Writes David Mamet, in "Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch."
I don't think Mamet means to question whether those words appear in the diary (as it was published), just the placement of those words at the conclusion of the play. Here's the full text of the diary, and here's the context of the line that the Hacketts chose to put at the end of their play:
Anyone who claims that the older folks have a more difficult time in the Annex doesn't realize that the problems have a far greater impact on us. We're much too young to deal with these problems, but they keep thrusting themselves on us until, finally, we're forced to think up a solution, though most of the time our solutions crumble when faced with the facts. It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.
It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realize them!
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Haven't gotten to this one yet but I did but the book yesterday and am about 30% through.
Excellent book, enjoying it a lot.
Only complaint is that some of the essays seem too short. He is jests starting to get interesting when he ends it.
Just a few though.
John LGKTQ Henry
Faith, Hope, and Charity.
It's what's for Easter!
"Raped it into"?
What horrible language.
There's powerful vulgarity in Mamet's language (cf: Glenn Gary Glenn Ross) but it often lapses into crudity and stupidity. H&G were trying to make the Diary into a popular play, not a boutique play for fans of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer.
"Here's the full text of the diary"
Not to be too pedantic--but it's the text of a translation. There is also a "critical edition" with three versions. How well did they capture her actual voice and idiomatic Dutch? The googled NYT review just says "smoothly translated."
Of course, Mamet is correct about the preposterous sentimentalism in the way Frank had been presented, but "the text" actually seems a complicated thing.
Mamet, “But the line brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels. Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.”
“People believe what they want to believe.” This line is from the movie “American Hustle” and it perfectly fits the CAGW crowd.
Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.'
Goebbels' prediction on how history will note the Third Reich's goings-on hasn't proven to be accurate.
Joan Rivers did an interview once about what things should never be the fodder for humor. She was serious and not playing the interview for laughs. She said she learned the hard way the holocaust is one of them. She told a joke about Jews and ovens in a standup routine. No one laughed. No one booed. It was met with dead silence. Perhaps, younger people today are distanced enough from it for a sitcom about a Jewish family hiding in an attic for over two years who are then found and killed by the Nazis to not be in poor taste. Maybe they've never seen a number tattooed on someone's arm that isn't from a gang. Or had a friend who was sent away all by himself to a new country because his parents loved him enough to send him away to save his life. Or maybe there is nothing that is in poor taste anymore.
I had to read it in college and was deeply unaffected.
Turning the Diary of Ann Frank into a comedy is a pretty loathsome thing to do. Things like Hogan's Heroes worked because the Nazis were the main objects of the jokes. The victims of the Nazis aren't.
Eleanor at 8:40 am.
Beautifully stated.
Glory be! So Anne Frank wrote her diary in real time, then altered it from memory in her book version only to have her father pick and choose what he thought should be included in the book.
And finally we get the comedic version summarized by the Coasters - using pseudonyms.
I plopped down in my easy chair and turned on Channel Two
A bad gunslinger called Salty Sam was chasin' poor Sweet Sue
He trapped her in the old sawmill and said with an evil laugh
"If you don't give me the deed to your ranch I'll saw y'all in half!"
And then he grabbed her (and then?)
He tied her up (and then?)
He turned on the bandsaw (and then, and then?)
And then along came Jones
Tall, thin Jones
Slow-walkin' Jones
Slow-talkin' Jones
Along came long, lean, lanky Jones
The movie "Life is Beautiful" managed to combine a lot of humor with a story of survival in the Holocaust. Of course some took offense, but I thought it worked for the most part.
well the setting there, was a pow camp, whose prussian martinet was too oblivious to realize an oss network was operating under his nose, of course the references to the eastern front are less humorous when you realize they are referring to the bloodlands of poland and ukraine,
Chris Lopes said...
Turning the Diary of Ann Frank into a comedy is a pretty loathsome thing to do. Things like Hogan's Heroes worked because the Nazis were the main objects of the jokes. The victims of the Nazis aren't.
He's voicing a criticism of the stage play that was written in 1959. Nobody turned Ann Frank's diary into a sitcom. What world do some of you people live in?
Excuse me, Hackett and Goodrich wrote the film. I know the diary has been adapted into a stage play, but I don't know if they did it or not.
I don't really question Mamet's judgment about the play or the last line. Is it possible/permissible to make a comedy about the Nazis? Mel Brooks, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, "The Producers" 1968, and "To Be or Not to Be," 1983; the latter he produced and starred in, but did not write or direct. Of course there is an anti-Hitler show biz message: as long as show business is alive, as tasteless as it is often is, there is still human freedom. A canary in a cave, even though at times you might say: somebody stop that bloody canary from singing.
Ms. Frank's inspiring message about humanity reminds me of the controversy about allegedly fine people at Charlottesville. Can you find at least some fine people in any political movement, even one that does evil things? Or do you say we all have roughly the same potential at birth, but some become evil or monsters for one reason or another, so it is fair to say some political movements are made up of monsters? I don't know if Broadway would ever do a play about the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation. The heros, mostly young, running around the sewers, maybe sharing jokes, sometimes stopping for dialogue or song: even though we are probably all going to die, what we do will be remembered. And it is not the SS who will be remembered for their humanity.
Maybe they've never seen a number tattooed on someone's arm that isn't from a gang. Or had a friend who was sent away all by himself to a new country because his parents loved him enough to send him away to save his life.
I was a little kid, about 7 or 8, when I saw the number tattooed on the arm of a man. I knew immediately what it was. That was about 1946 and the memories were still fresh.
"But the line brings to mind that of Joseph Goebbels..."
I believe Mamet misattributes that quote, not that the who-said-what is all that important to the history of the Holocaust. However, Joseph Goebbels enjoys a specific yet minuscule quantum of plausible deniability in regard to the worst excesses of the National Socialist war against the Jews. Assuming Goebbels had been captured rather than shot dead by his own hand, he certainly would have faced trial at Nuremberg along with other Nazi bigwigs -- Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and especially Julius Streicher.
Streicher was a crude and brutal thug with a measured IQ of 106. He was the publisher and editor-in-chief of Der Stürmer, a similarly crude and brutal antisemitic newspaper dedicated to igniting Jew-hatred among the lowest rungs of German society. (For the benefit of the illiterate, SA Brownshirts read choice Der Stürmer items aloud on street corners.) Goebbels, an authentic intellectual holding a Ph.D. in literary history from the University of Heidelberg, despised Streicher and his foul-mouthed rhetorical style, preferring much more subtle means of inciting animus against the Jews. Nevertheless, as Hitler's minister of propaganda Goebbels was Streicher's nominal boss, and therefore equally responsible for the effects of Der Strümer's incendiary calumnies. Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg and paid upon the gallows. Had he faced the same court, Goebbels would have undoubtedly joined him in death for helping create the social atmosphere in which Himmler and his SS flourished.
For numerous reasons, I do not believe Joesph Goebbels ever made such a comment to the Gestapo. However, there is an authentic and documented address given by Heinrich Himmler to a conference of SS commanders and bureaucrats held in the Polish city of Poznan on 4 October 1943 which contains this excerpt in translation, "I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people... Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And . . . to have seen this through and — with the exception of human weakness — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned." Despite Himmler's "never to be mentioned" admonition his Poznan speech was recorded and is available on Youtube.
"These monsters are basically good at heart, despite what they have done to the Jews.'"
I suppose that's sort of the anti-Christian message that Mamet wants to put forth. Never forgive, and never forget. Just keep hating, year after year after year. 77 years and counting at this point.
And its a rather odd statement, since G&H's play isn't about claiming the Nazis were "good at heart".
Happy Easter.
Thanks to Quaestor, who beat me to the correction.
I've been to the Anne Frank House, but never read the book. As we get farther from the Turd Reich other, fresher, victims crowd the media and remind us that "Never Again" was never more than a PC slogan with an expiration date.
The precise path to publication and adaptation of the DAF are the least interesting parts of the story.
And when did playwrights start worrying about facts, anyway?
Rape or rape-rape? What there a girl-girl involved? The modern model advises that discretion is the better part of progress.
rcocean writes, "I suppose that's sort of the anti-Christian message that Mamet wants to put forth."
Just a darned minute, rcocean... Mamet's word is monsters. The equation, Nazi monsters equal Christians, is your formulation, not Mamet's. Just what sort of unforgiveness are you trying to promote? Or are you just thoughtlessly strewing antisemitic rhetorical landmines?
I first assumed that a couple of hacks named Hackett and Goodrich recently had written and staged a mockery of Diary and the Holocaust. Mamet's entitled to his interpretations, but he seems to be away off on this one. It seems almost as if he hasn't merely swung hard right, but hard into an alternate reality.
Interesting choice of blog posts for Easter. The church doesn't celebrate Easter because it believes that we're basically still good at heart, but because it realizes that we aren't.
people are not good at heart, thats the lesson of the Old and New Testament, hence the holocaust, the hundred million dead that is the blood price of marxism,
I assume she meant "I still believe people are good at heart". I wonder whether that permutation is present in the original, or was inserted by the translator.
I'm a few years younger than Michael K, but not many.
I work with a young woman, late 20s, who is in all ways admirable- smart, reliable, helping, nice, eager to serve others.
She has numbers tattooed on her forearm. I asked her about them. She said it's the latitude and longitude of a girl scout camp that she attended as a child, that is very meaningful to her.
I did not tell her that my first recollection of numbers tattooed on forearms is essentially the same as Michael K's- my grandmother's friend who survived the Holocaust. The youngsters could say that I was triggered, or experienced a hostile environment, from being in that space.
My young colleague no doubt knows about the Holocaust. Likely also knows about Hutus and Tutsis, the Cambodia genocide. Maybe even the Holodomor.
What is important to me, and us, is not what is important to others. That does not make others bad people, necessarily.
"Comedy" doesn't necessarily mean funny. It can just mean not tragic -- or in this case, less than unremittingly bleak and harrowing. In 1950s popular entertainment you weren't going to be the kind of unbearably hellish horror that Mamet would have liked. Getting people to think about the Holocaust at all was hard enough.
Mamet wouldn't be Mamet if he weren't provocative, offensive, and an asshole. If it's not in his contract it's in his nature. He's not going to be a plaster saint for the National Review. He's going to break things, make messes, poop on the floor and expect to be praised for it.
'Addressing the Gestapo, he said, 'History will note that we did these things while still preserving our essential humanity.''
This is what Democrats have been saying about every one of their proposed laws and programs for he past few decades.
Am I equating Democrats to the Gestapo?
Yes. Yes I am.
As I have often mentioned, my mother, a couple years older than Frank, lived through the Nazi conquest and occupation of Holland, it was maybe her privilege of seeing the sky, since she wasn’t Jewish, but every mention of hers of looking at the sky as a child involved watching combat of some kind, so it sounds inauthentic to me to talk about the sky and human goodness for a child from that time and place.
I adhere to the wisdom of all the great religions and serious philosophies:
People Are No Damn Good.
Tattoo that to your inner eyelids, and get on with living.
Hi Tim from Vladivostok. I bet your Mom is proud of your support of the Putin liberation of Ukraine saving all of those would be Anne Frank's from the Nazis.
It wasn't Goebbels who said that, it was Himmler, and not about the Gestapo, it was the SS and the mass murder of the Jews. But I'm just nit picking. Same evil, just different demons speaking.
More brilliant people like you've never seen before. Everyone is talking about them. They are so much smarter than our government people.
The Goebbels children were the five daughters and one son born to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda Goebbels. The children, born between 1932 and 1940, were murdered by their parents in Berlin on 1 May 1945, the day both parents committed suicide.
I impressed the attractive young mother who was our "Operation Anthropoid" tour guide in Prague when I mentioned Goebbels's mistress, the Czech actress Lida Baarova'.
Hitler didn't like cheaters--and with a Czech!--so Goebbels had to break it off. Himmler was more discreet and kept to good Aryan stock.
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