[50 years ago this coming weekend, the pilot episode of M*A*S*H aired. So in honor of that ground-breaking sitcom, this week I’ll AmericanStudy wartime comedies in various media, leading up to a special post on M*A*S*H!]
On the
vital importance of not judging a book by its cover (or a sitcom by its
premise).
Maybe
starting each post in this week’s series with some blog inside baseball is
going to be a thing, because I have to do the same for today’s subject (if in a
very different way than I did for Catch-22
yesterday). Despite reruns of the show playing on Nick at Nite quite a bit
during my childhood, I’ve never seen a single episode of the long-running hit
sitcom Hogan’s
Heroes (1965-71), and that’s not an accident: I always found the
premise, the very idea of a comedy set at a Nazi POW camp, to be one I just
couldn’t wrap my head around (I have a similar feeling about the film Life is Beautiful, which I’ve also never
seen). I’m not saying that there are topics which should be absolutely
off-limits to comedy, necessarily—part of the whole thrust of this series is
that there shouldn’t be, that comedy has a role to play in how we engage with
even our hardest and darkest histories and themes—but that doesn’t mean that
every comedy is for me, and this one quite simply felt like it wasn’t.
Can’t say I
had given the show a single further thought since those childhood days until I
sat down to research this post. And, well, let me quote at length from the “Casting”
section of its Wikipedia page: “The actors who
played the four major German roles—Werner Klemperer (Klink), John Banner (Schultz), Leon Askin (General
Burkhalter), and Howard Caine (Major Hochstetter)—were
all Jewish.
Furthermore, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin had all fled the Nazis during World
War II (Caine, whose birth name was Cohen, was an American). Further, Robert
Clary, a French Jew who played LeBeau, spent three years in a concentration camp (with an identity tattoo
from the camp on his arm, ‘A-5714’); his parents and other family members were
killed there. Likewise, Banner had been held in a (pre-war) concentration camp and his family was
killed during the war. Askin was also in a pre-war French internment camp and
his parents were killed at Treblinka.
Other Jewish actors, including Harold Gould and Harold J. Stone,
made multiple appearances playing German generals. As a teenager, Klemperer,
the son of conductor Otto Klemperer, fled Hitler's Germany with his
family in 1933. During the show's production, he insisted that Hogan always win
against his Nazi captors, or else he would not take the part of Klink. He defended
his role by claiming, ‘I am an actor. If I can play Richard III, I can play a
Nazi.’ Banner attempted to sum up the paradox of his role by saying, ‘Who can play
Nazis better than us Jews?’”
I’m
not sure I need to say much more, but I will add this: how freaking cool is
that? There’s no doubt that this casting trend was intentional and purposeful,
and it honestly makes me rethink the show’s very genre; seems to me that it
should be described not only as a sitcom, but also and especially as continued
resistance to the narratives of Nazism, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and
more. Heroic indeed.
Next
wartime comedy tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other wartime comedies you’d highlight?
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