Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (3 page)

Likewise harmless, although somewhat more bold, was the first publication by Kurt Tucholsky, the Berlin native who became Weimar Germany’s greatest satirist. In 1907, he was held back in
school due to poor marks in German composition. But on November 22 of that year, the 17-year-old had a short piece entitled “Fairy Tale” in the satirical magazine
Ulk
:

Tucholsky’s text takes the monarch’s mundane taste in art to task. Wilhelm II was interested in neither in the miniature figures of Constantin Meunier nor still-lifes by the poet Rilke’s associate Emil Orlik. Everything new and modern that fascinated the 17-year-old Tucholsky simply bounced off the emperor, who was stuck in the past. The ruler in this fairy tale can’t see the trees for the forest. He has no idea what great talents his empire contains.

On the other hand, the fact that the Germans’ brittle, inflexible ruler would lead them into a world war, whose dimensions he himself anticipated less clearly than anyone, never became a topic for political jokes. Germans’ enthusiasm for the war and their effusive patriotism were initially too naïve, and the disappointment that followed came too abruptly. Wilhelm II was unable to deliver
the proverbial stroll through Paris. Instead, what the German populace got was a torturously long and extremely brutal war of hardened fronts, which ended in the German Empire’s defeat. Yet it was only after the end that German satirists discovered the war as a topic. Among these writers was Kurt Tucholsky, whose journalistic career had been interrupted when he was called to serve at the front.

HIS DEFEAT drove the kaiser out of Germany, but the pomposity, obsession with military discipline, and other negative artifacts of Prussian culture remained. After Wilhelm II fled, in 1918, conservatives began to consider Paul von Hindenburg, and in 1925 the field marshal was elected imperial president—a kind of ersatz kaiser. This strange figure never really fit into Weimar’s democracy and modernized state. His thinking, behavior, and entire appearance were too oriented toward the past. It’s not surprising that Germans particularly enjoyed laughing at and cracking jokes about this relic of a lost epoch.

Yet again, the jokes were tame and innocuous, even affectionate. The following example of wit is a declaration of love in disguise:

The joke plays upon Hindenburg’s outsize ego and also,
incidentally, upon his presumed ignorance of democratic history: St. Paul’s Cathedral was where the first German national assembly convened in the revolutionary year of 1848. But his cluelessness, like his conceit, is depicted sympathetically, as a forgivable, human flaw.

The same basic joke was told in the Third Reich about Hermann Göring: Imperial Marshal Göring visits the monument to the Germanic tribal leader Hermann in the Teutoburger Forest and says, “Oh, you shouldn’t have.” A great many Hindenburg jokes were to reappear a decade later as Göring quips. The reason was simple. Both men had a love of pompous public appearances and Byzantine splendor, and both men’s chests were covered with medals. One popular Hindenburg joke likely predated the Weimar Republic:

This gentle joke was also told on Göring during the Third Reich. And, just as when it was aimed at Hindenburg, it carried no real sting. On the contrary, it was a verbal congé before its subject, no criticism, but rather an expression of admiration and respect for that many-medaled chest, despite or perhaps precisely because of the decorated man’s childish love of publicly displaying his honors. Indeed, there is no detectable hatred for party bigwigs in jokes like this from the Third Reich, despite what many editors who compiled such “whispered jokes” after the end of Nazism tried to suggest.

Neither of the jokes cited above is spontaneous or sarcastic, and the basic anecdote presumably existed in some form long before either. They belong to that genre of political humor in which
the shell of an ancient jest is simply refilled with content appropriate to its time. Some patterns of human behavior are so obvious, they can survive any change of system or regime. At heart, such jokes are apolitical, even when they are aimed at a well-known political figure. The following joke has enjoyed a special longevity:

In Communist East Germany, the name of the measure was changed to redirect the punch line at party secretary and political leader Walther Ulbricht and a famously sycophantic news presenter on East German TV, Eduard von Schnitzler:

Thus, the joke was not only adapted to postwar Communist society but also expanded for it. The idea of the punch line isn’t augmented, however; it is merely repeated, making the joke wordier and significantly reducing its comic effectiveness.

The joke still worked in Communist East Germany thanks not to its topicality but to its formula, which raises curiosity, builds tension, and then ends with a clever punch line. Both the Nazi and the Communist variations can be classified as political
only because their subjects are members of the ruling class. These leaders are being called vain and soporific, but neither foible is a grotesque violation of social norms or an atrocity against civilization, so the jokes don’t carry much subversive political force. They are pleasant tricks of language intended to raise a smile, nothing more and nothing less.

The following riddle, which appeared toward the end of World War I, is somewhat more critical:

The same joke was told at the end of World War II, with Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels as the men overboard. For 17 years, this subversive riddle had been forgotten, then retrieved from the mothballs as German cities were being bombarded and the Nazi reign of terror was in its death throes. But although the joke expresses the hope that the political leadership will be destroyed, it is more fatalistic than incendiary. The country is saved by a fortuitous accident, by the superhuman power of the sea—not by a human revolt. The German people are not called to rebellion but told to pray for rescue through an unlikely twist of fate. In another variation of the joke, Hitler is sitting in a bunker and gets hit by a bomb. In that case, the enemy—still not the German people—takes over nature’s role as tyrannicide.

A third formulaic joke, which had an even longer history, lacked the bitter sarcasm of the previous example—in its original form. It was first told at the expense of Gustav Stresemann, a chancellor and later a foreign minister during the Weimar Republic who was constantly under attack for signing controversial international agreements:

The punch line, a call for Stresemann to resign, is a bit of needling and would not have gotten the teller in much trouble in a democratic system. But in the context of a dictatorship, such a joke becomes considerably more explosive. According to a report by a contemporary, Carl Schulz, the Berlin cabaret artist Werner Finck performed a Hitler sketch along lines similar to this joke just before the start of World War II. It took courage to mount the stage before the eyes of the secret police and informants who might have been in the audience. Schulz describes the scene:

Today, the punch line of this routine may seem weak, but considering the tense mood in Nazi Germany before the beginning of World War II, the sketch was not without subversive force. No one was permitted to think out loud in public about Hitler being
toppled. Finck’s cheeky sketch lived from what
wasn’t
seen but
did
take place in the mind of the audience. The fact that people laughed showed they got the joke.

When people made fun of their aged imperial president in the final years of the Weimar Republic, there was no need for subterfuge. The unpopular democracy was on its last legs, as was the state’s highest representative. In the years leading up to his death, Paul von Hindenburg had increasingly withdrawn from public life. He lived in isolation on his estate, surrounded by people he patronized and by sycophants. The Prussian field marshal had delegated most of his authority to the government cabinet, which happily went on with business as usual while a great political catastrophe loomed.

The checks and balances written into Weimar’s political system proved entirely inadequate to control the Führer of the Nazi Party. Hindenburg’s proxies—his own son, Oskar, and his deputy, Otto Meissner, were no match for Hitler, who had worked his way up from Bavarian local politics all the way to Berlin. Hindenburg himself was the only national politician who could have restrained the provincial demagogue. But the aging leader was as uninterested as the electorate in preserving the unpopular Weimar state. However, the Germans were not so disaffected from politics as not to register their president’s gradual loss of power. They did, and made it the backdrop of the following joke, popular in Berlin:

It was not lost on many Germans that neither Oskar von Hindenburg nor Meissner would be able to fill the old patriarch’s shoes. At the same time, rumors and jokes arose about the patriarch’s alleged increasing senility.

According to one story, after Hitler came to meet Hindenburg at his estate, Gut Neudeck, the president asked since when had Heinrich Brüning (a former German chancellor) worn a moustache. The anecdote was likely apocryphal, but it presaged in an uncanny way what was to happen in reality—at least, according to Hitler himself, who claimed that at his last meeting with the deathly ill field marshal, Hindenburg had addressed him as “Your Majesty.”

Another joke that made the rounds in a number of variations in the late Weimar Republic is difficult to translate because it plays on the dual meaning of the German word
Blatt
, “leaf” and “sheet of paper”:

The point—that the president would sign anything—was prophetic. The Weimar Republic essentially ended with Hindenburg’s signature on a piece of paper making Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany.

A LOT HAS been written about the last days of the dying democracy and the Nazis’ rise to power, and there’s no need to repeat it here. The Nazi dictatorship meant the disappearance of the
society which had produced the flourishing cultural life of the “Golden Twenties,” a paradise for those who had the opportunity and financial resources to take part in it.

For satirists and comedians, the Weimar era was a time of relative prosperity. Especially in the glitzy metropolis of Berlin, cabaret stages and cellar theaters sprouted up everywhere, and the German film company UFA made countless comedies directly outside the gates of the city. The studio’s director was the unlikeable and arrogant Alfred Hugenbuerg, a man of extreme right-wing sensibilities who created silly comedies to distract the populace, plagued by inflation and unemployment, from their grim everyday lives. Most of these apolitical productions have been forgotten—and rightly so. One exception was the huge 1930 hit
The Three From the Gas Station
, starring the comic actor Heinz Rühmann. It is still watched today. The persistent popularity of this naively funny film can scarcely be explained by its simple story line. The secret to its rather childish charm was its cleverly paced musical interludes. Songs like “A friend, a friend, there’s nothing better in the world …” are still well known in Germany.