Frühling für Hitler

A few days ago me and a few people (Caitlyn, Kristin, Ryan, Keegan, and Anna) got together to see The Producers at the Admiralspalast, a theater just down the road from IES on Friedrichstraβe.
Now, before we continue, I want you to take a few things into consideration:

-This is The Producers we're talking about. A Mel Brooks musical that opens up it's second act with a dancing, singing number entitled "Springtime for Hitler."
-This is in Germany.
-The Admiralspalast was Hitler's favorite theater. I was sitting about thirty feet away from the Führer's personal box.

So as you can imagine, this was not your normal off-Broadway theater experience. In the United States, of course, the subject of World War 2 is fair game for satire by now, but here there are still living remnants from the time period, and the whole national conception of the war is completely different from our own. I understand that even 60 years on that Germans are still pretty sensitive about the whole subject. So I wasn't quite sure how a musical with tap dancing stormtroopers, gay Hitlers, and women dressed up in Third Reich Eagle costumes was going to go over with an audience like this.

In addition, I had taken a visit to the Holocaust Memorial a few days earlier, and that was just a horrifying experience. You can read about stuff like that in textbooks, but after reading the history of the extermination of a whole race of people, coupled with the personal stories of dozens of Jews/families and letters from people getting shipped off to concentration camps, the reality of the Holocaust hit me a lot harder. For a day or two after that I didn't consider it at all appropriate to be showing something like this in Germany.

But, I went to see it anyway, and I must admit, it was pretty damn funny. It was all translated into German, but having seen the show a couple times before I didn't have any problem following the plot. I'd like to say that I would have been able to watch the translation for the first time without knowing the plot of the show, but there were a few key moments that I couldn't quite pick up for lack of vocabulary or for the actors speaking too fast. The first song was just impossible for me to understand at all, but as the show progressed it got progressively easier to hear the words and sort out the meanings. I'd say by the end I was comprehending 60-70 percent of it. Beforehand I was worried about not being able to understand one of the characters, Ulla, in the show, seeing as she speaks with a really exaggerated Swedish accent, but ironically enough she was the easiest to understand since she spoke the slowest.

We all thought the show was funny, but I don't think all the Germans around us got as big of a kick out of it. It was a Tuesday night, so the crowd wasn't as big as it might have been on a weekend, but all of the slapstick moments that would make a standard American theater audience laugh were observed with an awkwardly somber silence by the Berliners. Maybe it's just a matter of German taste, who knows.