Laugh Yourself to Death: the new wave of Holocaust comedies!<br>By Slavoj Zizek</font></td></tr><tr></tr></tbody></table></center><br>{{BSZ}}
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="100%" width="100%"> <tbody><tr><td width="15%"></td><td valign="top" width="70%"><font face="Times New Roman,Times,Courier" size="3"></font><p class="b" align="justify"><font face="Times New Roman,Times,Courier" size="3">The success of Benigni's <i>Life Is Beautiful</i> seems to mark the beginning of a new sub-genre or at least a new trend: the holocaust comedies. It was followed by Jacob the Liar with Robin Williams, the remake of the old GDR classic about the owner of a small shop in the ghetto who pretends to have a hidden radio-receiver and regularly tells his terrified fellows uplifting news about approaching German defeat that he allegedly learned from the radio. Forthcoming is the American release of the Rumanian <i>The Train of Hope</i>, the story of the residents of a small Jewish community who, when the Nazis occupy the country and plan to transport them to the extermination camp, organize a fake train with Nazi guards, board it and, of course, insteads of the camp, take the ride to freedom. Significantly, all three films are centered on a lie that allows the threatened Jews to survive their ordeal.<br><br>
The key to this trend is provided by the obvious failure of its opposite, the holocaust tragedy. There is a scene which condenses all that is false in Spielberg, although many a critic praised it as the strongest scene in <i>Schindler's List</i>, containing the "Oscar winning" performance by Ralph Fiennes: the scene, of course, in which the commander of the concentration camp confronts a beautiful Jewish girl, his prisoner. We listen to his long quasi-theatrical monologue, while the terrified girl just silently stares in front of her, totally immobilized by mortal fear: while she attracts him sexually, he finds her unacceptable as his love object due to her Jewish origins. In this battle between the human erotic attraction and the racist hatred, racism wins the day and he casts off the girl.<br><br>
