by Eliane Perret and Renate Dünki
There are texts that were written a long time ago and suddenly become topical again. One of them is the closing speech in Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” (see box):
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that.”
This is how his famous speech begins. It points to what should be written in everyone’s heart as the basis for peaceful, equal coexistence on our planet. Only then can we carry out our tasks with a feeling of solidarity with our fellow human beings.
Of urgent topicality
And who does not know Charlie Chaplin, the great actor, best known for his silent films? For a long time, his entertaining films were an indispensable part of children’s parties and end-of-school celebrations. And many children enjoyed trying to imitate his unmistakable walk with enthusiasm and tenacity.
He later became known for films in which he addressed serious topics: “The Kid”, “Modern Times” and, of course, “The Great Dictator”. It was 1940, in the middle of the Second World War, when this film appeared on movie screens. Anyone today re-reading the final speech from this film will recognise its urgent topicality and perhaps wonder what prompted Charlie Chaplin to make it. In his autobiography, he himself gives interested readers an insight into his eventful life, which is characterised by many unexpected events and at the same time also reflects global political developments.1
‘A cloud of sadness’
Charlie Chaplin’s life began in London, where he was born on 16 April 1889. It was significant for the rest of his life that both his mother and father were well-known singers and actors who had made a name for themselves in the popular theatres of the time. His mother gave him a unburdened introduction to life in the early years of his life. However, this came to an abrupt end when she lost her voice with the slightest cold and could then no longer perform.
Just one year after Charlie was born, his mother separated from his father because he drank too much. This was the beginning of a very poor life affected by great poverty for the small family – Charlie, his mother and his older brother Sydney (although the two children also tried to contribute to the family’s livelihood by working at various jobs). In the end, their mother broke down under the demands of her barely manageable everyday life, and, with interruptions, she lived in psychiatric clinics for many years. Their father soon died as a result of his alcoholism.
A “cloud of sadness” hovered over their childhood, as Chaplin vividly phrased it. However, his mother remained important to him throughout his life. On her deathbed, he remembered her loving support with gratitude: “Even in death her expression looked troubled, as though anticipating further woes to come. How strange that her life should end here, in the environs of Hollywood, with all its absurd values – seven thousand miles from Lambeth, the soil of her heart-break. Then a flood of memories surged in upon me of her life-long struggle, her suffering, her courage and her tragic, wasted life … and I wept. (p. 284).”
Inner resistance –
a driving force in life
There was little room for school education; Chaplin only later acquired a comprehensive education. He left school at the age of 12 because he got his first chance to take part in a stage show and eventually perform as a vaudeville comedian. This initially allowed him to contribute to the family’s livelihood, and when his brother and he were completely on their own, it became part of their way of coping with life. This led him to tour the United States at the age of twenty, where he quickly became very well known. In 1912, at the age of twenty-three, he was offered a film contract in the USA.
To this day, he is known for his unmistakable appearance – as a tramp, as he calls it, an appearance that he acquired on the spur of the moment and kept for the rest of his life: “I had no idea what make-up to put on. (…) However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything a contradiction.” (p. 145)
Over the following years, he unexpectedly made a great fortune as an actor in the emerging silent films and later as a director, composer and producer, soon accompanied and supported by his brother Sydney. It may seem surprising how Charlie Chaplin, a child from a precarious background, was able to follow such a path.2
He was less fortunate in love than in his professional career. It was only in his fourth marriage, to the much younger actress Oona O’Neill in 1943, that he finally found the long-term happiness he had longed for. Eight of Charlie Chaplin’s eleven children came from this marriage.
In a straitjacket of obedience
Born in 1889, the young Chaplin experienced the time before the First World War in the USA. The political upheavals of the time find little space in his biography. Like many others, he initially felt little of the burdens of war in his everyday life. “There were no shortages, nothing was rationed. Garden fêtes and parties for the Red Cross were organised and were an excuse for social gatherings” (p. 215), he writes. By now he enjoyed great popularity among the population. It is therefore not surprising that, when the USA had entered the war in 1917, the US government propaganda department approached him as well as two of his acquaintances and persuaded them to launch a campaign for a third war bond. He went along with this and helped spread the propaganda slogans. Naive? Careless? Who can judge him? Chaplin writes in his life story: “The highlight of our tour was an event on Wall Street in New York in front of the Treasury […] New York was depressing; the ogre of militarism was everywhere. There was no escape from it. America was cast into a matrix of obedience and every thought was secondary to the religion of war. The false buoyancy of military bands along the gloomy canon of Madison Avenue was also depressing as I heard them from the twelfth-storey window of my hotel, crawling along on their way to the Battery to embark overseas.” (p. 216f.) And at the end of the war: “Nevertheless, the Allies had won – whatever that meant. But they were not sure that they had won the peace. One thing was sure, the civilization as we had known it would never be the same – that era had gone.” (p. 224)
War was in the air again
In the years following the First World War, Chaplin produced feature-length films in which he himself appeared as an actor. For example, “The Kid”, a film in which his life story unmistakably came into play, and “Modern Times”, which dealt with the inhumane assembly line system in factories, became well-known. 1940 then saw the premiere of “The Great Dictator”, Chaplin’s first sound film, a satirical parody against fascism, but also against militarism and the American state power associated with it. A new war for the USA was brewing, and Chaplin wrote: “War was in the air again. The Nazis were on the march. How soon we forgot the First World War and its torturous four years of dying. How soon we forgot the appalling human debris: the basket cases – the armless, the legless, the sightless, the jawless, the twisted spastic cripples. Those that were not killed or wounded did not escape, for many were left with deformed minds.” (p. 386)
When in 1937, the emigrated Hungarian director Alexander Korda gave him the idea of making a film about mistaken identity because Hitler had the same small moustache as Chaplin’s “Tramp”, he did not think much of it at first. But then the idea flourished. He wanted to combine comedy and pantomime in a Hitler film. In his life story, he later reflected: “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made "The Great Dictator"; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” (p. 387f.)
A heartfelt appeal
It took Chaplin two years to write the screenplay. When the film was half finished, he was warned that it would hardly ever be shown in England and that in the USA, the censorship of the Production Code Administration (PCA), which was founded in 1934 and to which all new films had to be submitted, would prevent it from being shown. So at first there was no getting past the American censorship authority, but then Chaplin was suddenly urged to complete his film.
Would this still have been possible at the end of 1940? When the USA entered the Second World War – shortly after the premiere of Chaplin’s film (in October 1940) – all studios had the task of supporting the US war effort. With the founding of the United States Office of War Information OWI in June 1942, the PCA was placed under the authority of the new agency. The OWI now issued the necessary licenses, without which no film could be made.
The movie became famous in particular because of its final speech. This begins with the above-mentioned, surprising words spoken by the supposed dictator Hynkel: “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor.” But this is only surprising if you do not know that it is not delivered by the mistakenly captured Hynkel, but by his counterpart, a hairdresser from a Jewish ghetto – an appeal to the world to stand up for democracy, peace and humanity, which pulled at people’s heartstrings.
In the sights of surveillance
But even after this, Chaplin remained in the sights of American surveillance, especially also those of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who was one of his fierce opponents. In particular, Chaplin was accused of making public speeches in support of Stalin’s and Roosevelt’s wish that the USA should support the Soviet Union in its fight against the Nazis through a second front. In one of his speeches, in response to his critics, he stated: “I am not a Communist, I am a human being, and I think I now the reactions of human beings. The Communists are no different from anyone else; whether they lose an arm or a leg, they suffer as all of us do, and die as all of us die. And the Communist mother is the same as any other mother. When she receives the tragic news that her sons will not return, she weeps as other mothers weep. I don’t have to be a Communist to know that, I have only to be a human being to know that.” (p. 403)
In 1947, however, he repeatedly had to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee because, like many others, he was suspected of being a Marxist and a Communist because of his critical statements on American politics.
Un-American activities?
On 17 September 1952, Chaplin and his family left the United States by ship for a visit to England. Despite having lived in the USA for more than twenty years, he had always remained a British citizen. Now he wanted to attend the world premiere of his film “Limelight” and to finally show his family the country of his childhood. On the ship, he received the news that his re-entry permit to the USA, which had already been issued, was revoked. It was the Mc Carthy era, and the FBI and J.E. Hoover suspected him of “un-American activities”. The paragraph used when there was a suspicion of “morals, health or derangement, or advocacy of communism or association with communists or pro-communist organisations” was elastic enough to capture any American citizen who held an unpalatable opinion. Chaplin’s name was also, as it later turned out, on a list of names of journalists, writers and artists suspected of pro-Communist tendencies. In the period that followed, Chaplin experienced an exhausting campaign against his person. “Now I felt I was caught up in a political avalanche.” (p. 411)
This campaign was directed against the screening of his new films and kept him busy with far-fetched court cases.
Dulled by greed for profit, by the
striving for power and for monopolies
He could no longer return to the USA without having to endure the most unpleasant questioning. Being an American citizen, his wife Oona was allowed to return to her home country in order to save at least the most important documents and the contents of her safe. They decided to travel to Switzerland, a neutral country at the time, and Charlie Chaplin spent the rest of his life there with his family. In 1952, he bought a property for his large family in Corsier-sur-Vevey, high above Lake Geneva. Today it has been converted into a museum, where Chaplin’s work is documented in a varied and fascinating way.
He repeatedly reflected on the world situation – as a now convinced opponent of war – in a way that is particularly thought-provoking today, when he writes: “Our living sense has been blunted by profit, power and monopoly. We have permitted these forces to envelop us with an utter disregard of the ominous consequences. Science, without thoughtful direction or sense of responsibility, has delivered up to politicians and the militaire weapons of such destruction that they hold in their hands the destiny of every living thing on this earth.” (p. 460)
Remaining a fellow human being
Despite all the fame and fortune that Charlie Chaplin was able to acquire in the course of his life, he never forgot where he came from and remained shy and reserved, as he described himself. He remained a fellow human being, as Roger Ferdinand, the president of the Societé des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatique in France, noted when Chaplin was made an honorary member: “You are faithful to the memories of your childhood. You have forgotten nothing of its sadness, its bereavements; you have wanted to spare others the harm you suffered, or at least you have wanted to give everybody reason for hope.” (p. 462)
Charlie Chaplin died after a fulfilled life on Christmas Day 1977. •
1 Chaplin, Charles. (2003) My Autobiography. London: Pinguin. (in German Die Geschichte meines Lebens. 2023, Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer-Verlag.) He published his mature view of his life in English and German in 1964. The book is also a treasure trove of developments and personalities in the Anglo-American region for those interested in film history.
2 cf. the fundamental long-term study by the German-American psychologist Emmy Werner on the development of resilience in children. Werner, E. (1997). “Gefährdete Kindheit in der Moderne. Protektive Faktoren (Endangered childhood in the modern age. Protective factors)”. In: Vierteljahresschrift für Heilpädagogik (Quarterly Journal of Curative Education), 66 (2), pp. 192–203
I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor. That’s not my business. I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone – if possible – Jew, Gentile – black man – white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness – not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men – cries out for universal brotherhood – for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world – millions of despairing men, women, and little children – victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.
To those who can hear me, I say – do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed – the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.
Soldiers! don’t give yourselves to brutes – men who despise you – enslave you – who regiment your lives – tell you what to do – what to think and what to feel! Who drill you – diet you – treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men – machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate – the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke, it is written: “the Kingdom of God is within man” – not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power – the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.
Then – in the name of democracy – let us use that power – let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world – a decent world that will give men a chance to work – that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfil that promise. They never will!
Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfil that promise! Let us fight to free the world – to do away with national barriers – to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.
Soldiers! in the name of democracy, let us all unite!
(transcript from the film)
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