‘Hogan’s Heroes’ A Hit In Germany Creative Dubbing Helps Nation Lighten Up About Past

Burdened by decades of guilt, Germans are understandably reluctant to mine their past for laughs. So it’s surprising to say the least that each evening at 6:30 the ratings jump by 50 percent on the Munich-based Cable One network, as up to 840,000 Germans tune in to “Hogan’s Heroes,” the American prisoner-of-war sitcom that even some Americans criticized as insensitive to World War II’s horrors when it first aired in the 1960s.

Here, writ large in this comedy of caricatures, are the gray and black uniforms of the Hitler era, the barbed wire and the wooden huts of a prison camp - totems that usually evoke feelings of shame mixed with revulsion in Germans. So what’s the joke?

“It’s very simple,” said Josef Joffe, a newspaper commentator in Munich. The two main German characters of the series - Colonel Klink, the prison commandant, and the beefy guard Sergeant Schultz - “are absolutely non-threatening.”

“They are bumbling fools who do not confront Germans with the classic Hollywood image of the cold, ultra-competent Nazi, the cruel Himmler figure bestriding the world in jackboots,” he said.

That is to say, Germans don’t mind laughing at Germans in Nazi uniforms provided they are clearly, very clearly, shown to be buffoons - as Third Reich Lite rather than the manifestations of 20th-century evil that Germans regularly see in their history books.

This explanation of the show’s appeal is supported by its mixed track record in Germany. When first introduced here in 1992 by another channel, with a title that translates roughly as “Barbed Wire and Clean Heels,” it was aired without attention to certain nuances of presentation. And it was a ratings flop.

Then Cable One hired some creative dubbers to rework it a bit.

It was renamed, somewhat more whimsically, “A Cageful of Heroes.” Klink and Schultz were given broad Swabian and Bavarian dialects, playing on regional stereotypes to underline the notion that they are comic figures - not to be confused with, say, the depraved concentration camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes in the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List.”

Touchy plot lines in the original American episodes, like a German plan to blitz London, were written out and replaced with a German plan to bombard Britain with condoms and thus win the war through birth control - shades of Woody Allen’s comedic dubbing of a Japanese spy thriller in “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?”

And, of course, the show’s stiff-arm salutes could not be accompanied by “Heil Hitler!”

Instead, the new dubbing has German officers barking out, “This is how high the cornflowers grow!” as they raise their arms.

“Normally when you are confronted with German history, you learn about evil and feelings of guilt,” said Bernd Nussbaum, a 26-year-old student. “This is the opposite. It’s sarcastic and ironic and you don’t feel confronted at all. It’s funny.”

The ratings have soared, and Cable One credits the revamping for the turnabout. “Hogan’s Heroes” is first in its time slot among Germany’s newer cable channels, says Cable One, which is available nationally.

In contrast, “Seinfeld,” another American import, was canceled by the channel this month because, as one insider put it, its “slick, East Coast American humor just passed people by.”

Perhaps the most telling message is that it took a foreign-made farce to bypass Germany’s own deep reluctance to be seen as trivializing a monstrous past.

Thus, here as anywhere else, it has become easy enough to laugh at what Aristotle defined as comedy’s quintessential juxtaposition - the bishop and the banana skin, or the world’s greatest evil brought low by a plateful of schnitzel and sauerkraut.