Great Lines, Beautiful Lines

History repeats itself. You have to laugh. Edgar Hilsenrath is known for being "one of the first Holocaust survivors who dared to laugh at the worst," per the opening cards of the cheeky, light-on-its-feet documentary The Masturbator - The Adventures of Edgar Hilsenrath . The writer turned his personal plight, and the fate of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, into a plethora of works that both reflected the horrors of the Holocaust while also incorporating humor, satire, and frank expressions of humanity. From the film's title, you can guess that he didn't shy away from sexuality, and the documentary regularly returns to his interest in and desire for sexual contact with women. He was, according to the film, a boobs guy. As a work of biography, The Masturbator doesn't necessarily go deep, and it probably couldn't go too much deeper, since it's less than an hour long. Rather, this traces the path of Hilsenrath's life, touches on some o...