Frankfurt
Germany broke a broadcasting taboo this week by airing a comedy set in the Nazi era. Making light of the people who perpetrated the Holocaust has long been seen in Germany as the height of bad taste. But Goebbels and Geduldig, a farce about a Jewish concentration camp inmate who impersonates Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, was supposed to show that it could be done successfully. Its creators tinkered anxiously with the script, finally producing a show that was widely deemed inoffensive, historically inaccurate, and not even slightly funny. “A comedy doesn’t have to be historically accurate,” sniffed the Hamburg daily Die Welt, “but it must at least be humorous.”
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