Tantrums, spoiled meatloaf, and family silver stuffed in underwear: the delicate art of Holocaust comedy | books

MThe beloved German-Jewish grandmother Gisela was not a friendly person. She enjoyed laughing at her own jokes, enjoying other people’s misfortunes, and telling people off. If the event combines opportunities for all three activities, so much the better.

When my father was six years old, he refused to eat the meatloaf his mother served him for lunch. Gisela took a piece of meatloaf, now spoiling quickly in the Zimbabwean afternoon heat, and served it to him for dinner, breakfast, and every subsequent meal until he forced himself to eat it. It was the late 1950s, when authoritarian parenting was de rigueur, and an uneaten meatloaf was the hill on which Gisela was willing to die.

30 years later, at the age of six, I examine the horror movie plaque on my grandmother’s dinner table in Freiburg: the tart pink plate of… FlashcaseAnd the white sausage quivering in a bowl of what appears to be lukewarm dishwater, the cold, slimy herring in pickle juice, and the piece of black rye bread that takes 20 minutes to spread and three days to digest. “I don’t want to eat anything at this table,” she announced to the room, and immediately retreated to the floor and crawled between the legs of the table to wait for this so-called dinner to be over.

My father exchanged a pained look and shrugged in resignation. Gisela is apoplectic, directing her anger at my father for being weak and indulgent, but ultimately powerless to exert her will over the next generation. She takes revenge over the next two decades: every time we’re in company, she tells this story in detail, my refusal of food becoming more brutal and her reaction more holier with each telling, as she works her way to the end. “Then I sat under the table for the entire meal… like a dog!”

As I spent the last few years researching and charting Gisela’s life story for my graphic memoir The Crystal Vase, I found these memories of gleeful humiliation tactics and self-aggrandizing tales creeping into the gaps between the heavy truths of Holocaust history. Each generation relates to their family history differently, and as the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, I found that I had a certain critical distance from that lived experience that my father did not have.

In recent years, telling serious Jewish history through family comedy has become the dominant approach for third-generation survivors. Real Pain director Jesse Eisenberg summed it up this way in a recent interview: “The first generation builds the house. The second generation lives in the house. The third generation burns it down.” “The film can simultaneously have a great reverence for history while also creating an irreverent and sometimes transgressive tone, because that is the full and honest way I experience history,” he explained.

Nowhere is this tension more evident than in the scene in which the impulsive Benjy (Kieran Culkin) convinces the rest of his Holocaust tour group to pose for pictures as Polish guerrillas next to the Warsaw Heroes Statue monument. His uptight cousin David (Eisenberg) protests: “Doesn’t that sound disrespectful?” He is forced to be their official photographer, juggling everyone’s phones as they merrily reenact the heroic moments of the Warsaw Uprising, with imaginary weapons blazing. David’s discomfort is played for laughs, while Benjy’s sensitivity to the tour guide’s repetition of dry facts is evident in this subversive desire to feel history physically, to welcome pleasure and let it sit with the pain.

In the treasure trove of tragicomedy “Grief Tourism,” Ruth (Lena Dunham) travels to Poland with her Auschwitz survivor father, Edek (Stephen Fry), to find out where his family used to live. Their angry bickering undermines many of the film’s more serious moments. When Ruth finally manages to buy back her murdered grandmother’s tea set from the Poles who seized Edek’s apartment in 1940 after the family’s deportation, Edek is unmoved. “You have no idea how important this is to me, Dad,” she told him. “Before this we had nothing, nothing from your past.” “Now,” he said deadpan, “you have a teapot.”

Elsewhere, writer Joe Dunthorne goes on a research trip to Munich with his mother in 2025’s Radium Children, a wry family memoir about his German Jewish great-grandfather, a scientist who developed chemical weapons for the Nazis. Dunthorne and his mother (whom he describes as a Birkenstock-wearing “cut bastard”) stay in the same rooms of the apartment where his great-grandfather spent his wedding night. “I don’t think we got much out of this overwhelming search, eating bowls of overcooked spatz while trying not to picture newlyweds eating it in the corner.”

As the last generation to grow up around Holocaust survivors and hear their accounts firsthand, it is not surprising that we are now motivated to record our ancestors’ stories for future generations, and to reflect on how they have affected us. But why do we choose humor as our medium? Maybe this is just the default viewing style for our generation, preoccupied with maintaining a sarcastic distance from difficult topics. Are we so fragile that we need to use humor as a buffer, to make even the bleakest history comforting and palatable?

The bare facts of my grandmother’s story certainly don’t sound like comedy. Gisela fled Nazi Germany in 1939 when she was eighteen years old. Her family home in Bad Homburg was destroyed on Kristallnacht, and her father was beaten, arrested, and taken to Buchenwald. He did not survive the war. Several other family members were trapped in Germany and eventually killed in the camps of Sobibor, Mauthausen, and Theresienstadt.

But Gisela went to Amsterdam – where several of her Frankfurt cousins ​​were already living in exile, including her second cousins, Margot and Anne Frank – before sailing to South Africa. She took a train north, ending up in the first place that would take her: Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. Her passport was confiscated when the war broke out, so she was stuck there. Thus began Gisela’s new life in colonial Africa. She married German Jewish immigrant Hans Goldschmidt, with whom she had three children.

They remained in Bulawayo for almost four decades, until the political situation in Zimbabwe in the 1970s forced them to flee again. My grandparents returned to Germany in 1976 and settled in Freiburg, chosen for its strategic location near the border of two other countries: even after retirement, these lifelong refugees kept their options open.

After their deaths, our family had to decide how to divide the remaining valuables rescued from the Nazis. My initial intention was to write a venerable book honoring my grandmother, who was lively, personable, and a great speaker (I’ve always been interested in stories about how wonderful she was).

But in the wake of her funeral, my family’s eccentricities came violently to the surface and irrevocably colored my experience. I took a perilous road trip across Europe with my parents to clear out Gisela’s apartment and distribute her belongings to the rest of the family. My aunt considered four-course lunches a higher priority than packing, and my uncle smuggled the family silver across the border in his underwear. I brought Gisela’s collection of moth-infested Persian rugs into my insect-phobic sister’s house, and I’ve never forgiven her. Family secrets were revealed, everyone fought over the inheritance, and we all fell. In the end, an approach that embraced humor alongside tragedy seemed like the only way to tell this story.

Shedding light on one of the darkest atrocities of the twentieth century is a risky business. Even Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning film “Maus” was initially met with condemnation in Israel due to the perception of the comics as vulgar, ridiculous and inappropriate. Spiegelman’s frustrations with his Auschwitz survivor father are evident throughout Maus, as he details their complicated relationship.

Because I was a generation apart, my relationship with Gisela was different — I was both amused and horrified at a safe distance. The centuries-old tradition of self-deprecating Jewish humor was wiped out from German culture in the Holocaust, and this new wave of Jewish diaspora stories embraces it. Humor and gravitas can coexist when examining tragic events, and I found both helpful when dealing with the mixed bags passed down by survivors. Humor is not a barrier here, but a doorway: it allows access to the narrative. The Third Generation takes ownership of our family history, draws our own conclusions, and makes room for humor about human foibles, even in our darkest stories.

As for me, I am waiting for the memoir in which everything will be revealed to my son, whom we are raising as a vegetarian, and in which he complains bitterly that his mother never fed him meatloaf.