Two years after Charlie Chaplin’s very successful satire The Great Dictator (first German showing 1958), the famous director Ernst Lubitsch filmed his intelligent comedy To Be Or Not To Be in 1942 (first German showing 1960). The film, which is nowadays considered a classic, was initially greeted with almost universal criticism. Most prominently, the emigrant community was accused of trivializing the events in Europe.

The plot takes place in 1939. A Warsaw theater group is rehearsing an anti-Hitler piece as German soldiers march into the city. That piece is quickly dropped and replaced with Hamlet. Whenever the famous “to be or not be” monologue is performed on stage, the wife of the actor playing Hamlet receives a male visitor in her dressing room. Her admirer, an air force lieutenant, exposes a supposed Polish professor to be a German spy. To prevent resistance fighters’ names being reported to the Gestapo, the actors assume the roles of the Germans. A game of confusion and mistaken identity ensues which garners laughter, but also evokes horror in the face of the constant and palpable sense of mortal danger facing the actors.     

For Felix Bressart, who was reluctant to appear in an anti-Nazi film during contract negotiations with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, his role as the Jewish Polish actor Greenberg became a kind of double success. In the pivotal scene, playing before a Nazi audience, Greenberg was able to finally deliver Shylock’s famous lines, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?...”