Hogan's Heroes
Hogan’s Heroes is a comedy set in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp.
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Sergeant Shultz, the show’s Nazi buffoon, is played by John Banner, an Austrian Jew whose entire family was killed in a concentration camp after he left for America. Shultz’s superior, Colonel Klink, is played by Werner Klemperer, the son of Otto Klemperer, who conducted Schoenberg’s Erwartung at the Kroll Opera house in Berlin before fleeing Germany in 1933.
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One of the running gags of the show is that Klink plays the violin poorly. A parody of the effete artist, Klink plays music not in order to connect himself to the rest of the world but to prove that he is separate from it.
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Hogan uses Klink’s pretentions for his own devises. In Season 6, he convinces him he’s a great painter. In Season 5, he gets him to collect rare cuckoo clocks. Klink moves from one artistic hobby to another, consistently thwarted by his belief that he is something he is not.
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Bob Crane grew up in Waterbury and played drums for the Connecticut Symphony Youth Orchestra. He married his childhood sweetheart, went into radio broadcasting and became the number one disc jockey in Los Angeles before being hired to play Colonel Robert E. Hogan. After he became famous, he had a routine: he and a friend would seduce a woman in a bar, take her back to a motel room, and then surreptitiously videotape themselves having sex with her. In 1978, Crane was murdered in his own apartment. The official cause of death was “bludgeoning with a camera tripod.”
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The point of Ewartung, Schoenberg said, was to present, in slow motion, a single second of maximum spiritual excitement so that it would last for half an hour, or about the length of an episode of Hogan’s Heroes.
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Schultz’s signature line in the show is, “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing.” Despite acting as the prison guard, he is actually the most imprisoned character. When Hogan escapes the camp, he is merely transported back, but Schultz, if he were to leave, would be shot for desertion.
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Schoenberg’s most famous student was John Cage, whose signature line was: “I have nothing to say / and I am saying it.” In the name of defending sound, Cage locked himself in an anechoic chamber.
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In the name of defending his country, Hogan traps himself in a prisoner-of-war camp.
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Schoenberg told Cage that he had no ear for harmony, and that if he tried to write music, he would repeatedly arrive at a wall that he wouldn’t be able to break through.
“Well then,” Cage said, “I’ll beat my head against that wall.”
When asked, he said the definition of a composer was “someone deep in thought who is constantly interrupted.”
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The plot of Hogan’s Heroes is that a group of prisoners plan and execute elaborate escapes from a place they have no desire to leave. Branded as escape artists, they are equally skilled in the art of being caught. If the preferred outcome of an escape is to end up back at the point of origin, an escape cannot be judged on the merits of success or failure. With every escape producing the exact same result, “escape” loses its meaning and becomes an art form.
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Hogan’s Heroes was voted one of the worst shows in the history of television.
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