Hotel Lux
October 26, 2011
Making jokes about Hitler and Stalin isn't for everyone - especially when it comes to German filmmakers. But a number of other directors have given it a shot: Charlie Chaplin ("The Great Dictator"), Ernst Lubitsch ("To Be or Not to Be") and later Mel Brooks ("The Producers") and Roberto Benigni ("Life is Beautiful").
All of them were able to stuff bleak material into a comedic package while sending a message of humaneness and of revolt.
German director Leander Haussmann is the latest to try his hand at offering a humorous take on World War II tragedies in his film, "Hotel Lux," due for release in Germany on October 27. But the acclaimed director was aware of the risks.
"The events themselves which we associate directly with the fate of 20 million victims are dramatic and extremely unsuited to comedy," Haussmann said.
A death trap
The film sees its two protagonists, 1930s Berlin-based comedians Bully Herbig and Jürgen Vogel, head to Moscow. Once in Russia, the two men get caught up in the chaos of the Second World War.
The film's setting, the notorious Hotel Lux in the center of Moscow, is a meeting point for communists on the run from across the world, but it's also a death trap for anyone who falls into purview of Stalin's merciless bloodhounds.
It's not a film for everyone. Making jokes - no matter how subtly they may be delivered - about historical atrocities, death and torture is enough to turn away plenty of movie-goers.
Nevertheless, Haussmann and his team understood how to weave weighty historical elements into an absurd comedy. The director uses humor to pique the viewers' interest in the wrenching themes at hand.
"We didn't produce a knee slapper. Instead, we show a fugitive caught up in a labyrinth of confounding experiences," explained Haussmann. "Many of the things that happened in Hotel Lux are absurd and follow the rules of an illogical system - that creates humor."
Laughing and crying
And the film does indeed function on both levels. Sequences in which the viewer can hardly keep from laughing alternate with disturbing scenes. "Hotel Lux" delivers an impression of rumored hotel prison in all its horror.
"The Lux was a conspirative hotel, conspirative both inwardly and outwardly, a secretive place," wrote the Austrian communist Ruth von Mayenburg in her memoirs after spending several years there.
"There was no guest list, no death roll gave information about who had once lived within," added von Mayenburg, one of the most important witnesses from the German-speaking world. "When people arrived, the name on their passports generally didn't match their real names, and their real names didn't correspond to their party names - these ever-shifting aliases."
It's this play with convoluted identities that makes up the heart of the film.
Autobiographical touch
It goes without saying that not all of the gags in the film go off equally well. But ultimately, Leander Haussmann delivers a work in "Hotel Lux" that is among his strongest - likely because he was able to work part of his own story into the film.
"As a citizen of the German Democratic Republic, he himself grew up in a communist setting," said producer Günter Rohrbach. "He has personal experience with how an artist has to deal with that kind of system."
And that background is evident in the film. "Hotel Lux" is a successful comedy about a terrible historical era.
In her book "Lachen über Hitler - Auschwitz-Gelächter?" (Laughing about Hitler - Auschwitz Laughter?), film scholar Margrit Fröhlich examines parody in film and believes that irony can be a way to make historical figures more accessible.
"In historical films like 'Downfall' [a 2005 epic on the last 10 days of Hitler's life], there's the danger of furthering the mythos surrounding Hitler," she wrote. "Artists with a more subversive bent go in a different direction. Their point is to demolish fundamentally the aura of a given figure."
Author: Jochen Kürten / gsw
Editor: Kate Bowen