Comedy in a Minor Key

Hans Keilson

2 ideas

1. An ordinary death becomes a catastrophe

   In a regime of persecution, a Jew dying of illness in bed is an ordinary death that the regime tried to deny him. That is the bitter comedy in the title. The same normal event becomes a lethal problem, because a body that officially cannot exist must be made to vanish, and the effort to hide it creates the danger.

2. Hiding binds rescuer and rescued unequally

   Sheltering someone creates a relationship of total dependence. The hidden person feels gratitude, shame and the guilt of endangering his hosts. The hosts feel virtue, resentment and fantasies about the rescue's meaning. Read this way, heroism looks less like a single brave act and more like a strained, intimate arrangement that wears on both sides every day.

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