DOK Leipzig Review: The Masturbator offers a cheeky crash-course in the life and works of Edgar Hilsenrath

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 of his works, and infuses it all with a clever humorous bent of which the late author would likely be fond. Indeed, the film is a loose adaptation of some of his works, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. Hilsenrath is shown as a man who wears many hats, or who can, popping into different personas. Part of this is the burden of being a survivor, particularly a survivor who is also a writer. While he's one man, he's also six million people, and his scream is their collective scream. He is tasked with carrying a collective Jewish history that the Nazis were desperate to erase.

The film is largely made up of historical and stock footage, including some interviews with Hilsenrath himself. Between and sometimes on top of this footage, we meet a cast of animated characters, including Hilsenrath and his brother alongside lots of more fantastical and imaginary characters. We see a trio of animated Nazis at one point juxtaposed over actual historical footage of Nazis. One of the animated characters has a smart phone and can't stop snapping selfies. Later, we see a parade of animated fish donning swastikas, marching brainlessly in a line. They represent the groupthink-abiding citizenry falling in line with Hitler and helping him execute his agenda.

The animation is very simplistic, fairly crude. When Hilsenrath hires a prostitute in New York, she has a huge puff of pubic hair, and massive cockroaches crawl around the room. The somewhat rudimentary style feels like a good match for the film's tone, the marriage of horrifying historical fact with the winking satirical approach Hilsenrath rook to said facts. He isn't numb to the horrors, or dismissive. He knows that there's power in humor. Using humor to process the Holocaust has even been the subject of a whole other documentary, the very enjoyable The Last Laugh.

Hilsenrath certainly seems to have gotten the last laugh in his own life, despite the hardships along the way. From surviving in the ghetto, to a brief stint living in Palestine ahead of the creation of Israel, to slumming in various odd jobs in New York, his life was never easy. He felt a burden to tell his stories, but also a fear about getting them right. And then there's the whole matter of getting approval to tell these stories in these ways. Even after managing to get published in the US, Hilsenrath still struggled to get published in his native Germany. The country was, as a whole, a monument to the Holocaust, and his approach to his storytelling felt like it went against that grain, that national framework. The powers-that-be in the publishing world didn't understand how they shared the same goal.

One of the opening scenes of The Masturbator shows Hilsenrath being asked by an interviewer if he is a German writer or a Jewish writer, which Hilsenrath dismisses as a stupid question. In those early moments, having never heard of him myself, I though "Oh, he wants to just be identified as one or the other. I can't wait to find out which." But no, it's a dumb question because he is both. He is German. He is Jewish. He's a German Jewish writer, one who loves his homeland, his mother tongue, despite the lack of reciprocity.

While The Masturbator may not be as wide-ranging as you might want a biographical documentary to be, it serves as a solid primer on Hilsenrath's life and work, and made me interested in reading his work myself. And in its approach, it's creative, clever, and witty, which is always appreciated.