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Abstract
Dani Levy's film Go for Zucker! (2004) won a myriad of prizes in 2005 and was touted as the first Jewish comedy to be produced in Germany since the rise of National Socialism. Critics and scholars who have analysed Levy's popular film tend to focus on its presentation of Jewish characters as something other than victims of the Shoah and on its comic engagement with persistent social and cultural divisions between East and West Germans in post-reunification Germany. What these otherwise valid approaches ignore, however, is an additional historical and cultural layer of interpretation, one that more aptly fulfils Levy's goal of paying homage to pre-Shoah forms of self-deprecating German-Jewish humour. Such examples of the Jewish comedic tradition reach even further back in time than the early twentieth-century films of Ernst Lubitsch and the Hollywood films of Billy Wilder to include turn-of-the-century Jargon theatre and the metropolitan revue show, forms of popular entertainment that thrived in Imperial Berlin and delighted mixed audiences of Jews and Gentiles. By reviving a comic past, in which Jewishness could be staged in a variety of ways without derision, Levy's film provides hope that contemporary Germany might once again become a place where Jewish and non-Jewish Germans can laugh together.
Notes
1 The quote comes from an interview with Dani Levy featured on the film's now dormant website. Excerpts from the interview can be found in English on the DVD released by First Run Features in 2006 (Levy Citation2004). This subtitled version of the film serves as the source for any translations of film dialogue presented in my essay.
2 Frank Beyer's film adaptation of Jurek Becker's 1969 novel Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar) was nominated for an Academy Award. Both Beyer's film and Becker's novel are often cited as two of the most effective examples of imaginative works that use the comic mode to represent the Shoah.
3 When I write about “Jewishness,” I am using Peck's definition of it as “an ethnicity or cultural definition, a sociological and anthropological category that is fluid, socially constructed, and open to interpretation” (Peck Citation2006, 120).
4 On Meyer aus Berlin and Lubitsch's comedic use of ironic distance, see Weinstein (Citation2006, 112, 117–118).
5 Rother (Citation2005, 7) and other critics have mistakenly claimed that Samuel and Joshua are shown with side locks, which stands as evidence of how viewers sometimes impose their own images of Jews onto the screen image presented.
6 Information on the Herrnfeld brothers' theater was compiled from a number of sources, including Brenner Citation2008, 17–21; Jelavich Citation2010, 53–55; Otte Citation2006, 125–197; Sprengel Citation1997, 55–98; Stratenwerth Citation2004, 149–154.
7 See also Stratenwerth Citation2004 (157, 160–161).
8 It is rather odd that Golda refers to Samuel as “Shloyme,” considering that it is actually the diminutive of “Schlomo,” which is Hebrew for Solomon.
9 Tencer is also the only actor in the film with a direct connection to the Shoah, which her father Szmul Tencer survived. Levy is a Swiss-born Jew whose mother fled Berlin with her family in 1939; the film director has an extensive background in comic theatre and has resided in Berlin for over 30 years. Biographies of the actors and artists who created Go for Zucker! can be found on http://www.filmportal.de.
10 Go for Zucker! won the most “Lolas” (the German equivalent of the Oscar) at the German Film Awards in 2005, including best picture, director (Levy), screenplay (Franke and Levy), lead actor (Hübchen), costumes (Lucie Bates), and score (Niki Reiser, who also plays in a professional Klezmer band).
11 It is estimated that 1,321 Jews lived as so-called U-Boote (submarines) in Berlin until the Nazi regime collapsed in 1945. See Large Citation2000 (339–340).
12 On the Metropol Theater, see Jelavich (Citation1993, 104–117) and Otte (Citation2006, 202–279). On Lubitsch's performances at the Metropol, see Stratenwerth (Citation2004, 155). The Metropol was destroyed in WWII; the building that now stands at the Metropol's former location is the Komische Oper (Comic Opera) of Berlin. Today's Berliners, however, are likely to associate the Metropol Theater with the Admiralspalast on the Friedrichstrasse, where it was housed after 1955. Most relevant to this article is the fact that the Admiralspalast is now home to the Jewish Theater Bimah Berlin, which promotes itself as a site of “tolerance and friendship” where audiences can “encounter the rich and varied Jewish culture.” See http://www.juedischestheaterberlin.de/ (accessed 1 June 2013).
13 For a very US-centric view of the history of Jewish humor from the Marx Brothers to Judd Apatow, see Harris Citation2009 (34–39, 84–85). OldJewsTellingJokes.com has been so popular with Internet users that it was made into a hit show on Broadway. See http://www.OldJewsTellingJokes.com (accessed 1 June 2013).
14 Film audiences in the US balked at the explicit sexual relations between the two sets of cousins, whereas in Europe, where sex between first cousins is legal, this issue was hardly raised. When asked by the New York radio host Stephen Schaefer (Citation2006, 30) about his decision to include “incestuous relations” in his film, a surprised Levy replied that he simply wanted to keep the cast small and the plot centered on the Jewish family. Terri Ginsberg (Citation2012) provocatively reads the scene between Samuel and Janice/Ghada the Palestinian hostess as an allegory of the Israeli oppression of Palestinian Arabs and hence as an indication of the film's implicit prejudice against Muslim minorities.
15 In her article, Ezrahi (Citation2001, 287) plainly states, “No, the Shoah cannot be funny.” This is a tenet that Levy unfortunately failed to uphold in the film he made after Go for Zucker!, a supposed comedy about Hitler called Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler 2007) that also stages the death of Hitler's fictitious Jewish acting coach, Adolf Grünbaum. The film was a flop, both among critics and audiences. On Levy's My Führer, see Fuechtner (forthcoming) and Gölz (Citation2012).
16 Because both “Spiel” and “Glück” have other meanings, this is a fitting motto for the film; it could also mean “new play, new happiness.”
17 Here I concur with Allan's assertion that Levy's films “have played a key role in reconceptualizing contemporary notions of victimhood” and in exposing “categories of national identity … as inherently problematic” (Allan Citation2010, 252).
18 As Lutz Koepnick (Citation2003) and Stuart Taberner (Citation2003) have both convincingly argued, recent film melodramas produced in Germany, most notably Max Färberböck's Aimée & Jaguar (1999), use Jewish laughter as a means toward forced reconciliation or intimacy between Jews and Germans. The responsibility for relieving Germans of their burden of historic guilt is symbolically placed upon the Jewish protagonist. As I state in the opening pages of this essay, I see Levy's comedic project as inherently different from the “heritage films” criticized by Koepnick and Taberner.
19 Recent statistics show that there are approximately 12,000 Jews living in Berlin, but the number is likely to be much larger, as only those officially registered as part of the Jewish religious community are counted.
20 I am indebted to my former student, Jordan Krechmer, for this reference and for writing an honors project with me that inspired my own research on Levy's film.
Additional information
Jill Suzanne Smith is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College in Maine. Her research focuses on German Jewish Studies from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, gender and sexuality in German literature and visual arts, and the city of Berlin from the Wilhelmine era to the present. She is the author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman, 1890–1933 (Cornell University Press, 2013).