To Be or Not to Be: Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 Film

As some of you may know, I’m working on MRS. LIEUTENANT IN EUROPE, the sequel to MRS. LIEUTENANT. The sequel takes place in Munich, Germany, starting in September 1970 when Sharon and Robert Gold first arrive. A major theme of this second novel is what it’s like as Jews to be part of an occupation force in Germany only 25 years after the end of World War II.

Thus I read with particular interest David Propson’s October 25th Wall Street Journal article “A Bubbly Mix of Zaniness and Doom” about Ernst Lubitsch’s classic 1942 film “To Be or Not to Be.”

Propson’s article apparently was motivated by the less-than-stellar reviews for the current Broadway play based on the film. Propson says:

It would be tragic, however, if audiences mistook this misbegotten production as any reflection of Lubitsch’s sublime comedy. Recreating Lubitsch’s bubbly cocktail of zaniness and doom is a tall order: Even Mel Brooks missed the mark with his 1982 film remake. But the Broadway version travesties Lubitsch’s original, altering characters and even changing the famous ending.

The original movie is a favorite of my husband and mine. (We refused to see the remake.) I don’t want to give too much away except to say that the plot concerns a troupe of Polish Shakespearean actors in Nazi-occupied Germany who impersonate high-ranking Nazis in order to save the Polish underground. Jack Benny is the lead actor of this troupe and he is beyond hilarious.

When my husband and I first saw the film in 1971 or 1972, we and the two other American servicemen with us were the only people laughing in the theater. Where did we see this film? At a Hollywood film festival at the Munich city museum. Why the museum thought that Germans would understand the farcical humor of this film was beyond us. But the four of us couldn’t stop laughing.

If you have the opportunity to see the original film, do so. While it’s very funny, there are serious underpinnings (Lubitsch himself was a Berlin Jew who got out in time). And sometimes the most farcical films can give us food for thought.

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Commemoration of 70 Years From the Signing of the Munich Agreement

This afternoon my husband and I attended a program sponsored by the www.americanfreedomalliance.org marking the 70th anniversary of the Munich Agreement that is generally blamed for leading to World War II.

For those of you who aren’t immersed in the history of World War II, here’s the basic rundown:

Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January of 1933. (The concentration camp Dachau was opened in March of 1933 as a political prison camp.) In contradiction of the peace treaty ending World War I, Germany annexed the Rhineland (the area between Germany and France) in 1936 without the European powers of France and Britain saying anything. (The United States was busy pursuing an isolationist policy at the time.)

Then, in March of 1938, Hitler annexed Austria, which ceased to exist as an independent country. Soon Hitler wanted the Sudentenland, the western part of Czechoslovakia that was predominately populated by ethnic Germans. The Czechs wanted to resist this plan, but were told they had to go along with the policy of Britain and France, which was appeasement.

And at the end of September 1938, based on the Munich Agreement, the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia was handed over to the Germans, to be followed in 1939 by Nazi Germany’s takeover of the rest of Czechoslovakia.

The British prime minister at that time, Neville Chamberlain, is infamous for the statement “peace in our time” that sealed the fate of millions of Jews, Gypsies, clergy, homosexuals, mentally handicapped and anyone else the Third Reich declared should be exterminated.

At the program that we attended, the German and French consul generals tried to put appeasement in the context of the time – only 20 years after what was then known as the Great War, no one wanted war. (Nobody, that is, except the Germans, who apparently drank so much beer that they forgot the horrors of the World War I trenches.)

But there was also a video from a former Czech prime minister who presented the Czechoslovak side of the story: desertion by the West even though the Czech military were willing to sacrifice their lives to fight the Germans at the Czech border.

The reason for the importance of remembering the Munich agreement was mentioned – to ensure that the free world does not again bow under to appeasement rather than facing head on the horror of tyranny.

I understand the tendency of humans to wish for the best – burying their heads in the sand in hopes that the worst will not overcome them. But I fear that politicians, wishing to remain popular to achieve or stay in office, will repeat the mistakes that the British and French politicians made in appeasing Hitler rather than choosing to emulate Winston Churchill, who refused (though vastly unpopular) to knuckle under to appeasement.

And if our leaders choose to knuckle under, will democracy survive?

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