The Trouble with Dancing Hitler

Here's some excerpts of the most complete English article I've found about the trouble Rio de Janeiro's Viradouro Samba School got into for planning to include a Holocaust themed float among the dozen or so that made up their 2008 Carnival parade.

Dancing Hitler for Carnival Shocks Over-The-Top Rio

By Adriana Brasileiro
Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Even Rio de Janeiro has its limits.
The city, whose annual Carnival celebrations regularly include half-naked women and over-the-top parties, banned a samba group from entering a holocaust-inspired float in the championship this year. The float, with a pile of atrophied concentration-camp victims at its base, was to be accompanied by a dancer dressed as Adolf Hitler.
"The idea of a dancing Hitler on top of dead Jews is outrageous," said Jose Roitberg, a spokesman for Rio de Janeiro's Israelite Federation, which represents Jewish interests and sued to have the float thrown out.

At this point, if you haven't, hop on over to the Viradouro site and pay attention to the flash animation on the home page, which uses a bit-o-montage to explain the theme.

The holocaust float was part of samba group Viradouro's "It Gives You Goose Bumps" show, which portrayed events, movies and characters that make people shiver.
"It's about all the wonderful and terrible things that make your hair stand on end," said Lucia dos Santos, who was in charge of Viradouro dancers dressing as the monsters from the movie "Alien."

Some of the other goose-bump-giving things in the parade: a Kama Sutra-themed float with gold-painted dancers of unclear attire enacting various, um, poses; a ski/snowboard ramp with ski/snowboarders; hundreds of dancing beheaded gentlemen with guillotines strapped to their backs; then a whole garbage-themed float with people in cockroach-costumes swarming around it; and a whole bunch of giant marching bugs--tarantulas and flies, I think. Then the creatures from Alien, some Japanese Geisha-types who for some reason have multiple arms. And (after the Kama Sutra float) courtly ladies with their arms bound to stakes above their heads. I'm getting the order wrong; watching all the videos mixes things up (plus they seem to be cutting between the parade proper and the folks lining up for it).





There was also a huge newborn-baby float featuring, of course, a huge newborn-baby, held up unwashed by its ankles, taking its first breaths. Presumably this was part of the positive things that give you goosebumps, but the rear part of the float had these towers constructed of smaller newborns, such that I couldn't quite decide whether they were supposed to be dead? alive? babies on a stick? Well, clearly the loss of the Holocaust float didn't hurt them in terms of variety or mind-boggling surreality. If they weren't all singing that same catchy song over and over I'd think I was seeing highlights for different Samba groups in different years on different planets, rather than part of a single, coherent theme. OK back to our reporter:

Viradouro lost in court Jan. 31, as Judge Juliana Kalichszteim of the Tribunal of Justice of Rio de Janeiro cited a federal law against Nazi propaganda and racism.

The judge warned that if the school included the float in its parade today, it would be fined 200,000 reais plus 50,000 reais for each dancer dressed as Hitler.

Viradouro didn't accept the court decision without protest. In place of the banned display, the school paraded a float carrying protesters dressed in white tunics with gags over their mouths and a sign that said "The future cannot be built by burying history." A dancer dressed as Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, the hero of Brazil's independence known as "Tiradentes," who was hanged in 1792, watched from above with a noose around his neck.

"The restriction to freedom of expression creates a fertile territory for the proliferation of violence, disrespect, brutality and extermination," Viradouro said in a statement on its Web site. "Neither the executioners nor the victims of the tragic history of humanity have the right to hide the facts and dim our memory."

Unlike Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" and "The Producers," two successful films that took a humorous look at Hitler, Viradouro's float probably failed because it wasn't obviously a satire and may have caught viewers by surprise, said Arnold Aronson, a professor at the theater division at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

"No one was forced to watch the Chaplin film or "The Producers"," which was "presented as ridiculous farce in which Hitler and Nazis were depicted as buffoons," Aronson said in an e-mailed response to questions from Bloomberg News. "A parade float forces itself on everyone who views the parade, and Carnival has a huge and diverse audience."

I don't know about the "Forces Itself on Everyone" argument. There's plenty else that forces itself on the viewer too. Rather, I think the best tactic would be to affirm (at least a little) the performers' desire to play with conventions and distinctions. If they'd done a float focusing on the horrors of Brazilian slavery, for instance, they could have pulled it off with uncomfortable joy, an dancing-on-the-graves sense of things. But this is too much someone else's (many other people's) story for that to work.

That said, if the Nazi float had run, it would have been the worst of the lot, but in the context of a great parade of oddness and creepiness and combined celebration of life and death, the effect would have been diluted. Then again, maybe the dilution, too, would be part of the problem. Though I wonder if all the publicity, and the School's "principled" anti-censorship response really just made the outcome even worse, and less helpful, educative, or edifying all around.