Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (2 page)

But our distorted perspective cannot be blamed solely on cinematic documents of the Nazi era. Our historic hindsight also plays a role. We observe the Third Reich in retrospect, knowing all too well where the path taken by this evil system will end. The horrors of the Holocaust and Hitler’s wars of annihilation are so present in today’s collective consciousness that the years leading up to those crimes against humanity have been pushed into the background. So we lose sight of thousands of instances where the screws were gradually tightened to choke off the rule of law and then almost any form of humane behavior. At the beginning of their regime, the Nazi’s hold on power was anything but unbreakable. The earliest phase of Nazi rule was dominated by
Gleichschaltung
, which meant, roughly, “getting Germans into the same ideological gear,” a policy that the National Socialists carried out by silencing or murdering the majority of their critics. But even this brutality could not reform German society as it had been during the Weimar Republic into a racially based, Nazi folk community overnight. Jokes from the early years of Nazi rule, including those of professional comedians, give us particular insight into the mood of the populace. These jokes comment upon and make fun of the political events of the day and throw a harshly revealing light on certain social transformations, though other social processes that may appear more significant from today’s perspective are hardly mentioned.

As members of the Nazi secret police wrote in their reports, the people generally stood behind Hitler in the years before World War II, despite the hard line that those in power were taking. The
bubbling enthusiasm depicted in weekly German newsreels may have been an exaggeration, but the majority of Germans were satisfied with their government, which seemed to have had an especially lucky hand in the realm of foreign relations. This satisfaction was reflected in contemporary political jokes, which were largely harmless and silly. Only with the onset of World War II did the citizens’ mood begin to shift significantly. And with Germany’s military defeat at Stalingrad and the first waves of Allied bombing campaigns against German cities, German political humor took on a dark, fatalist tone. Silliness gave way to sarcasm.

By describing how and why people laughed during the Third Reich, this book aims to examine the sensibilities of the German people—and all of the changes to which those sensibilities were subject—during the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. What this clarifies among other things is that the Third Reich was not nearly as monolithic as the makers of contemporary newsreels liked to depict it. Nazi society remained heterogeneous, influenced by very diverse interests, frustrations, worries, and fears, all of which were reflected in the humor of the time.

MOST POLITICAL JOKES can be seen as attacks, launched by humorous means, on those in power or on prevailing political conditions. Through comic exaggeration they make the state and its representatives seem laughable. Many of these jokes are told in a winking spirit of fun; in others, there is an underlying bitterness. But even the tellers of this second kind of political joke are not necessarily rebelling against the system. Political humor is not, in and of itself, a form of resistance; on the contrary, political humorists, like the dog in the old adage, usually have a bark that’s worse than their bite.

Political humor is often described as a relatively recent historical phenomenon. In older epochs, so the argument runs, the power of the state was not legitimized by the people, but by God, so any criticism of those in power was blasphemy and therefore punishable by church condemnation and state law.
Thus, political jokes could only arise in the modern, secular world. This theory is sound up to a point: it is true that the political humor was able to develop as a genre only in modern times. The reason for that, however, was not so much that the Western world became more secular but rather that relations of power became more complicated. After the French Revolution, the ways in which the people and their representatives interacted were far more multi-faceted than before. The number of targets available for satirical attack increased as opportunities for citizens to express criticism
broadened. This does not mean that there can be no political humor in states that are legitimized by the prevailing concept of the divine. Modern theocracies such as the current Iranian state, as well as ancient Rome, prove the contrary. Those who maintain otherwise deny the essential human quality of political humor, the impulse to dispute the ideal image that all systems claiming divine legitimacy try to project. People enjoy laughing at their leaders. That has always been the case and will continue to be so. It makes no difference whether such laughter is legal or not, or whether it is considered an insult to His Majesty or an offense against God.

Images from ancient Rome leave no doubt that Romans aggressively went after the weaknesses of their leaders. Busts of those in power are uncompromisingly realistic. Emperors are depicted with Adam’s apples protruding like birds’ craws; senators sport double chins. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the Romans were positively obsessed with human defects, and that is also reflected in their choice of names. Was Barabbas called that because he had a big bushy beard? The Romans gleefully handed out sobriquets based on a person’s limp, baldness, or harelip—using seemingly unlimited imagination to tag their victims.

Romans were equally creative with insults of every kind, and their love of the obscene is well known. Politicians constantly insulted one another, and the people enjoyed passing these barbs on as racy gossip. Most of those in power calmly put up with such indignities, as the following anecdote, which had no consequences for the man who told it, attests:

Political barbs hit the mark, then as now, wherever an Achilles’ heel was to be found and aimed at, and the higher the pedestal on which the heel rested, the better. Emperors, dictators and other big shots who rule on the basis of sublime principles have a long distance to fall. Thus they quickly became favorite targets for biting scorn.

Rulers who would represent the ideal, of course, are measured by their own ambition and conceit. If too great a discrepancy is perceived between the ideal and reality, if a ruler has clearly set the bar too high, he opens himself up to humorous attack. So a godlike emperor became a fop of dubious parentage, and the member of a popular tribunal became a senile old man with a crooked nose. This sort of ridicule can be found not just in modern history, but in antiquity and the Middle Ages as well.

IT IS TELLING that a compilation of “whispered jokes” was one of the first books to be published in postwar Germany. That fact reflects not just Germans’ eagerness to exonerate themselves, since such jokes were taken as a sign of “resistance” against Hitler, but also a basic human need. It was neither astonishing nor new that people should try to use laughter to deal with traumatic events. There are many comparable examples in both the rest of German and world history, and one doesn’t have to search far to find them.

Readers encounter an example of this phenomenon in early modern times, in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. Europe lay in
ruins, and whole stretches of territory had been depopulated. In Southern Germany, one of the most heavily devastated regions, barely a third of the population had survived. Many who had not died in battle fell victim to starvation and disease. In the initial years after this unprecedented hurricane of destruction, little was said or done to condemn it. Then suddenly, in 1699, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen raised his voice, in the first adventure novel ever published in German. The absurd pseudonym the author used, Scheifheim von Sulsfort, was a preview of what readers would find inside the novel’s pages.
The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus
, the first major literary work after the apocalypse of the Thirty Years’ War, was a book full of jokes.

The novel’s hero, a simple shepherd, stumbles through the war in a variety of roles, from a doctoring quack to a cowskin-dressed fool. The wholesale arson, murder, and rape going on around him serve as the backdrop for his roguish pranks. Readers see a bizarrely distorted reality through the eyes of the protagonist-fool, who was raised like a wild animal. As a young boy, Simplicissimus endured terrible suffering, but his descriptions of the horrors that he himself went through are cheerful and disarmingly ironic. Even when a splinter group of soldiers attacks his boyhood home and murders his stepparents, the narrative remains grotesquely nonchalant:

Grimmelshausen himself took part in the Thirty Years’ War, and the novel is full of autobiographical detail. The author takes the terrible slaughter he had survived and turns it into farce.

At first glance a novel featuring a rogue hero but really about a decades-long bloodbath may itself seem like a bizarre idea. Why didn’t Grimmelshausen just write a chronicle of events? The message of
Simplicissimus
is that fear and terror are only half as bad when one can laugh in their face.

Ironically, the tradition of the German novel begins with the sort of humor that still occasions controversy today, when people try to treat Hitler comically. Yet the truth is that terrible events seem to call for humor. In the aftermath of a catastrophe, humor often appears as the only effective antidote against lingering horror. One could cite dozens of examples of how the deepest human abysses make people laugh. The mentality underlying Grimmelshausen’s black humor is also found in Jewish humor.

JUST AS THE LESS THAN IDEAL Roman emperors inspired ridicule, the leaders of the Nazi empire were constantly being compared with the Aryan models they promoted. “Dear God, please make me blind so that I can tell myself Goebbels looks Aryan,” was a popular quip at the time. Whether or not this “prayer” is a verbal attack or a harmless joke is beside the point. It is more notable that, whatever way you take it, this type of German political humor blossomed under totalitarian rule, rather than in an open, free, and democratic society. Countless cabaret artists may make fun of present-day German politicians, but, just as in the Weimar Republic, spontaneously invented, popular political jokes are not nearly as common today as they were in the Third Reich or Communist East Germany.

Examined in retrospect, Wilhelmine Germany appears to fall in between these two extremes. Few political jokes from that time have been recorded, but this may have more to do with researchers’ lack of interest than with the period’s lack of antigovernment satire. The scholar Ralph Wiener has compiled a few examples. They consist of benign
bon mots
and short anecdotes as ornately baroque as the monarchy for which they were invented. Political humor under the kaiser only turned truly absurd and biting when its target was the ominous growth of militarism. The unthinking obedience of Prussian soldiers and the explosion of the imperial bureaucracy were easy marks for jesters in Wilhelm’s Germany.

The following example is one of the better jokes of the time:

The joke isn’t all that funny from our perspective, but it does feature a number of phenomena typical of the age, including the misguided and brutal behavior of the belatedly colonial German power and the impossibly wordy bureaucratic language of imperial government employees, which not even their African subjects were spared. For citizens of the Wilhelmine Empire, the punch line may have had a crude charm—an appeal we can only imagine today.

The imperial leadership was pigheaded and complacent, and the rules governing who was on top and who was subordinate were firmly fixed. The bureaucracy was outmoded and prone to
intervening in people’s lives. In general, Wilhelmine Germans made their peace with the antiquated social order. From lofty heights, the German kaiser steered the state, which often seemed to be amazed and somewhat afraid of how big it had become. Kaiser Wilhelm II, with his waxed moustache, had little to do with mere mortals, appearing to many more like a monument to himself than a man made of flesh and blood.

But the posturing of the German leadership was by no means lost on the people, and jokes from this period often poked fun at the kaiser’s otherwordliness and vanity. But these humorous remarks at Wilhelm II’s expense were relatively bloodless and innocuous. Even the following joke, aimed at the cult of personality surrounding the monarch, lacks any real force from today’s standards:

There’s little tension at work here. The punch line is completely soft—no amount of imagination can read anything comical, biting, or critical into it. The joke points up the absurdity of the omnipresence of a kaiser who’s already become a monument, but it clearly isn’t intended to do anything more than make listeners smile a bit.