Abstract
The essays by Tim Cole and James Jordan in this volume confirm the impressions one regularly gets when considering public media in Britain since 1945: the Holocaust was not a topic of major concern but merely seen as an add-on to the Second World War. The war itself and the Nazis were much more interesting — and easier to make fun of. One can only admire the lightness and easiness with which British television series, from Dad’s Army to Alio, Alio!; from Fawlty Towers to That Mitchell and Webb Look, deal with the Second World War and the Nazis, usually turning it into a light affair complete with a laughter track. The Germans are mainly characterised as fools, speaking English with a heavy German accent and outwitted by everyone — an exception here may be Dad’s Army which places the irony and humiliation firmly on the caricatured members of the British Home Guard. The only German-produced equivalent that comes to mind are episodes of Obersalzberg within the comedy show Switch Reloaded that has run on channel ProSieben since 2007.1 Here, the German version of The Office meets Hitler’s headquarters: a deranged Hitler is barely in control of his office, struggling with missing swastika keys on the typewriters, bullied and controlled by Goebbels and constantly sent poisoned cookies by Graf Stauffenberg.
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Notes
Mark J. Harris; Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (London, 2000); Caroline Sharpies, ‘Reconstructing the Past: Refugee Writings on the Kindertransport’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, 12(3) (Winter, 2006), 40–62.
Richard C. Raack, ‘Historiography as Cinematography: A Prologomenon to Film Work for Historians’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18(3) (1983), 411–438, here 418.
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© 2013 Olaf Jensen
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Jensen, O. (2013). The Holocaust in British Television and Film: A Look over the Fence. In: Sharples, C., Jensen, O. (eds) Britain and the Holocaust. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350770_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137350770_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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