12 - Post-unification German-Jewish Relations and the Discourse of Victimhood in Dani Levy’s Films

Summary

IN A LETTER TO Die Welt published on 20 January 2007 — just one week after the release of Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler) — the film’s director Dani Levy emphatically threw down the gauntlet to his detractors: “Lachen ist ein Politikum,” he wrote. “Das lachende Kino ist Ausdruck einer Haltung … Über Hitler zu lachen klärt unser Verhältnis zu ihm” (Laughter is a political act. Laughter in the cinema expresses an attitude … and laughing at Hitler clarifies our relationship to him). Levy’s statement serves as a welcome reminder of comedy’s potential to launch a radical critique of the prevailing political and social structures in the post-unification era. However, the wave of comedies that emerged after 1989 was not always viewed in such favorable terms. Eric Rentschler spoke for many when he depicted the comic turn of post-unification cinema as just one symptom of the decline in German filmmaking from a cinema of “oppositional voices and critical energies” to a “cinema of consensus.” But while many of the more anodyne genre comedies of the early 1990s might be seen as deliberate attempts to avoid political controversy, the emergence of a new generation of directors — many of them associated with the Berlin production company X-Filme Creative Pool — demonstrated that irreverent and often “politically incorrect” comedy could be deployed as a powerful, though controversial, means of addressing issues relating to the German past generally and to the discourse of victimhood in particular. At the same time, the positive reception in the Federal Republic of such foreign imports as Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), Radu Mihaileanu’s Train de vie (Train of Life, 1998), and Peter Kassovitz’s reworked adaptation of Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar, 1999) pointed to a major shift in attitudes towards the role of humor and irony in portraying Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. Accordingly, to dismiss post-unification comedy in Germany as part of a normalizing agenda that leads to nothing more than a “cinema of consensus” is to underplay its critical thrust.