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Germany Breaks A Taboo

Jewish Comedy Kosher as Pork Chops

By Jody K. Biehl in Berlin

Germany's first post-1945 German-Jewish comedy has blossomed into a surprise box-office hit. The film's director says he's tired of seeing Jews portrayed only as victims and that laughter could be the best medicine for ever tense German-Jewish ties.

Filmmaker Dani Levy loves a good Jewish joke. Unfortunately, he's found them hard to come by in his adopted home of Berlin, land of the Holocaust, and the city his mother fled as a schoolgirl in 1939. So, the 47- year-old, who still maintains the puckish twinkle of a boy, has started making his own. These days, he's got the whole nation laughing along with him. Levy's newest film -- the nation's first post-1945 Jewish-German comedy -- is both an unexpected hit and a politically unprecedented event: Germans are laughing at -- but also with -- Jews.

"You ask any German about Jews and they will think victim," Levy said, leaning back in the plush chair of a cozy Berlin café. "My characters are not that. They are real people, people with flaws, but people I love. I have a deep feeling for all of these characters. That's the secret to comedy, I think. Putting sympathetic characters in exaggerated circumstances."

Levy himself is terrifically sympathetic. Soft-spoken, humble and sporting a trademark three-day stubble, he sucks up life like he does his espresso: loaded with sugar. Yet, he is also filled with conviction and though he somewhat blindly stumbled into his role as German-Jewish provocateur, he is far from sorry to be there. "Do you know that 80 to 90 percent of Germans never come into contact with Jews?" he asked. "Germans no longer have any experience or relation to Jews and that creates a natural discomfort. Combine that with Germany's bad conscience over the Holocaust and you get an irrational fear. I want to change that. My film is not a film about Jews. It's a film about people caught up in everyday chaos who happen to be Jews." Maybe if Germans can laugh with these Jews, they will start to see how human they are, he says. Maybe then Jews will lose a little of their foreignness. And maybe, just maybe Germans will lose a little of their fear.

Levy's film is called "Alles auf Zucker!" (Bet it All on Zucker!) and is rapidly on its way to becoming the second-ever ethnic film in Germany to be both a box office and a critical hit. The first -- Fatih Akin's "Head On" -- a stormy love story among Turkish-German immigrants -- opened last year and has been winning prizes, including best European film, ever since. On Jan. 19, Levy, too joined in, winning the Ernst Lubitsch Prize for best German comedy of the year.

Could the success of these films be a sign that Germans are finally ready to look hard at the lives of the minorities who live visibly and invisibly among them? Perhaps. Certainly, it signals new acceptance of multiculturalism in a culture known to resist change. Yet, as always, when it comes to Jews, Germans tense up, afraid to say too much, afraid to make a mistake or even an assumption and critics have been wary to connect the two films or to talk much about what the Levy film -- released 60 years after the end of World War II -- might sybolize in the long-term.

Are Germans Ready for Jewish Jokes?

The truth is, Levy's film is the opposite of cerebral. It's a zany family triangle featuring two estranged brothers -- one a religious Jew from Frankfurt, the other a Godless communist from Berlin -- both angling for their mother's inheritance. If the brothers don't make up -- and give their mother a proper Jewish funeral -- the Jewish community will get all the cash. That's just what the rabbi who is overseeing the funeral would like; but, like the audience, he, too, falls under the charm of this kooky, yet ultimately warm-hearted family. The film is the first Jewish-German comedy featuring a German cast and set in Germany "since I don't know when," Levy says.

And it was not easy to make. Just finding someone to finance the idea took Levy close to three years. That's partly because the film breaks one taboo after another. In one scene, the Communist brother Jackie -- an addicted gambler, who always means well, but usually ends up with his face in the gutter -- tries to use his newfound Jewishness to finagle a spot at a billiards match. His first try is to accuse the owner of being anti-Semitic. When that doesn't work, he plies for sympathy, insisting he has lost everything, including his whole family in the Holocaust. In another scene, Samuel, the serious and pious brother, accidentally swallows ecstasy and ends up in a bordello being massaged by a Palestinian hooker.

Such scenes may be routine slapstick in other countries -- Woody Allen built his career on being the neurotic Jew and Mel Brooks made "Springtime for Hitler" into a household belly laugh -- but for Germany, cracking Holocaust jokes is brand new territory. And it almost didn't happen. "I was kind of naïve at the beginning," admitted the experienced filmmaker who already has seven films to his credit, including "The Giraffe," a romantic thriller in which German-Jewish history figures prominently. "I just thought why not make a comedy about Jews. Nobody will have a problem with that."

Film companies, it turned out, did. Levy got rejection letter after rejection letter. The word Jewish he said, is often considered "poison" at the German box office. "They told me that they don't make minority programs," he said. What they meant was that they didn't think German audiences would watch a movie like Levy's.

How wrong they were. More than 270,0000 Germans have piled into theaters since the film's opening on Jan. 6, the film's distributor claims. The numbers may not sound like much on an international scale, but in Germany, they are the trappings of a sleeper hit. Especially since the film only opened in 67 theaters. In just two weeks, Levy's film has made €1.6 million, already outstripping its €1.5 million budget. By comparison, "Head-On," considered a smash, was seen by 750,000 Germans last year.

Backing from Germanys Jews

Paul Spiegel, the head of the German Jewish community has hailed the film, saying it is exactly what German Jews need. Ironically, Spiegel also indirectly saved the film from the dustbin in 2002, when he mentioned to public television executives at German broadcaster WDR that he'd like to see more "unconventional" films made about Jews, films that are not "100 percent politically correct." The words could have come out of Levy's own mouth and although WRD had already rejected Levy's film, things were soon back on track.

Now, along with their popcorn, German audiences are getting a crash course in Judaism -- or actually Judaism lite, as they watch Jackie's family struggle to appear just Jewish enough to get their inheritance money. The film is packed with Jewish stereotypes -- the bearded, overzealous Orthodox, the rich land owner, the fat, busy body wife. It also pokes fun at the absurd mélange German culture has become -- pitting West Germans vs. East Germans, the religious vs. the non-religious, the impoverished vs. the well off. Plus, it is terribly human: in the end, these two very different brothers never stopped caring about the other or competing for the love of their mother.

Will such lightheartedness cure Germans of their stereotypical heaviness? Likely not, but it is a first step. Indeed, the best way for Germany to ever normalize its relations with its Jews is to treat them normally -- and that should include humor.