Can Channel 4 sink any lower? The TV channel has purchased a painting by Adolf Hitler so that a studio audience may decide whether to allow comedian Jimmy Carr to destroy it with a flamethrower.
In other words, popular television is trolling the Jewish community, all those around the world who suffered under Nazism and anybody who remains in possession of a moral compass. The fate of one of the world’s most problematic and disturbing artefacts will be determined by a studio audience and a comedian. As a symbol of 2022, it’s pretty good.
Who thought this was a reasonable idea? Step forward Ian Katz, Channel 4’s director of programming. ‘This kind of programming is difficult and expensive,’ he pointed out. ‘And probably not a rational, commercial approach.’
There’s no argument there. He then explained the ‘concept’ of Art Trouble. ‘There are advocates for each piece of art,’ he said. ‘So you’ve got an advocate for Hitler. There’ll be someone arguing not for Hitler, but for the fact that his moral character should not decide whether or not a piece of art exists or not.’
Channel 4 should donate Hitler’s painting to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem
Of course. With Holocaust survivors still living, a Channel 4 comedy gameshow is the perfect platform for debating such complex, weighty and painful moral questions. And there should be an ‘advocate for Hitler’. Obviously.
One wonders whether Katz, when deploying that particularly striking turn of phrase, had people like me, and articles like this one, in mind. Viewing figures won’t increase by themselves, after all.
The fetishisation of Nazism in popular culture has been accelerating in recent years, under the amnesiac effect of time. eBay apologised this week for selling Nazi memorabilia, including postcards celebrating Hitler’s victories across Europe. And John Boyne, author of the unbearably sanitised The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, which reduced the Holocaust to an idealised tweak of the heartstrings, has just brought out another – critically acclaimed – novel, whose title I will refrain from sharing.
As the Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel put it: ‘A little history, a heavy dose of sentimentality and suspense, a dash of theological ruminations about the silence of God, and there it is: let kitsch rule in the land of kitsch.’
What would Wiesel have made of the Channel 4 show, with Katz’s glib remarks about ‘advocates for Hitler’? What would Primo Levi have thought? What about Aharon Applefeld, the survivor and novelist whose mother was killed in the Holocaust? Or the countless numbers of living human beings whose families, in real life, were slaughtered by the Nazis? I doubt Channel 4 considered asking them.
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued that ‘all post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage’ as it produces ‘a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry’. And here we have Channel 4’s response to this profound philosophical challenge: Jimmy Carr, a studio audience and a flamethrower.
What gives a television station the moral right to take ownership of both the Hitler painting itself and the ethics of its disposal? What gives it the moral right to place it so flippantly in the hands of a ‘studio audience’?
As Elie Wiesel wrote:
‘You who have not experienced their anguish, you who do not speak their language, you who do not mourn their dead, think before you offend them, before you betray them. Think before you substitute your memory for theirs.’
Channel 4 should donate Hitler’s painting to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, at which point a serious debate can commence about its fate. And it should pull that idiotic Jimmy Carr programme. There are at least six million reasons why it is not funny.
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