The ‘Fawlty Towers’ episode skewering Nazis deserves to be preserved
Actor Stephen Hall plays Basil Fawlty in a stage adaptation of the “Fawlty Towers” episode “The Germans.” Image by Getty/James D. Morgan/Contributor
By PJ Grisar June 15, 2020
John Cleese can now boast that his little sitcom about a seaside hotel is a cultural lightning rod on the level of “Gone with the Wind.”
Late last week, the BBC-owned streaming service UKTV removed a 1975 episode of “Fawlty Towers” for racial slurs, including the N-word and the British epithet “wog.” Cleese, the show’s co-creator with Connie Booth, objected on Twitter, calling the BBC “cowardly”and claiming they missed the true point of using the words — to mock those who have them in their vocabulary. The BBC took the hint over the weekend, announcing it was reinstating the episode with disclaimers, mirroring HBO Max’s recent treatment of “Gone with the Wind.” But the episode in question is not really about racism — though there are grace notes of characters’ racist attitudes throughout.
Titled “The Germans,” the episode builds to a goose-stepping denouement of manners breaking down as German guests are forced to confront an ugly reminder of their recent past (by way of a concussed hotel owner). The half-hour farce is about voicing views that shouldn’t be expressed, but sometimes have to be.
First, some set up. In the show, which ran in 1975 and 1979, Cleese plays Basil Fawlty, a prodigiously rude inn keeper inspired by an actual hotelier from Torquay, England. In this particular episode — regarded by many as the series’ best — Basil is left alone to mind the hotel as his wife, Sybil, has an ingrown toenail removed. The scene flagged by the BBC involves the character of Major Gowen (Ballard Berkeley) discussing a cricket match in which his female companion referred to the Indian players as “n—rs.” In the same conversation, the Major, a dotard and permanent resident of the hotel, communicates his dislike for Germans, some of whom are coming to stay at Fawlty Towers.
Clearly we’re meant to accept the major’s worldview as antiquated and foolish, one that deserves derision and fun-poking. But Basil, a Brit who remembers the blitz, has no small amount of animus toward the Germans. Nonetheless he insists that when the Germans arrive, he will not mention the war.
Of course he does. After returning home from the hospital with a bandage around his head (following some earlier slapstick), he seats his guests from Deutschland at a table and subjects them to a barrage of Freudian slips re: the Reich, repeating their order of prawns back as “Eva Prawn” and pickled Herring as “Hermann Goering” until one young woman is reduced to tears.
Cleese has mocked the Nazis before — even in a similar setting — and seems to have no compunction about making the German people uncomfortable with their sordid past. Knowing that the German-born Andrew Sachs — who plays the hotel’s Spanish waiter Manuel — came to England in 1938 to flee the Nazis adds yet another layer of justice to Cleese’s high-stepping parody of the Führer.
It should be noted that Fawlty’s guests don’t appear to have been members of the Nazi high brass, but that’s the point. The implication is that the myth of the “Good German” is just that — a myth, and that there was societal complicity in Nazi crimes that forfeited a certain generation’s right to comfort and social nicety. If you’re a German visiting England in the 1970s, don’t expect that all will be forgiven. Basil’s refrain of “don’t mention the war” is disingenuous and cognitively dissonant. The war is a fact that shouldn’t be swept under the rug, but rather acknowledged — though maybe not quite as clownishly as how Basil does.
For all of Basil’s gaffes, here, in a concussed state, he struck at a flaw in the social contract: That we are too often polite at the expense of confronting a historical wrong, be it systemic racism, colonialism or genocide.
“You’d think it might be the Germans who would be offended by the episode, when in fact they love it,” Cleese tweeted recently. Having acknowledged the disgrace of that past, all Germans with a conscience consider it fair game.
Correction June 17, 2020: A previous version of this article misstated that Fawlty Towers was a country inn. It is in fact a seaside hotel.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected].
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