arts & entertainment

Moving The Needle On
Holocaust Humor

Martin Amis' new novel is the latest entry in a
cultural trend to probe the Shoah with satire.

British novelist Martin Amis' new book,

Steve Lipman

New York Jewish Week

I

n a German concentration camp, the com-
mandant and an officer of the Waffen-SS,
the armed wing of the Nazis' SS para-
military unit, are discussing the "selection" of
Jewish prisoners to live or die. "There was no
selection. They were all certainties for the gas,"
one Nazi tells the other.
Rapes?
"We do something much nastier than that,"
comes the answer. We get the pretty ones, and
we do medical experiments on them ... We
turn them into little old ladies. Then hunger
turns them into little old men."
"Would you agree that we couldn't treat
them any worse?"
"Oh, come on. We don't eat them."

This dialogue takes place early in The
Zone of Interest (Knopf), British writer
Martin Amis' new (it was released in the fall
of 2014), and controversial, novel set in the
fictional Kat Zet I camp, which is a fictional
branch of Auschwitz. (Kat and Zet are the
letters by which a Konzentrationlager, or
concentration camp, is known in German.)
Most of the action in the book's 295 pages
takes place through the eyes of, and in the
words of, the camp commandant and a Nazi
civil servant; a Jewish prisoner is a secondary
character. As in a real concentration camp,
there is death and torture, but it is largely
implied rather than depicted.
Instead, Amis, 65, and one of England's
most prominent writers (twice a finalist for
the country's prestigious Booker Prize for

fiction), largely centers his novel around such
everyday stuff as petty romances and office
politics.
Amis' book is a departure from standard
fictional books about the
Holocaust. His perpetrators,
instead of the victims, tell the
story. They are shown to be
neither bloodthirsty monsters
nor sympathetic figures, but
as regular people with regular
foibles — clueless, morally
deaf people. They see their
lives, in venues of bureaucra-
cy-regulated cruelty, through
a lens of detached irony.
HI
The novel contains many
examples of sarcasm, of
comic hyperbole, of humor,
even on such serious topics as murder and
anti-Semitism. Even the cover is untradi-
tional: a drawing of red roses on barbed wire.
The Zone of Interest is the latest example
— a major one, given Amis' stature in the
world of literary fiction — of the increasing
convergence of two phenomena once consid-
ered inherently contradictory: the Holocaust
and humor.
"We're living in an age of irony ... an age
of [late-night comic commentators] Stephen
Colbert and Jon Stewart:' observed Thane
Rosenbaum, a son of Holocaust survivors
whose own novels frequently touch on
Holocaust themes.
Rosenbaum cited the 1949 statement by
German sociologist-philosopher Theodor
Adorn that "to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric:'
In other words, no form of art could accu-

rately deal with unprecedented genocide.
"You don't write novels inside concentra-
tion camps," Rosenbaum said. "You don't
make art of atrocity:'
For years, writers inspired by
the messages of the Holocaust
would write about the after-
math — postwar Germany, or
the camps' psychological effect
on survivors. Or, in the case of
Sophie's Choice, the experiences
of a non-Jew in a concentration
camp.
"It was very rare to violate the
rule Rosenbaum said. Then,
various writers and filmmakers
and other creative individuals
"chipped away at it. The further
we got away from Auschwitz, the
less sacred it became:'
The most famous example was The
Producers, Mel Brooks' 1968 movie about a
pair of Broadway charlatans whose doomed-
to-failure show about the Third Reich fea-
tured the memorable "Springtime for Hitler"
song-and-dance extravaganza, and the 2001
Broadway version of The Producers that fol-
lowed.
In this spirit was Roberto Benigni's 1997
Oscar-winning Life Is Beautiful, a comedy-
drama set in a concentration camp.
"You can laugh at Hitler because you
can cut him down to normal size Brooks
said in an interview with Germany's Spiegel
magazine. "By using the medium of comedy,
we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous
power and myths"
Lawrence L. Langer, emeritus professor of
English at Simmons College in Boston and

set in a Nazi death camp, incorporates
an amount of ironic humor.

the author of several books about Holocaust
literature, disagreed about the place of
"Holocaust humor" in a post-Holocaust set-
ting.
"I don't think farce works with the
Holocaust," he said. Humor, by definition,
diffuses the true atrocity of an event being
depicted. "I don't think it's a good phenom-
enon:'
A novel by a writer of Amis' stature raises
the place of humor in a Holocaust context to
a higher level of acceptability.
"It signifies that Adorno's admonition is off
the table," Rosenbaum said. "The Holocaust
is open for business in any art form:'
"It's fair game for anyone said Michael
Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and author.
Amis, who had set his 1991 novel, Time's
Arrow, in the same fictional concentration
camp and has conducted extensive Holocaust
research and has condemned anti-Semitism
in the contemporary United Kingdom, fol-
lows other recent examples of boundary-
testing Holocaust humor.
Er ist Wieder Da (He's Back) is a German
novel about a Rip Van Winkle-ish Hitler
who awakens in modern-day Germany. A
Brazilian play, Holoclownsto, is about clowns
in a concentration camp. An American play,
The Timekeepers, is about a Jewish watch-
maker and a homosexual German man
who bond in a concentration camp through
their mutual love of opera and their sense of
humor.
All are sympathetic to the Third Reich's
victims.
While humor in the context of the Shoah

Jews

Nate Bloom

Special to the Jewish News

Remembering Roger

Last August, the documentary Life

Itself, about the late film critic

Roger Ebert, had a brief theatrical
run. The film will be shown at 9 p.m.
Sunday, Jan. 4, on CNN.
Ebert became famous as one half
of Siskel & Ebert, the television
program (1975-1999) featuring two
dueling Chicago newspaper film
critics who gave a "thumbs up" or
"thumbs down" regarding new film
releases.
Much of the film is dedicated to

26

their relationship, which was often
as acerbic in real life as it was on
TV. However, the film does cover
Ebert's moving memorial TV tribute
to Gene Siskel (1945-1999).
The film's director, Steve James
(Hoop Dreams), said in an interview
that their relationship "wasn't all
vitriol and conflict; there was a
bond between them, too." By way
of evidence, he cites one outtake
reel in which the duo, knowing
their comments wouldn't make the
air, berate the WASPs (in a mostly
comic way) for "running the coun-
try" and their other faults – as
compared to "real folks' like Jews

(Siskel) and Catholics (Ebert).

New On TV

I saw the trailer for the new fairy-
tale-themed musical comedy series
Galavant, and I was quite amused
and impressed. The series debuts at
8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 4, on ABC.
Set in medieval England, it fol-
lows the adventures of Galavant, a
handsome knight who tries to win
back the affection of his sweet-
heart, whom the king fancies. That's
the basic plot, but really this show
is part Monty Python and the Holy
Grail and part Mel Brooks' Robin

Hood: Men in Tights.

It was created and written by Dan
Fogelman (Cars; Crazy, Stupid Love),

50, who even manages to work in
some explicitly Jewish humor. The
really funny songs were penned by
the top Disney songwriting team
of composer Alan Menken, 65, and
lyricist Glenn Slater, 46.
The main cast is mostly made
up of lesser-known British actors,
but guest-starring are some big-
gies: Hugh Bonneville (Downton
Abbey), Weird Al Yankovic and Ricky
Gervais, among others.

Contact Nate Bloom at

middleoftheroadl@aol.com .