Discussion Film / DrStrangelove

IIRC Turgidson pointed out that "Strangelove" doesn't sound German — he was not commenting on his original surname.

I don't really recall any in-universe hint at Dr.Strangelove's possible Jewish origin, he's not displaying any stereotypically "Jewish" traits and he seems to be modelled as a rather generic parody of the Herr Doktor archetype and attempt to call him Ambiguously Jewish doesn't seem to be supported by the film.

(And according to Peter Sellers, Strangelove was modelled after Wernher von Braun, who was not Jewish.)

As noted, the Wikipedia article lists as inspirations for Strangelove the scientists and strategists Edward Teller, John von Neumann, Wernher von Braun and Hermann Kahn. Of these four, three were Jewish. If we want to be pedantic, Strangelove's role in the film is also closest to that of Kahn. Wernher von Braun was a rocket scientist; he had nothing directly to do with nuclear weapons or strategy.

The same article also says that the character's distinctive accent (which is not just typical "Hollywood German") was based on that of one of Kubrick's Jewish co-workers.

The name Merkwürdigliebe sounds very odd if read as an ethnic German name, but follows the pattern for Austrian-Jewish surnames. In earlier times, the authorities basically forced Jews in Austria to take up surnames, and sometimes they chose deliberately insulting or weird ones for them as a sort of harassment. (One extreme example is a family that was saddled with the name Nachtschweiss—"Night Sweat". A nicer, but still sort of silly one would be Zuckertort—"Sugar Cakes", the name of one of the Jewish generals in the Nazi Wehrmacht discussed in the book I linked to in my first post.) For a brief reference (the first thing in English I can find on a quick search), see this thread at Quora: https://www.quora.com/Were-Jews-given-antisemitic-family-names-in-the-past?share=1

So: Strangelove has a Jewish(-sounding) name, speaks with a distinct "Jewish" accent, and is a No Celebrities Were Harmed Composite Character version of people who were (mostly) Jewish in real life. I think this is enough to qualify as Ambiguously Jewish. I agree that none of this is unequivocal "proof" that the character is Jewish In-Universe, of course, but that's what the "Ambiguously" portion of the trope is all about.

It still sounds like just a one-person WMG...

The Wikipedia article lists influences and inspirations for the character, but these influences are related to their respektive scientific fields only, and completely unrelated to their Jewishness.

(You've also failed to notice or mention that three of the four mentioned scientists were either immigrants or wartime refugees, and only von Braun worked for Nazis during the war, as Dr.Strangelove did.)

The same with the accent - at least I got Strangelove's accent as "odd-sounding Central European Germanic", not specifically "Jewish", whatever that could mean.

Surname "Merkwürdigliebe" perhaps sounds funny, strange and non-standard German, but jumping to conclusion that it's therefore a Jewish-sounding one seem to be a bit of stretching it. (Central Europe is kind of funny in this regard - lots of people with surnames unrelated to their family traceable ethnic history etc.)

I still can not see anything which would in-universe clue to Strangelove's possible Jewishness, and I believe that the Rule Of Cautious Editing Judegement should be carefully followed here, due to the Unfortunate Implications involved.

Agreed, within the text of the work there's nothing to indicate jewishness, ambiguous or otherwise.

A "Jewish" accent (at least the way I used the term here) means influenced by Yiddish, the traditional language of the Eastern European Jews. Since this language combines features of Germanic and Semitic languages, it can sometimes sound like German to English speakers. However, to native speakers they are quite distinct. There are also different dialects of Yiddish itself, which can sound fairly dissimilar, although going into this is probably excessive pedantry in the present context. Similarly, a German watching Doctor Strangelove might fail to notice that (for example) Major Kong speaks with a regional American accent, whereas this will be obvious to most American viewers.

As for Strangelove specifically, his accent is distinct from the standard "Hollywood German" typically spoken by Nazi characters. If you compare with people like the Red Skull in the Captain America movie or Colonel Vogel in Indiana Jones, you'll perhaps notice that, for example, they tend to speak with longer, cleaner-sounding vowels and sharper fricatives and rhotics (which is more broadly speaking the main reason why German accents are often said to sound "harsh" in English) as well as a generally somewhat different prosody. Of course, all of these accents are affectations in the first place, spoken by actors who have English as their first language, so none will sound completely consistent (or convincing to native speakers), but it's still noticeable that they use different models for the way they try to sound.

What would be the Unfortunate Implications of the character Strangelove being Jewish? Surely that doesn't imply anything negative about Jews as a group, any more than the character being a Christian German like Wernher von Braun would imply anything about Germans or Christians as a group.

Generally speaking, it seems like your standards of "proof" for being Ambiguously Jewish are much higher than those the trope page uses. Looking over there, we have, for instance, the following characters listed as examples:

• Peter Parker/Spider-Man: Has an Anglo-Saxon-sounding name, a Christian family, and no obvious Jewish characteristics otherwise. Listed because his nerdiness and guilt over inadvertently causing his uncle's death are supposedly Jewish characteristics.

• Irene Adler (in Sherlock Holmes): Has a surname that could be taken as either German or Jewish, and may have been inspired by real-life Jewish people. Otherwise, nothing specifically Jewish about her.

• Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters): Played by a Jewish actor, and has a German name, which is said to sound Jewish. (To me, it doesn't really, but perhaps to some people.) Nothing in the films directly suggests that he is Jewish.

• Fox Mulder (The X-Files): Played by a Jewish actor, and the character (a conspiracy theorist and amateur scholar of occult lore) knows a little bit of Hebrew. Otherwise, his family is depicted as at least culturally Christian, has a Dutch-derived name, and there are no obvious indicators of his Jewishness.

• Professor Layton: A British Gentleman Detective with no apparent Jewish characteristics, except that his first name Herschel is somewhat Jewish-sounding (although actually German in origin).

To repeat, according to the trope description, Ambiguously Jewish does not mean that a character is necessarily or obviously Jewish, only that there are hints that he or she might be. Given the evidence adduced so far, certainly Doctor Merkwürdigliebe-Strangelove is at least as Ambiguously Jewish as any of these.

I believe I was the one who originally pulled the entry. I agree with Larkman and isolato that there's nothing at all in the work itself that suggests that the character might be Jewish.

And as isolato pointed out, the character's Nazi background seems based on von Braun and other Nazi scientists brought to American to work on their science programs through Operation Paperclip. None of them were Jewish.

I agree that, at best, this is a WMG.

The "Ambiguously X" tropes tend to get misused for "well, it's not explicitly ruled out so I'm going to include it" but that is still misused. An Ambiguously Jewish character should be coded as Jewish, but not confirmed. Dr. Strangelove is not coded as Jewish. There's literally nothing in the text of the work to indicate he's Jewish.

He has some traits that if you squint and do a little bit of mental gymnastics don't disqualify him as Jewish but that's... a stretch.

@ Idumean Patriot

Strangelove's accent is also not a standard Hollywood Yiddish-influenced English - he's just speaking with a ambiguously foreign accent, but not one that can be pinpointed as a Jewish one.

Perhaps there are some hints that Dr.Merkwürdigliebe might not be German by birth, but I still see no hint he might be specifically Jewish.

Since there appear to be some disagreements on what the evidence actually is, it may be time to lay it out in detail. This necessitates extended discussion, so apologies in advance for the volume of this post.

According to the trope page, as of the current date, the specific characteristics indicating that a character is Ambiguously Jewish are the following, quoting verbatim:

• "possibly played by an actor who is Jewish in real life"

• "having Yiddish as a Second Language is a clue but is not conclusive"

• "a 'Jewish' name ending in -berg, -stein or the like is also evidence but not proof. These names are actually just German names that many Ashkenazi Jews took when required to adopt some type of surname (that said, some of those surnames were German words not used as surnames before, and as such denote Jewish ancestry [emphasis added])"

• "being a Brainy Brunette"

• "a love for books and the written word in general"

• "a sarcastic wit often accompanied by self-irony"

(There is also a seventh, purely historical criterion: in earlier, more anti-Semitic times, Ambiguously Jewish characters could be depicted as "greedy and cunning" as a clue, much like the stereotype of confirmed Jews. However, Dr. Strangelove was made well after anti-Semitism became politically incorrect, so this factor is not relevant for our purposes.)

The page furthermore specifically notes that the presence of contrary evidence does not necessarily rule out a character being Ambiguously Jewish:

"In some cases, the show might present contradictory evidence on both sides."

In the case of the Doctor Strangelove character, the most important contradictory evidence is obviously his strongly implied former Nazi associations. However, as I have noted, there were in fact many quite high-ranking Jewish Nazis, or at least Jewish people employed by the Nazi government, in real life, weird as that will sound to us today. It is not impossible, or even improbable, that a younger Strangelove could have worked for the Nazi government twenty-some years before the film takes place (presumably then in some more minor capacity than the Director of Research office he currently holds with the US federal government).

For more information on these matters as pertaining to real life, I again recommend the book, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers by Dr. Bryan Mark Rigg, that I linked to in my first post. It's a very interesting read, quite independent of the context of this present discussion.

As for the positive evidence, checking each of the quoted indicators on our list in turn:

• Strangelove is in fact played by a Jewish actor, Peter Sellers. In my own opinion, this point is not necessarily of great importance here, since Sellers also plays other characters in the film that are not implied to be Jewish in any obvious way (the President, Colonel Mandrake). I nonetheless list it because it is used as a criterion by the trope definition.

• Although he does not use Yiddish words, according to Wikipedia, his distinctive accent was based on that of a Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian Jew (the photographer Arthur Fellig, born Ascher, known professionally as Weegee). It seems, then, that it is intended to give the impression of a Yiddish influence (albeit, as Isolato correctly points out, not the stereotyped "New York" accent commonly used by Hollywood — clearly, Strangelove is intended to be thought of as foreign, which is also reinforced by the film's explicit clue that he immigrated from Germany and changed his name upon becoming a naturalized American citizen). The director Stanley Kubrick, who was friends with Weegee and grew up among Yiddish-speaking Jews himself, would presumably have been aware of such nuances, although of course, we can't be completely certain.

• Strangelove's original name as given (Merkwürdigliebe) sounds much more Jewish than a typical -berg name—again, something that Kubrick would presumably have been aware of. As the trope page alludes to, -berg names are somewhat common among ethnic Germans; for a famous example, one of the top Nazis was named Alfred Rosenberg (and he was not one of the Jewish Nazis discussed by Dr. Rigg). A name like Merkwürdigliebe is not, but a perfect example of what the trope page lists as "or the like", a combination of German words of a type not ordinarily used as a surname by ethnic Germans, but more commonly by German- or Yiddish-speaking Jews. In fact, in the German dub, the name is even changed, possibly to avoid causing offense (postwar Germany is, as you may know, extremely sensitive about anything in the media that could possibly be interpreted as anti-Semitism, such as Jewish characters portrayed as unsympathetic). In German, it's rewritten as "Dr. Seltsam" instead. It is the only name in the film that the German version changes.

• Strangelove is obviously intelligent, although he is depicted with fairly light hair. To play the Devil's advocate, it could be argued that he is wearing a wig (as can clearly be seen in close-up shots), in which case the wig tells us nothing about his hair color. Kubrick is a subtle enough director that such an interpretation is possible, although since the film does not appear to draw attention to this, the same could also (and more probably, in my own view) be chalked up to a simple special effects failure. In any case, clearly positive evidence for brunetism on the character's part is lacking.

• Love of books is not particularly demonstrated on his part, as far as I can recall. Nor is it counter-indicated. I suppose it could conceivably be argued that he is (IIRC) the only character at the meeting who cites written works (the BLAND Corporation study) to back up his arguments, but this seems far too vague and tenuous to allow us to rest any major narrative analysis on this point. The film, then, leaves us with an agnostic impression on the matter.

• He certainly does show a diabolical sarcastic wit, as demonstrated perhaps most impressively in the great climactic war room scene.

Thus, out of the six criteria for being Ambiguously Jewish given in the trope definition, Strangelove indicates varying degrees of positive for four (points 1, 2, 3, 6), apparently negative on one (point 4), and gives insufficient data to judge either way on one (point 5). This is a preponderance of positive evidence, although not all of this evidence is necessarily to be given equal weight. Outside of this list, there is also the fact that he is a No Celebrities Were Harmed Composite Character of people who were (mostly) Jewish in real life. This would specifically be true of the nuclear strategist Herman Kahn, the closest single real-life approximation (and inspiration) to Strangelove.

(Incidentally, although interestingly, the German Wikipedia adds a further source character for Strangelove in Sidney Gottlieb, a Jewish scientist and CIA director who was involved in the Operation Paperclip project that Captain Crawdad mentions during World War II, and later in charge of the infamous MKULTRA brainwashing program. Unlike both Herman Kahn and Wernher von Braun, but like Strangelove, Gottlieb was physically crippled, suffering from club foot. His name also ends with the same German element as Merkwürdigliebe.)

Given the above, it sounds odd when people keep insisting that there is "literally nothing" to indicate that the character is Ambiguously Jewish. Even if one disagrees with the affirmative conclusion, clearly evidence is present. Indeed, as previously noted, the evidence is stronger than for many characters presently listed on the Ambiguously Jewish page itself as eminent examples of the trope.

I realize from the reactions so far that some people don't personally like to think of the character as possibly Jewish. I have no objections to those personal opinions, of course. I don't think holding such opinions makes you anti-Semitic, if anyone is worried about that. However, the fact that we may or may not feel that way as individuals doesn't mean that the character cannot be an example of the trope, which has the name it does precisely because it describes a phenomenon that is ambiguous—that is, unclear.

To qualify as Ambiguously Jewish, conclusive "proof" of a character's Jewishness is not needed. Tangential hints are enough. And these are surely present in the film. They may or may not be intentional, although as for me personally, it would surprise me if Stanley Kubrick (being a very careful cinematographic artist, and coming from the multilingual background he did) was not aware of these apparent clues that he included. Regardless of the director's intent, however, the evidence itself is still there.

It's 3-1 against. The deletion is going to stand.

Surely you can't mean to say that you feel free to enforce a different definition of a trope on this page than the one written and used on the trope page itself, merely because one or two others appear to agree with you? That would quickly make the wiki rather schizophrenic, if everyone acted that way as and when he or she felt like it.

Or will you also delete the less extensively supported examples on the Ambiguously Jewish page that were previously noted (as well as a great number of others) for insufficient evidence? That page will have to become a lot shorter if we apply your apparent standards of evidence to it.

Misuse elsewhere doesn't mean we want misuse everywhere. It's why we have extensive cleanup threads.

There's literally nothing in the work to code the character as Jewish. In fact, he's coded as a Nazi, which in terms of shorthand is the exact opposite. Your points rely on A: An apparent belief that a character is Ambiguously Jewish unless proven otherwise and B: Complete conjecture regarding author intent to justify some mental gymnastics. You're right that Kubrick is an obsessive filmmaker with a keen eye for detail... but he's also incredibly skilled in the language of film.

Your arguments haven't convinced anyone here, in other words.

The issue at hand is that what you appear to consider "misuse" is at least in many cases what the trope page considers legitimate examples. The trope page is more authoritative on the matter than are you.

Your attempt at a summary of my argument is a caricature, wittingly or otherwise. I base my case mainly on the character having:

• A name that sounds Ashkenazi Jewish, and close to no other real-life ethnicity. Notably, in the German dub of the film, it was changed to a more German-sounding name.

• A foreign accent that was based on English influenced by a dialect of Yiddish.

• The honor of being a No Celebrities Were Harmed Composite Character of a group of real life government scientists who were mostly, although not entirely Jewish.

The third may be a meta-argument depending on contextual knowledge, but the first two at any rate are very clearly present in the work itself. I personally believe that Stanley Kubrick would have been aware of these things. As a very careful movie artist, and one well familiar with the Yiddish language and Ashkenazi culture, I don't think he would have created such a mixture just by accident while trying to portray a purely non-Jewish German character. But nothing in my argument depends on him having done it deliberately. It is enough that Kubrick included these characteristics in his fictional character, whether by design or happenstance, to make him Ambiguously Jewish.

The fact that Strangelove is very strongly implied to be an ex-Nazi does not invalidate this, as already discussed. In fact, if we are to speak meta-fictionally, Strangelove having both ex-Nazi and Jewish traits fits very well with his status as a Composite Character of both the German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun and the Jewish scientists Hermann Kahn, John von Neumann and Edward Teller. In any case, as was also already shown, there is nothing implausible in real life terms about him having such a background.

That you dig in your heels and refuse to acknowledge these characteristics does not mean that they are not present. You don't have to agree with my analysis, but you can't honestly say that there is "literally nothing" to support it.