Funny Nazis? The Return (In Bulk) of Hogan’s Heroes
By Benjamin Ivry
The CBS Home Entertainment/Paramount Release of a 28 DVD-set, “Hogan’s Heroes: The Komplete Series, Kommandant’s Kollection” reminds us of this early effort to find belated humor in Hitler’s war machine. Writer/director Billy Wilder’s much-admired 1953 film “Stalag 17,” was adapted from a play of the same name by two former POWs, and subtitled: “a comedy melodrama in three acts.” Deleting the melodrama, TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes,” which ran on CBS for 168 episodes from 1965 to 1971, went for outright laughs, successfully or not.
Ambiguously, “Hogan’s Heroes” cast all the principal roles of Nazi soldiers with Jewish actors, notably two Austrian Jews who were refugees from Hitler, Leon Askin (General Burkhalter) and John Banner (Sergeant Schultz). Werner Klemperer (Colonel Klink), son of the eminent German-Jewish symphony conductor Otto Klemperer, had also fled the Nazis, arriving in Los Angeles in 1935. Was it somehow better to have buffoonish Nazis played by Jewish actors?
For refugee actors with accents, jobs in Hollywood were scarce, and Werner Klemperer, although he claimed to be “very proud” of the TV show, in later life strained for acceptance in the higher echelons of the arts, recording for Philips Classics the narration for Schoenberg’s oratorio “Gurre-Lieder,” and taking speaking roles onstage in Mozart operas.
April 15, 2008, 6:02pm
Little-Known Fact: Nazis Lit the Flame of Olympic Torch Relay
By Daniel Treiman
Against the backdrop of this year’s tumultuous Olympic torch relay, New York Times polymath Edward Rothstein locates the origins of this peculiar ritual:
If you want to know how the Olympic torch really began its “Journey of Harmony,” as the Chinese call its current relay, if you want to see why the torch has had to pass through a human obstacle course composed of protesters, SWAT teams and police in San Francisco, Paris and London, then do not look to Tibet’s grievances against China. Look to the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 film, “Olympia.”
In that homage to Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games the origins of this ritual are revealed. Never before had a lighted torch been relayed from a Greek temple in Olympia to an athletic competition, let alone by thousands of runners trying to keep it from being extinguished.
Rothstein writes that with the 1936 torch relay Nazi Germany was staking its claim as “the living heir to Ancient Greece.” He also points out that the Nazis had plans for a 400,000-seat stadium in Nuremberg, since future Olympic Games, as Hitler put it, “will take place in Germany for all time to come” (with the exception of a 1940 turn at hosting for fellow Axis power Japan).
Unsurprisingly, Rothstein notes, the International Olympic Committee “offers a slightly different account of the torch relay.”
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