Flippant Entertainment

Is Hunters’ irreverent portrayal of the Holocaust kosher?
by Michael Isenberg.

Last week, Nerds who Read posted Kerey McKenna's review of Hunters, the new Amazon Prime series about Holocaust survivors seeking vengeance against Nazis who escaped to the United States. In it, he raised some questions about whether some aspects of the series were appropriate for a subject as tragic and grim as the Holocaust. “Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece,” he wrote, “Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers…the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile.” He concluded by wondering if “all that ham and cheese is ‘Kosher’ for such subjects.”

Indeed, Kerey was not the only one put off by the comic book vibe of the series, not to mention some historical inaccuracies. TV Critic Daniel Fienberg, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called it “Jewsploitation,” in analogy to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; they were hyper-stereotyped and hyper-violent, and yet groundbreaking in portraying blacks as action heroes, instead of servants or comic relief, as had been the norm in prior decades.

The BBC reported that “Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told the BBC such portrayals risked fuelling Holocaust denial, and lent a tone of ‘flippant entertainment’ to the programme. ‘We have a real responsibility to protect the truth of the Holocaust,’ said Mrs Pollock, ‘particularly as we're moving away from living history, the survivors are few and frailer.’”

The inclusion of a human chess game at Auschwitz—in which the “pieces” get murdered upon being captured—was a particular point of criticism. There is no record of any such atrocity in the annals of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz Memorial, which according to its Twitter profile, “preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp,” tweeted, “Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

In my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong per se with a comic book-style series about the Holocaust, or including fictional incidents, or even injecting humor into a tragic subject. Any problems with Hunters is not because of what they set out to do. Whether they did it well is another matter.

Certainly comic book heroes confronting Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular has a long and honorable history. From the March 1941 debut of Captain America, with its now-viral cover art of Cap punching Hitler in the face, to the more tortured portrayal of Holocaust survivor Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies, Nazism has been grist for the superhero mill almost as long as there have been Nazis.

Many reviewers have noted that Hunters was very obviously trying to capture the magic of another comic book-style movie about "killing Nah-tsees": Quentin Tarantino’s simultaneously gruesome and tongue-in-cheek Inglourious Basterds. In this, Hunters bit off more than it could chew. But then, it would be difficult for anyone who isn’t Tarantino to reproduce the dramatic intensity of Basterds’ opening scene, in which a Nazi "Jew Catcher" chats calmly with a farmer over a glass of milk while the Jews he’s looking for are hiding under the floorboards. Or the manic insanity of Shosanna’s fiery revenge against Hitler and his despicable crew in the climax.

Of course, Basterds departed from the history books in a major way, and indeed authors of historical fiction (a category which includes me!) have no obligation to confine themselves to actual events. It is not their job merely to chronicle real life. Historians do that quite well, thank you very much. The job of historical fiction is to entertain, to make the reader empathize with the characters, to explore the human psyche, and to show what life could be, not merely what it is. History can be a starting point. It need not be the ending point. The key word in the phrase “creative writing” is, after all, creative. Or as series creator David Weil put it, Hunters “is not documentary. And it was never purported to be…this show takes the point of view that symbolic representations provide individuals access to an emotional and symbolic reality that allows us to better understand the experiences of the Shoah and provide it with meaning that can address our urgent present.”

Weil had another reason for relying on fictionalized atrocities. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor himself, he thought it would be disrespectful, in a piece of Holocaust fiction, to appropriate the stories of its real victims. This was the same reason “that all of the concentration camp prisoners (and survivors) in the series would be given tattoos above the number 202,499. 202,499 is the highest recorded number given to a prisoner at Auschwitz. I didn’t want one of our characters to have the number of a real victim or a real survivor.” One may disagree with Weil’s reasoning in this. One certainly can’t deny that his heart is in the right place.

Certainly there may be, as Auschwitz Memorial warns, some Holocaust deniers who idiotically think that the existence of a fictional incident in a fictional TV show somehow proves a cover-up. But there will no doubt be many more people who will be inspired by the series to learn more about the true history of the Holocaust. I know in my own case, vast swaths of the history I know was the result of seeing or reading some piece of historical fiction, 1976’s I, Claudius, for example, and then doing some research to find out which parts were true. Indeed, in the case of Hunters, it seems to be working. For instance, Google Trends showed a 17-fold increase in interest in “human chess” after the series was released.*

But it is perhaps the inclusion of humor in the series that is the most controversial aspect of Hunters in this age of political correctness and perpetually offended snowflakes. As with comic book treatments, people have been making fun of Nazis since the beginning: P.G. Wodehouse created the knee-obsessed would-be Fuehrer of Britain Roderick Spode in 1938. Charlie Chaplin mimicked Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) and the Spike Jones cover of its title song were two of the greatest pieces of war propaganda ever made.

After the war, there was Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) with its comically inept pro-Nazi musical, “Springtime for Hitler.”

TV’s Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) was particularly controversial in its day because of the inappropriate setting for a comedy: a prisoner-of-war camp. So it’s interesting that all four of the main German characters were played by Jewish actors—three of whom—Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink), John Banner (Sgt. Schultz), and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) had been born in Germany or Austria and had been fortunate to escape in time (The fourth, Howard Caine [Maj. Hochstetter], was an American Jew). Another Jewish cast member, Robert Clary, who played the French P.O.W. Le Beau, had actually been imprisoned at Buchenwald.

Klemperer once told The Houston Chronicle, “I had one qualification when I took the job. If they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.” Clearly, this was personal for him, as I’m sure it was for all the Jewish actors. I believe that was the reason the show was so wickedly funny. And if actual victims of the Nazis don’t have an issue with the humor, it seems foolish for the rest of us to object.

These examples all made fun of Nazism in general, but stopped short of jokes about the Holocaust. In recent years, even that taboo has been shattered. The 2004 South Park episode “The Passion of the Jew” is a particular favorite of a Millennial I know.

Laughter in the face of tragedy does serve a purpose. It helps us fragile humans deal. It's been said that the most oppressed peoples have the best senses of humor. This is believed to be especially true of Jews, who have faced more than their share of tragedy during their thousands of years of history. A 1978 Time Magazine article explored the question, noting that “Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population, 80% of the nation's professional comedians are Jewish.” “Why such domination of American humor?” it asked. “New York City Psychologist Samuel Janus, who once did a yearlong stint as a stand-up comic, thinks that he has the answer: Jewish humor is born of depression and alienation from the general culture. For Jewish comedians, he told the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, ‘comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.’”

Humor also allows us to explore difficult subjects which might otherwise make us too uncomfortable to confront. And when directed at our enemies, it makes them seem weaker and easier to defeat.

In short, laughing at Nazis is healthy.

Nevertheless, I had issues with the humorous elements of Hunters, which mostly took the form of Family Guy-style cutaways. They just were not well done. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong, how they differed from Spike Jones, Hogan’s Heroes, and the rest. Part of the problem was most of the show was fairly serious, so when it hit one of the comedic sequences it was, in Kerey’s word, “jarring.” In any case, whatever the reason, they weren’t funny. In particular, a fake game show in Episode 8, “Why Does Everyone Hate the Jews?,” had me sitting in icy and uncomfortable silence as contestants yelled out negative Jewish stereotypes as if they were on Family Feud. As my father used to say, “Laugh? I never thought I’d start.”

Still, even though the series failed to rise to Tarantino-level heights, and the humor fell flat, I recommend it. Flippant entertainment has its place, and it is thoroughly satisfying to see the Jewish characters deal rough justice to the Nazis who once tormented them.

Furthermore, we live in a time of historically high levels of anti-Semitism. When white supremacists march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Hebes will not divide us.”** When too many Americans—especially the young—are woefully ignorant of the Holocaust. According to a Pew survey, 43% of American teens could not correctly identify the 20 year period in which it happened, 62% did not know the approximate number of Jews who died, and 67% did not know that Hitler became chancellor of Germany via a democratic process. Any TV series that raises Holocaust awareness, and sends its viewers to Google to find out more about the tragedy, is performing a valuable public service—especially if it’s the sort of irreverent series that might resonate with a generation brought up on South Park and Family Guy.

My cousin Louis lived through the Nazi occupation of Belgium. When the Germans invaded, they ordered all the Jews in his town to register with the authorities. Louis’s father was a tailor and one of his clients, who was the mayor of the town, told him to just not register. And so, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews to ship them off to the concentration camps, they missed Louis and his family (Other family members have told me that Louis’s father was going to register but never got around to it, so procrastination literally saved their lives). Louis’s brother Jacques went to Paris at one point where he got picked up by the Gestapo. “We never saw him again,” Louis told me. But Louis survived the war.

Sadly, Louis is no longer with us. He died last summer at the age of 91, after a long and happy post-war life. When I found out his daughter had watched Hunters, I asked her what her father would have thought of it. “Every Holocaust movie or series would upset my father,” she told me. “But he couldn’t turn away...he had to watch it. I think he would watch this and cheer for every murder of a Nazi.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Marvel Comics, Google, Historia Obscurum

*--I also checked Google trends for searches on "holocaust," and it is at an elevated level, but it was not clear whether that was the result of Hunters, or a residual effect from the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a couple weeks before.

**--Contrary to popular opinion, I do not believe that the Charlottesville assholes chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” I listened to the video a number of times, and it sounded to me like “You will not replace us.” But, as I indicated above, they clearly chanted “Hebes will not divide us.”