Jews, Germans, and Comedy: Re-viewing Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be

Abstract

ABSTRACT:By the very nature of its subject, To Be or Not to Be (1942) caused Ernst Lubitsch considerable trouble, even though it came late in his successful film career, which began in Germany in 1913 and finished in Hollywood in 1947. It must be recalled that Lubitsch was Jewish and would in any case have been under heavy pressure to leave Germany after January 1933 had he not already done so ten years earlier. Adolf Hitler himself is said to have had a particular animus against Lubitsch, as a Berlin Jew who triumphed in the German film industry and then went on to further triumphs in Hollywood. The Nazi propaganda picture The Eternal Jew (1940) went so far as to display the director's face as an archetype of corruption and depravity.Along with The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Trouble in Paradise (1932), and Design for Living (1933), To Be or Not to Be ranks among Lubitsch's best films. It is a black comedy about Hitler at the same time as it was a morale-builder for Resistance fighters throughout Europe during World War II. Along with Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), itself a dark comedy about Hitler, To Be or Not to Be is an early landmark in the evolution of a modern genre: war-as-black-comedy. This essay reconsiders Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be in light of its controversial genre (sometimes described as grotesque satire or gallows humor), its relationship to the theater (including acting), and the film's sociohistorical context (Nazism, the Holocaust, and World War II).