Shakespeare, Nazis, and Pop Culture
The famous German dramatist Shakespeare once said, “to be Jewish, or not to be Jewish; that is the question.”
Wait.
No.
Two things wrong with that. First of all, it’s a bit misleading to say “Shakespeare said,” when really, Shakespeare puts the line in the mouth of a character (everyone’s second-favorite melancholy Dane, Hamlet). Just as when “to thine own self be true” comes spilling out of the mouth of a fool, who speaks is just as important as what is spoken. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, that’s not exactly how the line goes.
So now that we’ve cleared that up, we can return to the most famous and most brilliant creator of German drama, Wilhelm Shakespeare.
Is something sticking with you here? Are you shaking your head, wondering when I’ll tire of the joke and move on? “English!” you exclaim indignantly, “English dramatist! And it’s William, damn it!” Perhaps you are right. But tell that to Joseph Goebbels. Or Hitler himself.
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By the late 1930s, no foreign enemy’s work was allowed to be staged in Germany, due to its uniformly corrupt, disgraceful heritage. (After all, Germany was trying to conquer the world; it’s probably best not to remind the German people that, hey, those English blokes write good stuff, and maybe we shouldn’t bomb them so much.) But in 1939 the führer himself made the lone exception, as announced in the press by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: William Shakespeare was to be allowed on the stage once more. But not the English William Shakespeare, no; that Shakespeare was nowhere to be found. What German audiences saw instead was the Germanic Shakespeare, the Shakespeare who valorized good Germanic heroes in their fights against corruption and moral decay. The Nazis recoiled in horror at “modern” interpretations of Shakespeare, aghast at all that critical emphasis on individuality, the complexities of characters’ inner lives, and any idea that Shakespeare may have seen “people” (or “Volk,” as the Nazis would have them) as a group maybe best not relied upon. What Germany got from Shakespeare throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, as Rodney Symington points out in his 2005 book The Nazi Appropriation of Shakespeare, looked more like this: “The Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer turned Hamlet the play into a narrative of Germany, likening ‘the crime that . . . deprived Hamlet of his inheritance’ to the Treaty of Versailles and ‘Gertrude’s betrayal [to] that of the spineless Weimar politicians.’” Nationalist, political, and primarily concerned with the collective rather than the individual. (Also spiteful, mean, and cruel, but you say tomato, etc.)
Goebbels, as the propaganda minister for the Third Reich, recognized the value of theater when it came to creating pliant political actors (pun intended). He saw the theater as the ideal tool with which the Nazi establishment could “educate” the people. After all, high-minded, obscure academic argument will only get you so far with the guy who runs the butcher shop down on Main Straße and just wants to live his life. Entertainment, though — that’s the way to go. As Symington points out, 26.4% of the Propaganda Ministry’s budget went to German theaters. At the height of the Nazi rule of Germany, between 1934 and 1942, state subsidies to theaters skyrocketed by 500%, contributing to theater attendance doubling during the same time frame. And Shakespeare was a popular showing indeed.
Not all of The Bard’s plays worked for the Nazis. Most of the historical plays were right out, no good, just not gonna happen. Poor Antony and Cleopatra got the boot because it was “too perverse and effeminate.” Othello was verboten for its racial issues — imagine that. But while Hamlet had some great metaphorical ammunition going for it, by far the most popular Shakespeare play for the masses, the Volk themselves, was The Merchant of Venice. This was true from the very beginning of the Nazi era — in 1933 there were at least twenty separate productions of the play, while there were at least thirty more between ’34 and ’39. While many treatments of Merchant today wrestle with the complexities of the character of Shylock, there was no such concern in 1930s and early 1940s Germany. Shylock was the Jewish villain extraordinaire: cruel, merciless, single-minded, money-grubbing, and hateful to the core. He existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to carve his pound of flesh from the good Christian man and delight in the suffering he caused.
But this doesn’t mean some caution wasn’t taken. Some in the audience might, after all, find something redeemable in Shylock, and that would not be good for the Nazis, especially with the Final Solution in full swing. Some newspapers expressed concern at potential ambiguities in the play, wondering if maybe, just maybe, Shylock wasn’t evil enough, if his humanity was going to inspire sympathy in some audience members. (Maybe he needed to behead a couple Venetians on his way to court? Or was that too obvious?) So some directors of the play took no chances. In 1942, for instance, when Paul Rose directed Merchant in Berlin, he paid actors to dress as regular audience members and sit in the stands to boo, hiss, scream, and shout at Shylock whenever he appeared onstage. Much as the Imperial March lets everyone in hearing range know that, hey, Darth Vader is coming and we should be concerned, this made sure the audience knew how to feel: “That guy down there in row four is really mad at that Shylock character. He must be truly evil! I’ll boo too!”
In 1943, the famous actor Werner Krauß played Shylock in a rendition staged in Vienna. While the director wanted to stage the play as a comedy, Krauß was insistent that it be a comedy of the most sinister kind. When Shylock would appear onstage, one critic noted, the audience would gasp in horror: “With a crash and a weird train of shadows, something revoltingly alien and startlingly repulsive crawled across the stage.” Another more detailed account: “The pale pink face, surrounded by bright red hair and beard, with its unsteady, cunning little eyes; the greasy caftan with the yellow prayer shawl slung round, the splay-footed, shuffling walk; the foot stamping with rage; the clawlike gestures with the hands; the voice, now bawling, now muttering — all add up to a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.” Master of subtlety, he was not. That was hardly the point.
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A critical question, then: if the Nazis can get Shakespeare, quite possibly the most famous author in the western world, what’s to stop their descendants, the neo-Nazis and “alt-right” of today, from taking whatever they please? And how are the rest of us to react? Shakespeare was never going to be ruined by the Nazis. No one was ever going to look at Hamlet and say, “well, after the Nazis said all that stuff, I guess we can consign this dreadful play to the dust pile of history.” Krauß’s rendition of Shylock did not condemn the character to eternal villainy. But that’s a luxury afforded to precious few artists, and precious few pieces of art. It took decades for Nietzsche’s reputation to be rehabilitated after the Nazis’ wholesale perversion of his work. And today we’re seeing Norse symbols turned into hate symbols, with runes and Viking-age images and even Beowulf held up as alt-right fodder. The academy rarely turns its back on whatever is appropriated by reactionaries or revolutionaries (Nietzsche being one of the rare exceptions, and that didn’t last anyway), but pop culture can and does. It is all too easy to discard some bit or another of media, of art, because a neo-Nazi got to it first, especially when there’s always more media to be consumed, and more being produced every second. Guilt by association is a powerful thing.
The story of the Nazi appropriation of Shakespeare ought to be known by every individual who takes their exposure to pop culture seriously. It demonstrates not only how easy it can be for art to be steered in any number of directions, but how important it is to the political operatives who want to do the steering. Nazi Germany understood the power of performance in politics. It is entirely possible, I think, to argue convincingly that President Trump does too, in a way as powerfully instinctual as Goebbels did (the NFL debacle is a testament to that, but that’s an essay for another time).
There’s much to be said about the recent resurgence of right-wing reactionary politics in America. A testament to the movement’s persistence, perhaps. Or we could compliment their fashion sense — after all, khakis and white polo shirts are never out of style — and talk about the “normalization” (a word that’s been beaten just about to death by now) of neo-fascist, nationalist, white supremacist ideologies. Or if we were feeling particularly intellectually and morally bankrupt, we could just say they’ve got the right idea and continue our steady march towards making America great again (let’s not do that). One way or another, the reactionaries, right-wingers and neo-Nazis and aspiring fascists and virulent racists and populist ideologues are here to stay, no matter what we say about them. They’ve been emboldened by recent events in world politics, sure, but it’s not like they’re new. And it’s not like Meryl Streep or Leonardo DiCaprio or the whole Academy is going to scare them off. Art will always fall prey to radical political ideologies. If Shakespeare is vulnerable to appropriation, so too is Andrew Lloyd Webber or Steven Spielberg. So what are we, consumers of pop culture, to do?
“Don’t trust the artist, trust the tale,” goes the saying. The Nazis found much to trust in some of Shakespeare’s tales, much as today’s right-wing reactionaries will continue to find much to trust in works we might otherwise find innocuous, or, at least, devoid of the hyper-politicization the fascists notice and emphasize. (Theater continues to be useful for politicians on both sides of the aisle here in America.) But it is important, vitally important, to always pay close attention to what the fascists choose to emphasize. What elements do they prioritize in their interpretations or re-fashionings? What gets removed? Why are they doing this?
And if we ever succumb again to the rule of far-right ideologues, let’s make sure theater-goers are always, always thinking just a little bit more about Shylock’s humanity.
