermanMontresor voices the underlying assumption to this approach convincingly in her article“Parodic Laughter and the Holocaust” (1993):But what about literature, films, television programs, plays, and visualartworks that deliberately depart from factual, even realistic portrayals ofthe Holocaust? Can fictional representation meaningfully complement oreven supersede the lessons of historical representation? And moreprovocatively, is it permissible, even healthy for such works of theimagination to evoke laughter in response to the Holocaust? (126)2

Consider a controversial Holocaust joke told in 2012 by Tom Ballard on the Australianradio station Triple J that relates Hitler and fan-forced ovens to wind farms, whichmotivated author David Slucki to write an article called “Too soon? The case forHolocaust humour.” Ballard’s joke has long been removed from any material availableonline and is now only accessible as a short paraphrase. Ballard’s controversial commentand Slucki’s article are important, because they illustrate common misconceptions aboutthe use of humor in relation with the Holocaust. Ballard’s remark during a morningbreakfast show on a youth radio station was criticized for being inappropriate. The titlechosen by Slucki and the first paragraphs of his article, which link Holocaust humorexclusively to jokes, feed into common, misleading assumptions that humor is limited tojokes and that humor always produces laughter.What the examination of humor in these four texts shows is that the use of humormoves beyond the comedic and engages two core supporting functions. First, humorworks to restore or maintain a potential loss of dignity, and helps victims of atrocitiesendure the incomprehensible. Second, humor assists in dismantling establishedframeworks of power, which set accepted notions of truth into place. I chose the twowitness-texts by the Jewish authors Jurek Becker and Ruth Klüger and two non-witnesstexts by Jewish authors George Tabori and Dani Levy, because I want to explore thedifferent ways they use humor. The humor in Becker’s Jakob der Lügner (first published1969) and Ruth Klüger’s autobiography Weiter Leben: Eine Jugend (1992), is subtle andthe humorous effect is predominantly achieved through contrast and understatement. Thehumor in both works fulfills the main two functions. George Tabori’s stage play Mein3

Kampf (premiered 1987), and Dani Levy’s the feature film Mein Führer, die wirklichwahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler from 2007 (henceforth, Mein Führer), use humor toupset the existing hierarchies of power apparent in each work and thus help unsettleestablished Holocaust discourse. Their distanced perspective motivates a more obvioushumor in their works as opposed to the subtle humor in witness narratives. By virtue oftheir personal distance to the Holocaust, Tabori’s and Levy’s work do not show signs ofhumor that allows victims to restore a potential loss of dignity. But both works offer ahumorous alternative reality that helps audiences approach the incomprehensible.Important for the thesis will be a range of theoretical texts. An underlying idea isbased on the concept of abjection, which is prominently discussed by Julia Kristeva inPowers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). Kristeva describes the abject in termsthat range from the physical repulsion one feels when bodily fluids or corpses areencountered, to the symbolic repulsion one experiences when their moral compass isdisturbed. I quote at length:The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably comea cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the onewho confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A wound with blood andpus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. Inthe presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—Iwould understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeupor masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside inorder to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life4

withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am atthe border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, asbeing alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until,from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyondthe limit—cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border,the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the mostsickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything (3).The abject – is not an object, but it is rather a process that occurs on the level of theunconscious. It is the set of complex feelings we experience when we encounter theboundary of what we consider acceptable, what she references here as waste and decay.We are initially attracted to the borderland, a desire to know what lies on the other side ofthat boundary, but in the moment of encounter the body reacts in repulsive ways. Thosemoments of repulsion represent the abyss that we need to encounter to ground ourselvesand to re-evaluate our sense of self. The concept of the abject illustrates our range ofexpectations and reactions in relation to the Holocaust. The Holocaust fascinates us,because it brings us to the abyss. We feel the need to understand, to see, come as close toexperiencing it as possible, yet we do not actually want to fall into the abyss. Theexperience of Holocaust prisoners attracts us by virtue of our wish for understanding thelimits of human experience, and trying to grasp what it means to be human. Witnessnarratives like Ruth Klüger’s, Jurek Becker’s or Tadeusz Borowski’s allow us toexperience the incomprehensible. Tadeusz Borowski and Ruth Klüger for instance bringus to the moment of their captivity, they describe their abyss, and with it a potential loss5