Can it ever be right to make a comedy about Hitler?
As a new film plays the Führer for laughs, Sam Leith talks to the acclaimed author of the original – and far more sober – novel
When Christine Leunens was in her twenties, living in Paris and working as a model, she befriended an elderly Frenchwoman who told her an extraordinary story. As a girl, Leunens’s friend belonged to a family who resisted the Nazis by hiding a Jewish refugee in their Parisian home. The refugee was a young man who had fled Poland at the start of the war – and while he was hiding in a nook in their house this young woman fell in love with him. After the war – and, sadly, in the face of resistance from her parents – the couple married.
This nugget lodged in Leunens’s imagination and three decades or so later, in 2008, had issue in her acclaimed second novel, Caging Skies. The story’s transformation as it passed into fiction was a pretty thorough one. In Leunens’s story the hider in the house is a young woman – Elsa – and the lovestruck child of the family an adolescent boy – Johannes – chillingly indoctrinated with Hitler Youth propaganda. The setting was now wartime Vienna.
And yet, even as she changed the story and the settings, Leunens was determined to do right by historical truth. “It was important for me to get every fact and detail right,” she says. She immersed herself in sources from the period – reading Simon Wiesenthal, scouring archives, trying to interview others who were old enough to remember the period. She
‘Taika believes it’s important to laugh at tyrants and psychopaths’
wrote the book itself at the Memorial Museum for Peace in Normandy, where, she says, there were “enough specialised books and documentaries to swallow me in World War Two and the atrocities of the Holocaust for five years”, where her daily commute to work took her past life-size photos of deportees, and where she found herself sitting underneath a restored Hawker Typhoon dangling from a wire.
“A soundtrack of the drone of bombers and the blasé pitch of air-raid sirens would go off every five minutes,” she says. “The Second World War couldn’t have felt closer.”
Now the story has itself been further transformed – with the forthcoming release of Jojo Rabbit, a free adaptation of the book by the New Zealand-born director Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Dark; Thor: Ragnarok). Readers of Leunens’s fine book may initially be disconcerted to see the trailer for Jojo Rabbit, though. The realism and sly comedy of her novel seems to have been replaced by something akin to high camp slapstick – complete with a supersaturated colourscheme and an imaginary Adolf Hitler (played by Waititi).
To those accustomed to the sombre palettes and would-begritty-realism of Hollywood’s sausage-factory of Second
World War adaptations, it’s a startling departure, and several critics who saw it at the London Film Festival earlier this year branded it “smug” and “wrongheaded” and accused it of trivialising the Nazis’ crimes. The film has also dispensed with the disturbing postwar section of Leunens’s book – Johannes (nicknamed “Jojo” in the film) allows Elsa to believe Germany won the war, Goodbye Lenin-style, so she stays in hiding under his effective control – and there’s no sign of the protagonist’s injury (he loses half of one of his arms very early in the novel). What’s more, the strong sexual aspect is absent. But Leunens, as many novelists might not be, is phlegmatic about the changes. The film and book, she says, “share similar themes, characters, and plot”, though the movie focuses in on Johannes as a “desperate to fit in” 10-year-old rather than following the book’s postwar plot trajectory. “The themes that I explore, Taika Waititi also explores: how teaching children a sense of ‘us and them’ breeds a sense of superiority and dehumanises what one perceives as ‘otherness’; and why this theme is relevant to today’s rise in the far-right, how children and youth are indoctrinated into extremism and terrorism.” She adds: “Part of what I wanted to do in this novel was explore how children could be lied to and used as tools for political aims. However, for my characters to have depth, they have to be human and complex, have both qualities and flaws, do the right things at times, and at others, things they’ll regret having done and not necessarily know how to undo.”
And she applauds what’s arguably Waititi’s boldest decision. “Taika brings Hitler out of Johannes’s head and lets the audience see him,” she says, “because he believes it’s important to laugh at tyrants and psychopaths to break down the mythologies and barriers that protect them.”
That sensibility – humour to a serious effect – is in evidence in Waititi’s early work, too. Leunens, who has lived in New Zealand since 2006, refers approvingly to his films Tama Tū, Two Cars, One Night and Boy.
“The laughs are never free in Taika’s films,” she says. “There are always strings attached. We both have our balance of drama and humour, he leaning more to humour and I more to drama. Without giving anything away I’ll just say that there are moments in the film when the audience cries. But Taika can take the most serious scene of mine and put something of his own in to add a note of humour.”
That question of how laughter can be used in the treatment of such serious subjects is one that seems especially live now that a new generation of writers is breaking old taboos, such as Shalom Auslander in Hope: A Tragedy (about a man who finds an elderly and foul-mouthed Anne Frank in his attic) and Timur Vermes in his bestselling comedy Look Who’s Back, about Hitler reappearing in modern Berlin. Those scabrous treatments have inflamed sensitivities, especially in Germany, and Leunens says Caging Skies “has been translated into about 20 languages, but a German publisher has yet to take it”.
I wonder if – in an age where “cultural appropriation” is a hot topic of debate – Leunens has worried, as a Belgian/new Zealand writer, that in telling this story she might be trespassing on territory that isn’t hers to write about. Leunens, born in the States to Belgian and Italian parents, has no hesitation there. She describes how her Belgian grandfather (the Flemish painter Gillaume Leunens) was detained in a German labour camp. Leunens’s Italian mother, too, witnessed atrocities in wartime southern Italy: “Two women from her village were hanged by the Nazis as a warning.”
She had family members in Buchenwald; a great-uncle sent to Mauthausen for harbouring refugees. “He witnessed a teenage Jewish-italian boy hung in Mauthausen and a Nazi guard letting his German shepherd eat both his feet as he was hanging. He fell to his knees and began to pray, even though he could have been killed on the spot. The Nazis later injected petrol into his veins.”
Trespass, then? “I feel the Nazis were the ones to trespass on the memories of family, friends, and countless others,” she says. “These memories have come to be my own memories, to inhabit me and haunt me. I feel I am recording that trespassing of the Nazis, not trespassing myself.”