Talking with ‘H*tler’s Tasters’ playwright Michelle Kholos Brooks

The next show from Tampa’s ThinkTank Theatre is H*tler’s Tasters, by playwright Michele Kholos Brooks. The 75-minute performance runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Tampa Fringe Theatre, in Ybor City’s Kress Contemporary.

Michelle Kholos Brooks. Publicity photo.

This is a based-on-fact drama, with elements of dark comedy. During World War II, a group of young women were conscripted to “service” by the Nazi High Command, to taste food, three times a day, every day, before it was delivered to Adolf Hitler.

If one of these girls died from poisoning, well, she’d protected the Fuhrer. And that would be that.

In this interview, Brooks explains how she imagined life, inside and outside the walls of the Chancellery, for the girls. What would they talk about? What would they do? Did they like each other?

According to the British theater website The Spy in the Stalls, the play is “The Mean Girls/Third Reich crossover we never knew we needed. It’s enthralling, unbelievable and inescapably relevant.”

Brooks may well have taken a note from her father-in-law, comedy writer and filmmaker Mel Brooks, who once upon a time composed a little tune called “Springtime For Hitler.”

St. Pete Catalyst: Mel Brooks famously said that laughing at Hitler is always going to be necessary, because what else can you do? But why did you decide to take on this project, and how did you not make it just the most depressing thing in the world?

Michelle Kholos Brooks: Because, as you say, we need humor to get us through. I was at a war museum in Indianapolis with a former writing partner, and very off the cuff he said ‘Did you hear that story about those young women that were Hitler’s food tasters?’ He just started to walk away, and I was like ‘W-w-w-wait, what did you just say?’

I said ‘Are you gonna write that? Because if you’re not gonna write that, I’m gonna write that.’

All I heard was a little morsel of the story, and knew that it somehow ticked every single box in me. Every single concern I ever had about the way that children are used as shields of war, that women are used up and tossed out, about the way women look at themselves and look at each other, the hilarity of being a woman. The idea of young women being forced to confront themselves and each other every day. In maybe a small dark room and having to bide their time, and the comedy that would come out of that.

And then you put, you know, possibly dying at every meal on top of that, it just seems hilarious.

Was it always your intention to leaven the darkness of the subject matter with moments of levity?

I certainly went into it thinking oh, this could be funny, knowing damn well how serious it was. But I didn’t really set out to make something humorous. It’s very, very dark humor, obviously.  But in the process of writing it, the humor just kind of came naturally, out of these human situations. When you put everyday people in these nightmarish situations, I think if you’re being honest humor is bound to emerge, because that’s how we cope.

And also for me, as a writer I tackle some heavy subjects, and I need the relief. I can’t live in that space constantly. And I also think that humor is kind of a gateway emotion. You know, once you can allow yourself to laugh, then you can feel a lot of things that you might not allow yourself to feel in other situations.

So I do feel that oftentimes the humor will open people up to the gravity of the situation, when there might be resistance to it otherwise.

How much historical research did you do?

There was this woman named Margot Wölk who, in her 90s suddenly came out with this story, in 2012, 2013. About being one of Hitler’s food tasters.

She had never told it. She was very ashamed of it. She had been recruited.

So she gave a couple of interviews, for a couple of German publications and the BBC. And that was it. That was all the information that we really had about it.

Had this never been reported before?

Not to my knowledge, and I’ve talked to a couple of historians who said ‘Yeah, probably.’

To my knowledge, none of the women actually died from the food. His food did not get poisoned.

He became particularly paranoid after the failed assassination attempt (in 1944). Unfortunately, the girls did not come to a good end. When the Russians came in toward the end of the war, my understanding is that a number of them were killed.

Miss Wölk herself was captured, and raped, and held hostage for a while. But was finally able to get out and eventually lead a life. And tell her story, incredibly.

There are, as you’ve pointed out in other interviews, parallels between this story and today. Can we talk about that?

So I heard this story and I started to write, around the 2016 election. What was extraordinary to me is that the rhetoric that I was hearing, from particular politicians, was exactly Hitler’s rhetoric. I mean word-for-word. And I didn’t have to do a whole lot of extensive research to find that out. It really crept into me how relevant this was.

And it wasn’t what I set out to do initially, but when I saw a group of young women taking selfies, trying to get exactly the right angle, I thought ‘My God, these are the same women that would have been conscripted for this job. They’re the same age.’

And I just thought, girls are not different. Times change, but we don’t change as people, as we’ve learned.

Then all these horrors emerged over the time that this play was being done. I mean, we lost Roe v. Wade … women have lost so much. The rhetoric has certainly not gotten any better.

And there were times, during the production of the play, when people would say to me ‘How did you know that children would be taken away from their parents?’ As we were reporting children were being put in cages.

I said ‘I didn’t know. But all you have to do is look at history.’

Do we know why young women were chosen for this “honor”?

Just when you think you’ve heard every creepy, shitty thing you could hear about Adolf Hitler, you find out that he chose young German women, who are meant to be the future of Germany, to be poisoned.

Why didn’t he choose Jews, or what they called then gypsies, or homosexuals, or Poles, or any of the myriad of people that he hated?

For me, it’s a lesson for all of us that no matter how privileged you are, or no matter how close you are to power, when the tyrant turns his gaze on you, we’re all on the chopping block.

For tickets and information, visit the ThinkTank website.