Revenge is best enjoyed cold, they say;

the saying may have been coined by supporters of the state's monopoly on the use of force, who are betting that vengeful spirits will calm down over time.

Either way, vengeance is the emotion that is acted out more than any other in fantasy rather than real life.

That's why she's the fuel for some of the most popular stories.

Quentin Tarantino is the undisputed master storyteller when it comes to revenge.

How in the film "Inglourious Basterds" he had a Jewish troop fight behind the lines against the Germans in World War II and ultimately had the entire leadership of the "Third Reich" killed in a burning Paris cinema is one of the boldest counterfactual fantasies of revenge in cultural history.

Matthew Alexander

Deputy head of department in the features section.

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In the Jewish Museum Frankfurt, a prop from “Inglourious Basterds” marks the start of the exhibition entitled “Rache”: It is the baseball bat with which the figure of the “Judenbär”, a giant with gentle features, used to beat captured German soldiers to a pulp strikes if they do not reveal the desired information about their comrades' positions.

This entry into the exhibition theme is staged theatrically to the point of parody: lightning illuminates the darkened room in which the bat is presented as the only exhibit like a relic.

The film music plays loudly.

victimhood cliché

The dramaturgy of the show – the first ever dedicated to the subject of revenge in Jewish history – follows the path of knowledge taken by the publicist Max Czollek, who came up with the idea for the exhibition.

For him, “Inglourious Basterds” was the beginning of an examination of the motif of revenge in Judaism.

He sees himself as a representative of a generation that wants to break with the cliché of the victim role.

The self-empowerment of Jews, as staged by the non-Jew Tarantino, is a welcome offer of identification for them.

The historical finds that Czollek and the curator Erik Riedel came across during their search for protagonists of Jewish retribution well into the twentieth century are displayed in the large special exhibition room of the new museum building.

There are ambivalent heroic stories that are told here in a gently expressionistic exhibition architecture, without the overpowering aesthetics of the opening: the figures presented are on the dark side of justice.

The biblical Judith makes the beginning.

In Jacopo Ligozzi's painting, she looks at the viewer, free from doubt, serious and calm, while she raises her saber, only to behead the enemy general Holofernes, who has been seduced by her, in his sleep.

Judith is an ancestor of the Inglourious Basterds, no question: as a heroine who goes to war in her own way against Nebuchadnezzar, who is after her people.

But the relationship is by no means close: Judith as a character is not an avenger, but a farsighted heroine who tries to avert disaster.

Telling their story may have functioned as a substitute for revenge in the diaspora.

From Samson to Superman

Another narrative strand of Jewish ideas of revenge, which culminates in Tarantino's "Bear Jew", begins with Samson, who brings down the temple and in this way takes revenge on the Philistines.

The hero figure, endowed with supernatural powers, later takes on a new form in the golem.

From there, a direct line leads to American superhero comics.

The genre was shaped by Jewish authors: Between 1934 and 1938, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel developed the character Superman, who summarily ended the war in a short story from 1940 and held Hitler, like Stalin, accountable.

Again, it's less about revenge and more about self-empowerment.