Read Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Online
Authors: Rudolph Herzog
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (17 page)
The
Philadelphia Inquirer
was even more drastic in its dispraise,
and, ironically, there was an anti-Semitic component to its negative review.
Lubitsch, the critic wrote, was a jaded Jewish director.
To this day,
To Be or Not to Be
retains its stigma of tastelessness in the American popular consciousness. Contemporary film historians may be far milder in their judgments about Lubitsch’s work than the critics of his own day, but the moral objections to it persist—
with many viewers still finding some scenes inappropriate in light of the Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe.
Lubitsch himself was mortified by the harsh commentary of his contemporaries, but he refused to cut the offending Shakespeare-Poland joke. Instead, he mounted a vigorous defense of his work in the American and British press. It took him two years to react to the particular hostility directed at him by the
Inquirer
, but when the same reviewer panned his next movie, Lubitsch submitted a long, well-argued open letter:
I am not writing this letter with the intention to make you reconsider your criticism—nothing is farther from my mind. I am merely writing this letter to point out to you that several times in your criticism you resort to what one calls in sports circles a “foul.”
The purpose becomes very clear when in the next sentence in regard to
To Be or Not to Be
you call attention to my “callous, tasteless effort to find fun in the bombing of Warsaw.”
Being an experienced newspaper woman you are surely aware of the effect such an allegation must have on the reading public, particularly at a time like this. Such propaganda is not very gracious, but when it is based on false facts it becomes outrageous.
Naturally, your statement that I “find fun in the
bombing of Warsaw” is completely untrue. When in
To Be or Not to Be
I have referred to the destruction of Warsaw I have shown it in all seriousness; the commentary under the shots of the devastated Warsaw speaks for itself and cannot leave any doubt in the spectator’s mind what is my point of view and attitude towards those acts of horror. What I have satirized in this picture are the Nazis and their ridiculous ideology. I have also satirized the attitude of actors who always remain actors regardless of how dangerous the situation might be, which I believe is a true observation.
Never have I said in a picture anything derogative about Poland or the Poles. On the contrary I have portrayed them as a gallant people who do not cry on other people’s shoulders in their misery but even in the darkest day never lost courage and ingenuity or their sense of humor.
It can be argued if the tragedy of Poland realistically portrayed as in
To Be or Not to Be
can be merged with satire. I believe it can be, and so did the audience which I observed during a screening of
To Be or Not to Be;
but this is a matter of debate and everyone is entitled to his point of view, but
it is certainly a far cry from “the Berlin born director who finds fun in the bombing of Warsaw.”
It is doubtful how effective Lubitsch’s missive was, given the emotionally charged atmosphere of wartime America. It wasn’t until after his death that
To Be or Not To Be
achieved the status of a classic.
Contemporary critics were unable to see beyond their own immediate horizons, which was why
The Great Dictator
and
To Be
or Not To Be
were measured with different yardsticks. Nazis were supposed to be portrayed as teeth-baring monsters, and Poles as helpless victims—no other depictions were permissible. Lubitsch ignored such clichés. His Nazis were grotesque petty bureaucrats, and his Poles were clever Davids who put one over on the Goliath Hitler with their inventive tricks. Although the plot of
To Be or Not to Be
featured stock comic routines, the depiction of the Nazis as philistine lunkheads contained a truth that exceeded what was usually found in cinematic comedies. Lubitsch’s biographer Herbert Spaich was right when he said that the director understood, much earlier than most of his contemporaries, the “banality of evil.” Most of Hitler’s henchmen were not demons. They were overly obedient petty bourgeois who had mutated into murderers. Their testimony about the Holocaust during the postwar trials showed that this view of the Nazis was largely correct.
But America in 1942 was not ready for it.
RADIO PROGRAMS produced by the Allies had few qualms about making the Nazis look ridiculous. The BBC began German-language broadcasts in 1938, and the content was generated almost exclusively by German and Austrian émigrés. Estimates late in the war put the number of Germans who tuned in between 10 and 14 million. Listening to foreign radio was of course illegal, but the threat of punishment doesn’t seem to have deterred many people.
It was a bold idea to combine news bulletins and swing music—which was very popular in Germany but had been banned by the Nazis—with satire. But the head of the BBC’s German service, Robert Lukas, an Austrian Jew (born Robert Ehrenzweig, he had had emigrated in 1934), convinced his colleagues to give it a try.
They had no ethical qualms about poking fun at the Nazis or fears of being too inventive in doing it, and their first comedy show went over the airwaves in December 1940. The main character in the BBC’s anti-Nazi satire was a private named Adolf Hirnschal, who reported back the news from the front to his “beloved wife.” At times, Hirnschal’s unit was surrounded, and at other times they were advancing against the Russians, and he refracted all the insanity of the war and of National Socialist ideology from his on-the-ground perspective. For every sacrifice he was called upon to make for the fatherland, he had a telling commentary.
Critically minded Germans who defied the law and tuned in to the BBC were delighted by these missives from England. The series featuring the fictional private who always said the first thing that popped into his head became a huge hit. The babbling, wisecracking Hirnschal would make his way through the remains of Europe right up until the end of the war, and the creative minds at the BBC used daily events as sources of inspiration.
For instance, the day after a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair retreat, Hirnschal sent an especially nonchalant letter home:
July 21, 1944
Dear Amalia, my beloved wife
,
You can’t imagine the commotion among our ranks on account of the attack against our beloved Führer. Hans-Joachim Blitz said you can’t believe how suddenly a twist of fate can happen. If the assassin had put his briefcase a footstep to the right or the left, we’d perhaps be enjoying peace right now. But thankfully Divine Providence intervened. And as Blitz was saying this, First Lieutenant Hanke came
up and made a short speech, in which he explained that there had been a major miracle, and that it was proof that fate was on our side, and that the entire German people stood as one behind our beloved Führer, and that we would achieve victory with the help of the Führer and fate and our new V-rockets … Then there was an air-raid alarm, and immediately the bombs starting falling. One was a direct hit, and when we starting looking for the dead and wounded, we saw that poor Hans-Joachim Blitz’s time was up. Jaschke and I stood in front of the body, and I said, “He may have walked with a limp, but he was a stand-up-straight guy.” I had never seen anything like the expression of Jaschke’s face before, as he said in a raspy voice, “Yep, that’s the way it is. Today it’s him. Tomorrow it may be me, and the day after that it could be you, Hirnschal.” And I said: “Yep, Emil, that’s the way it is. Tens of thousands who are alive today will die pitiful deaths. And many cities that today stand tall and lovely will be reduced to ash and rubble. And lots of women and children will starve to death or succumb to disease. And that’s all because a briefcase was placed a footstep too far to the right or the left. If that’s the way fate wanted it …”
And in that spirit, my beloved wife, you have my hugs and kisses
,
Love, Adolf
Private on the Western Front
The success of the Hirnschal program inspired the BBC to try other satiric shows. Author Bruno Adler decided to go Private Hirnschal one better and came up with “Mrs. Wernicke,” a
sharp-tongued, never-say-die Berlin woman who offered commonsense mockery of the coercive fascist state. She also subtly advertised the BBC’s German-language news programs. We can only guess today how many Germans tuned into the shows created by Robert Lucas and his comedic cohorts.
The zenith of the BBC’s satiric efforts came in 1940 when Austrian exile Johann Müller, who went by the pseudonym Martin Miller, began parodying Hitler’s bizarre speeches. Müller’s Hitler imitation was so perfect that the CIA is said to have asked the British intelligence service MI6 what they thought of the Führer’s new pronouncements—referring to a Miller broadcast. Moreover, after the war, it emerged that this fake Hitler had attracted a considerable German audience. A contemporary from Berlin, Manfred Ormanowski, told of how his father, a Social Democrat, transcribed and secretly reproduced Müller’s Hitler speeches, using a basement printing press. Ormanowski himself distributed the satiric leaflets to German critics of Hitler. He kept them hidden in the fake bottom of a fish tank and would visit friends of his father ostensibly to swap fish, but actually to hand out the witty pamphlets.
Müller’s performances hardly convinced hardcore Nazis that their ideology was ridiculous. But the BBC program did boost the spirits of Hitler’s German critics. As Ormanowski described it, they felt as though they were not alone in their views. Müller knew that the best way to amuse his audience was to go after Hitler where he was most vulnerable. After Hitler promised “final victory” in 1941, for instance, Müller had the fake Führer hold a year-in-review speech:
My message today coincides with the conclusion of a year in which I guaranteed final victory. But the year has only
concluded according to the calendar, the same Gregorian calendar that was forced upon the Germanic world by international Jewry and a Roman pope named Gregor who had been bribed by Freemasons. Do we National Socialists, who have given the world a new order, want to be told by shadowy foreign forces when a year begins and when it ends?
No, my racial comrades, I alone am entitled to decide when a year commences and when it concludes
.
For the Nazi party, the highlights of the BBC’s anti-Nazi satire initiative were unheard-of provocations, but the fascists were unskilled in the use of real humor as a weapon and came up with little in the way of a comic counterattack.
Ironically, earlier on in the war, it had looked as though the Nazis had an advantage on the propaganda front, and for a short time the English-language service of the German public radio broadcasters had almost as many listeners in England as the BBC. The broadcasts always began with “Germany calling,” although the nasal voice of the announcer William Joyce made the words sound like “Jermany calling” and promptly earned the moderator the nickname Lord Haw-Haw. Instead of satire, the Nazis’ English-language programming offered listeners cynical tips on how to treat injuries suffered in bombings. Joyce read out such advice in perfect Oxford English, though he was not at all an aristocrat, but rather an untamed thug with a large scar in his face that he’d received in a street fight. After the war, he was captured in Hamburg, where, as a former British citizen, he was executed for high treason.
DESPITE THE INITIAL propaganda inroads the Nazis made,
the BBC maintained the upper hand in the “radio war” until the demise of the Third Reich. Goebbels and his henchmen may have meted out draconian punishments to those found listening to foreign broadcasts, but such shows of force were an expression of helplessness. Even the gravest sanctions failed to deter Germans from secretly tuning in to the BBC. In 1939, for instance, a law was enacted making it a capital crime to pass on news from foreign broadcasters. The text of that piece of legislation left no doubt how seriously the Nazis took propaganda:
In modern warfare, the adversary does not fight only with military weapons, but also with instruments intended to influence and exhaust the people psychologically. One of these instruments is radio. Every word the adversary broadcasts is of course a lie conceived so as to harm the German people. The Imperial government knows that the German people are aware of this danger and consequently expects that every German will see it as a matter of responsibility and decency to avoid listening to foreign broadcasters. For those racial comrades who lack this sense of responsibility, the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Empire has issued the following decree. The Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Empire has decided it shall be law for the entire territory of the Greater German Empire:
§1 It is prohibited to listen intentionally to foreign broadcasters. Violations will be punished with re-educational imprisonment. In milder cases, this can be reduced to mere incarceration. The radio receivers used will be confiscated.
§2
Whoever intentionally disseminates news from foreign broadcasters of the sort that may endanger the German people’s capacity for resistance will be subject to re-educational incarceration and, in extreme cases, death.
But despite the number of spies among the populace and the unsavory show trials in which people were sentenced to death for violating this law, few Germans changed their radio habits. German radio was full of triumphant reports—even as the Wehrmacht was put more and more obviously on the defensive, journalists spoke of “adjusting the frontlines” and “planned rear-flank movements.” Though hardly free of propaganda, the BBC was a much more reliable news source. In Berlin argot, Goebbels’s mendacious radio addresses quickly became known as “Clubfoot’s Fairy-Tale Hour.”
But even those who saw through Nazi propaganda had to acknowledge the Nazis’ expertise in using the media for their own purposes. Besides radio propaganda, the importance of which Hitler had recognized early on, there were weekly newsreels devoted entirely to spreading Nazi ideology. Goebbels’s fondness for cinema inspired him to risk an experiment in filmed political humor, and in early years of the war, the Propaganda Minister had comic sketches included in the weekly newsreels. The first such series was called “Tran and Helle” and was based on a simple formula. A stubborn fellow with a shaved head named Tran (played by actor Ludwig Schmitz) would run through litanies of complaints, read books by Jewish authors, or buy oranges on the black market, that is, do everything possible that a good racial comrade would call wrong. Then the dapper party loyalist Helle would bring the “defeatist” back into line. Often Helle’s “well-intentioned” bits of advice were laced with threats. This was the case in a sketch about listening to foreign broadcasters:
