IN THE NEW CULTURAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT in Germany after 1933, the reuse of existing humorous stereotypes instigated not only laughter with but also laughter at and ultimately ostracism of Jews. Yet explicitly anti-Semitic film comedies such as Robert und Bertram (Hans Zerlett, 1939) were rare in the Third Reich. Instead, racial and racist codes adapted from anti-Semitic discourses of the Weimar Republic and earlier periods reverberate in film comedy in more subtle ways. Situating film comedies within their original cultural and discursive contexts can reveal anti-Semitic intertexts that are largely invisible to twenty-first-century spectators. Doing so complicates scholarly understanding of film comedy's relationship to the era's anti-Semitism and sheds light on the role of seemingly innocuous film humor in building the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft (racial community).

This essay interprets April! April! (April Fools!), a representative mistaken-identity comedy from 1935, in light of anti-Semitic tropes unfamiliar to most viewers today. Specifically, the film's anticapitalism dovetails with anti-Semitic currents in German culture of the early 1930s via the figure of the “white Jew.” The term “white Jew” was a common insult in the Third Reich used to criticize non-Jews perceived as corrupted by and behaving like “Jews.” By ridiculing figures that fit this paradigm, April! April! discourages behaviors construed by the era's anti-Semites as “Jewish” and thereby indirectly supports a national identity and community free of perceived “Jewish” influence.

The director of April! April!, Detlef Sierck, emigrated to Hollywood in 1937 and became Douglas Sirk. Since the 1970s and the rise of auteurist film criticism, scholars have lauded the stylistic excess and ambiguity of Sirk's melodramas. Although Sirk's reputation makes April! April! more noteworthy from a film-historical perspective than other run-ofthe-mill German comedies made in 1935, the following analysis resists the temptation to use Sirk's later oeuvre as an analytical lens. April! April! was not a project controlled by an artistically independent, mature director with a recognizable stylistic signature and social agenda. Instead, it is the first feature film by one of many fledgling directors who rose to fill the vacuum created by the Nazi expulsion of Jews from the German film industry.