Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (25 page)
Read Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Online
Authors: Rudolph Herzog
Hitler needs all the friends he can get as Moers sends him on a journey through all the clichés of the modern media world, from the cult of Princess Diana to housewives abducted by aliens. Hopelessly befuddled, the ex-dictator is utterly incapable of understanding the country he once ruled and can only vent his frustration in half-articulate outbursts of rage. When he hears the Beatles’ “Hey Jude,” for example, he’s incensed that a song about Jews could be such a hit in Germany. Worse still for Hitler, no one in the brightly colored, comic-book landscape of postmodern Germany pays any attention to the old man’s ravings. Modern-day Germany, with its incessant talk-show babble, may be superficial, Moers seems to be saying, but at least there’s no place in it for the Führer. Cast adrift in a homeland that has become a foreign
country, Hitler can lead nothing more than a shadow existence.
“Real Adolf fans don’t find it any funnier than do the antifascists,” wrote the German newspaper
Junge Freiheit
, which has itself been accused of fascist tendencies, about Moers’s work. But in truth, few people in the German media chose to publish their opinions, positive or negative, about the controversial comic. Michel Friedman, then the deputy head of the Council of Jews in Germany and never one to shy away from a fight, merely described Moers’s opus as “unsuccessful.” Readers were the ones who ultimately judged
Adolf, the Nazi Sow
. With them, Moers’s thin volume was a massive hit, selling more than 170,000 copies.
WITH THE PASSING of generations, Germans have become more relaxed about depictions of Hitler as a ridiculous figure. Nowadays, it no longer seems strange for comedians to play the Führer in movies, like Dani Levy’s
Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth about Adolf Hitler
. What used to be acceptable only for foreign productions is now considered admissible for German works as well. Without the ideological ballast from the past, media outrage at “trivializing” depictions of Hitler seems artificial and overwrought. Temporal distance has done its work. When Germans today watch newsreels from the Third Reich, they are able to see not just the monstrousness of Hitler’s regime but also its absurdity. That does nothing to decrease the importance of the Holocaust. On the contrary, people today ask themselves how a generation of Germans could have committed such grave crimes at the behest of a loudmouthed tyrant with a silly moustache. The days of demonizing Hitler are over. Nonetheless, the question of how he could ever have held such power will become harder, and not easier, to answer. For later generations, who have only seen
Hitler in his bizarre appearances in historical newsreels, the appeal of the Führer for the masses is completely mysterious.
Is it permissible to laugh at Hitler? Is a comedy like Mel Brooks’s
The Producers
immoral? The respective answers are yes and no. Brooks’s film does not decrease the significance of the Holocaust; it reduces Hitler to human dimensions so that people can see him as something other than the evil demon promoted by the historiography of the 1950s. Germans in the Third Reich were neither possessed by an evil spirit nor collectively “hypnotized” by their Führer. They have no claim upon either mitigating circumstance. When we laugh at Hitler, we dismiss the metaphysical, demonic capabilities accorded to him by postwar apologists. All the more pertinent is the question of how the empty trickery of the Nazis, which was already all too well exposed by critics in the late 1920s and 1930s, could have ended in the Holocaust.
On closer examination, the argument, advanced so often in Germany after World War II, that people were unaware of Hitler’s demonic maneuvering and were thus more prone to seduction simply does not hold water. The “ridiculous Führer,” stripped of his imperial posturing, was by no means a postwar innovation. Enough caricatures exist from the early years of Nazism that depict Hitler as loudmouthed buffoon and tin-pot dictator. The many disrespectful jokes about the Nazi Party leadership that circulated during the Third Reich also support the conclusion that Germans were by no means unwilling victims of propaganda. Great numbers of people back then saw through the swindles cooked up by Goebbels and his gang. Sadly, that did nothing to alter the fact that, in the course of a few years, Germany was thoroughly drawn into the terrible whirlpool of Nazi crimes.
I
.
POLITICAL HUMOR UNDER HITLER
1
“the various collections of ‘whispered jokes’ ”; Among these anthologies, Sellin’s should be mentioned in particular since it appeared immediately after the collapse of the Third Reich. The other anthologies of jokes were published with far more temporal distance to their subject matter.
2
“we have no way of knowing precisely how widespread they were.”; See Wöhlert, p. 7f.
3
“an expression of Jews’ will to survive against all odds.”; See Landmann, p. 12.
.
THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL HUMOR
1
“Thus, political jokes could only arise in the modern, secular world.”; See Wöhlert, p. 15.
.
THE NAZI SEIZURE OF POWER
1
“ ‘… for this reporter nothing special.’ ”; See Fest, p. 356.
2
“bellowing out their idiotic favorite song: ‘When Jewish blood squirts from the knife, happy days will return.’ ”; Quoted in Focke/Strocka, p. 15.
3
“This forced entry into the landed nobility earned him the nickname ‘von Ribbensnob.’ ”; See Wiener, p. 85.
4
“They greeted one another with the words ‘Swing heil!’ ”; See Allert, p. 25.
5
“the penalty for noncompliance being the ‘slaughter’ of the animals.”; See Allert, p. 87.
6
“the identity of the true culprit.”; See Steinert, p. 264.
7
“I can’t imagine anyone believes in Communist culprits instead of a contract job commissioned on behalf of the swastika.”; Klemperer, vol. 1, p. 8.
8
“The brothers Sass [SA+SS].”; The Sass brothers were the leaders of a notorious gang of criminals.
9
“a Jewish invention”; Focke/Strocka, p. 143.
10
“Brought into line, brought into line.”; Quoted in Kühn, p. 102.
11
“they are one of the many examples of cultural figures declaring their loyalty to the Nazis in those early days.”; See Kühn, p. 336.
12
“they have gotten things so obviously wrong.”; Hanfstaengl, p. 14f.
13
“he wished to spare the healthy productive masses of the German people from a bloody confrontation with their enemies.”; Hanfstaengl, p. 110.
14
“Hanfstaengl’s work would ‘recall to our minds the heroically pursued struggle of our Führer.’ ”; Hanfstaengl, p. 32.
15
“His anti-Nazi caricatures had appeared in mass circulation, and Goebbels and his henchmen could hardly be expected to forget his earlier criticisms of fascism.”; See E. O. Plauen, p. 43.
16
“Dangerous or not—keep going!”; See Kühn, p. 79.
17
“But the Third Reich did yield a number of instances of precisely that.”; Sellin, p. 19.
18
“The harshest sentences for ‘maliciousness’ were rendered in prewar Nazi Germany”; See Wöhlert, p. 95.
19
“to drag National Socialism and everything holy to National Socialists through the mud.”; Finck (2), p. 75.
20
“ ‘Why?’ I responded. ‘Do I need any?’ ”; Finck, p. 69.
21
“the ‘breeding grounds of Jewish and Marxist propaganda should be closed during their performances and everyone involved, including the audience, should be taken into protective custody.’ ”; See Kühn, p. 80.
22
“Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.”; See Kühn, p. 280.
23
“was dragged out of the bed he was sharing with his male lover.”; See Fest, p. 636.
24
“formed the basis of a conspiracy not just against the mores of a healthy people but also against the security of the state.”; See Wiener, p. 131.
1
“the amount of commerce done afterward by Jewish-owned business did not decline at all.”; See Fest, p. 577.
2
“A Jewish great-grandmother. She brought money into the family but not any trouble!”; The legal definition of being Jewish in the Third Reich was having one Jewish grandparent, so people who only had a Jewish great-grandmother among otherwise “Arian” ancestors were not considered Jewish.
3
“None of the other participants made any effort to defend him.”; See the interview with Magda Schneider in the 2002 documentary film
Prisoners of Paradise
.
4
“in short she was the heart and soul of the whole theater.”; Quoted in Hippen, p. 18.
5
“I, the prince of the land of lies.”; Quoted in Hippen, p. 26f.
6
“And we’d have every reason to be ashamed, if we stopped doing that now.”; See Hippen, p. 23.
7
“problems of continental Europeans”; See Kühn, p. 55f.
8
“ ‘Escort out’ was what the Swiss called the deportations, and in many cases it was an escort to the grave.”; See Hippen, p. 14.
9
“an innocent girl whose blood he defiles and thus takes away from her
own people.”; See Fest, p. 64.
97
“Der
Stürmer’s
readership came up with endless variations on it in the jokes they invented”; See Hanh, p. 225.
10
“Heinrich Hoffmann, whom he repeatedly invited to share evenings of jokes with himself and Goebbels.”; See Steinert, p. 327.
11
“Tatzelwurm, the troupe that took over the space previously used by the banned Catacomb.”; See Kühn, p. 81.
12
“Churchill a ‘drunk’ ”; See Wiener, p. 37f.
13
“It’s not a particularly good Rühmann film, but in war-time, it serves its purpose.”; Quoted in Kleinhans, p. 6.
14
“movie entirely in the spirit of my love of flying”; Rühmann, p. 149.
15
“His ability to embody the ‘little man on the street’ had already made him a star in the Weimar Republic”; The UFA had Rühmann under contract well before the Nazis came to power. This was very unusual at the time for comedians.
16
“no one will doubt that my Semites are genuine.”; See Kreimeier, p. 2.
17
“That, in any case, was how the political leadership and their minions in the film industry saw the situation.”; Kreimeier, p. 5.
1
“Only the dumbest calves elect their own slaughterers.”; Danimann, p. 58.
2
“Despite having received a few warnings, he was later to write, all seemed quiet on the ‘Goebbels front.’ ”; See Finck, p. 111.
3
“And it’s likely that its author was convinced of the propriety of a German attack on Poland.”; See Wiener, p. 105.
4
“But in 1940 the vast majority of Germans were intoxicated by Hitler’s early military success, and Elser’s would long remain the only attempt to assassinate the Führer.”; See Shirer, p. 1099.
5
“even the calculating studio bosses began to realize that the United States might not be able to avoid entering World War II.”; See Fyne, p. 18.
6
“The story took two years to develop.”; Quoted in Schnelle, p. 92.
7
“ ‘Hurry up with your film, everyone is waiting for it.’ ”; Quoted in Schnelle, p. 95.
8
“Civilizations may crumble—but the hero and heroine come out all right in the end.”; Mills, p. 168
9
“Lubitsch, the critic wrote, was a jaded Jewish director.”; See Spaich, p. 358.
10
“with many viewers still finding some scenes inappropriate in light of the Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe.”; See Fyne, p. 75. This book, which was published in 1994, describes the final scene of
To Be or Not To Be
as “tasteless.”
11
“it is certainly a far cry from ‘the Berlin born director who finds fun in the bombing of Warsaw.”; See Spaich, p. 358.
12
“But America in 1942 was not ready for it.”; See Spaich, p. 361.
13
“Private on the Western Front”; Lucas, p. 157ff.
14
“No, my racial comrades, I alone am entitled to decide when a year commences and when it concludes.”; See Kühn, p. 360.
15
“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.”;
Reichsgesetzblatt
1, 1939.
16
“Undermining defensive strength is punishable by death …”; §5 of the Ordinance on Special Wartime Criminal Law of August 17, 1938.
17
“The small minority of wits who were remanded to ‘protective custody’ were typically released after five months in prison.”; See Wöhlert, p. 97.
18
“Goebbels is a whoremonger, Hitler a criminal, and the war a lost cause.”; Muliar, p. 58.
19
“instructions that his gold watch and his copy of Goethe’s Faust be given to his friend Kurt Jelinek.”; See Muliar, p. 60f.
20
“Her honor has been permanently destroyed and therefore she will be punished with death.”; This comes from the official decision rendered by the People’s Court.
21
“Freisler embraced these words and enforced what they enjoined to the letter.”; See Koch, p. 217.
22
“Death sentences”; See Koch, p. 222.
23
“Dorsay had no time for the Nazis.”; See Liebe, p. 21.
24
“The sentence has already been carried out.”; See Liebe, p. 27.
25
“This guiding principle of the Nazi judicial system can be traced back to an order from Hitler himself …”; See Wöhlert, p. 137.
26
“Politics were part of what he taught, and he often warned his pupils against … extreme political positions.”; See Scharf-Wrede, p. 6.
27
“That violated the law, as did his public ‘defeatist’ insistence that Germany would never be able to win the war.”; See Scharf-Wrede, p. 11.
28
“he was only moderately intelligent and lacked ‘intellectual flexibility.’ ”; See Scharf-Wrede, p. 18.
29
“the ‘priests’ block’ of the Dachau concentration camp.”; See p. 193 Scharf-Wrede, p. 16.
30
“the Nazis had kept the priest under observation because they feared that his work … would have undone everything”; See Müller, p. 21.
31
“Freisler allowed his rationality to be overridden by an almost religious faith in the Führer’s promises of final victory.”; See Koch, p. 231.
32
“There was only one way to expiate such a sin: the death penalty.”; See Müller, p. 25.
33
“the Nazi empire’s military collapse was a mere matter of time.”; See Shirer, p. 1413.
34
“… seized the crucial oil fields of Romania, and reached the border of Eastern Prussia.”; See Shirer, p. 1409.
183
“But they never hit shit.”; See Wiener, p. 113.
35
“There’s no use trying to starve out the Germans … the sacks are coming out their cellar windows.”; What was meant were the sandbags used to protect windows from shrapnel.
36
“Let’s be honest, shall we? None of us are virgins anymore.”;
Anonyma
, p. 28.
37
“The war is lost.”; See Shirer, p. 1424.
