Comedic Distance in Holocaust Literature

There is a moment in the screen version of Robert Shaw's The Man in the Glass Booth when the uniformed officer, played brilliantly by Maximillian Schell, is revealed not to be Lagerkommandant SS Col. Dorf but the survivor Arthur Goldman. The giveaway is his humor, his characteristically Jewish humor. This is not a funny moment in Shaw's drama, but its effect as denouement depends upon our dawning realization that in fact the play has been laced with a great deal of humor, most of it sardonic and dark. In a work inspired by the Israeli abduction and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1962, humor might seem incongruous or even insulting to victims of the Holocaust, but Shaw uses it effectively to build sympathy for his own victim-protagonist. Reflection yields still other examples of humor, a feature largely ignored in the huge critical literature on the Holocaust. The very different aspects of humor in these examples illustrate the complexity of the phenomenon. The adolescent impishness of Anne Frank's confessions to her diary have little in common with the bawdy jests of Rolf Hochhuth's characters in Act I of The Deputy and still less with the mocking laughter of his sinister Doctor. Peter Weiss's documentary drama on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, The Investigation, systematically employs humor as a way to characterize moral bankruptcy as in-jokes are traded among the accused at the expense of the surviving witnesses. By contrast, the careful avoidance of humor by these same witnesses signals the high seriousness of the moral issues at stake. In works written by actual Holocaust survivors, the most conspicuous comic elements tend towards gallows humor. In Simon Wiesenthal's novella The Sunflower the narrator reports an execution at which a village wag drapes each hanging corpse with the label "kosher meat." Later in the same work, the autobiographical protagonist jokes that he would rather just sleep until God comes back. In his seminal work on humor and fear in Gothic literature, Paul Lewis suggests a taxonomy for the way humor can function in fearful circumstances: it can be used "to establish a temporary sense of normality," as a means of "coping with or minimizing fearful occurrences," by evil or benevolent forces "to assert and celebrate their superiority," by victims "in rising above their pain," and as a "sign of madness or demonic possession" (Lewis 112). Many examples of humor in Holocaust literature, including some of those cited here, function precisely in these same ways. Hochhuth's Doctor, based loosely on the infamous Dr. Mengele, is shown through his cruel and taunting sense of humor to be at least mad and perhaps possessed of incarnate evil. Anne Frank's spunky good humor "despite everything" helps her, and us as readers, rise above the deprivations of her life in the Secret Annexe. Wiesenthal's character Simon copes with his loss of faith by joking that God is on vacation. Laughter rises from the ranks of the accused in Weiss's The Investigation like an evil chorus as those on trial flaunt their perceived superiority. The initial comic appearance of Elie Wiesel's Moshe the Beadle in Night helps establish a sense of normality before the searing violations of the transports and camps introduce us to l'univers concentrationnaire.(1) Some examples of humor in Holocaust literature take us beyond the functions of the comic in Gothic fiction, however, and call for an expanded taxonomy appropriate to an aesthetics of atrocity (Langer 22). One of these functions is to define the boundaries of our moral response to the events of the Holocaust.(2) This occurs paradoxically by the introduction of inappropriate, often savage humor in the depiction of negative characters, and then by the suppression of humor in those characters--whether victims or non-victims--with whom the author wants the reader to empathize. We empathize with Father Fontana in Hochhuth's The Deputy, with the Jewish victims and with the enigmatic SS officer Gerstein; our rejection of many of the other characters in the German military-industrial complex and the Catholic Church is conditioned by the tastelessness of their fascist jokes. …