Whom pray tell
Did Karl Marx quote?64
Anyone familiar with the steady stream of quotations that filled the official rhetoric of the GDR smiled. The need to take creative measures to get spare parts or rare goods was satirized in a cartoon in which a man writes his telephone number on a 50 mark note “in case the part comes in early.”65
Items now and again dealt with the regular practice of stealing material from the workplace for home use.66
Even more serious problems were on occasion considered. A back cover cartoon showed crying children looking over the balcony of their apartment as three drunken punks destroyed their playground.67 Another cartoon had workers standing in the midst of their decrepit factory, with broken windows, a leaking roof, and holes in the floor. Their factory head tells them: “What you need, colleagues, is culture. Go to the opera or to a concert!”68
Such items were hardly biting criticism, but they were more forceful than GDR citizens found in other periodicals. They must be compared, however, with the treatment Eulenspiegel gave the West, where, it seemed, crime, poverty, corruption, and exploitation were the daily lot of many. The occasional disadvantages of socialism were portrayed as minor annoyances.
The magazine regularly gave the targets of its criticism opportunity to respond. To a building manager who complained about an article, the magazine replied: “If there were no problems, one would not need satire. Positive satire would self-destruct. Please do not expect an ‘objective report’
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live by exaggeration.”69 Eulenspiegel never suggested that it might be necessary to dispose of socialism to improve the courtesy of shop clerks or the quality of consumer goods.
As an Eulenspiegel writer later noted, criticism had to be by “street and house number.”70 Specific indignities at the lower level were open to criticism but not the actions of higher-level leaders. When, for instance, Eulenspiegel criticized Manfred Ewald, who headed the GDR sports system, staffers lost their jobs. Even the hint of criticism of the leadership was rejected. An amusing example came in 1963, when Eulenspiegel attempted to run the following joke: “As the West German President Lübke was on an African trip recently, he let the public know that he was Germany’s representative. A passer-by was heard to remark: “He must be an imposter, for Germany’s representative has a beard.” This was an ever-so-gentle reference to Ulbricht’s goatee. The Agitation Department rejected that punch line. Instead, readers found: “He must be an imposter, since I saw Germany’s representative at the FDJ Congress.” Editor Peter Nelken wrote to the Agitation Department:
Do we have to be so nervous and defensive in using such silly, empty phrases in popular agitation literature? Why are we so allergic? Is Comrade Ulbricht’s beard ugly?
I have been around long enough to know that there are things one does not write, terms one does not use. But look at the way we dance around the word “Wall.” One has to listen to what people say if one is to reach them.
I’m not particularly concerned about Comrade Ulbricht’s beard, or even an Eulenspiegel joke that did not work. I am concerned about defensive and therefore un-Marxist taboos.71
But that was a mild altercation. There were a number of cases in which the Eulenspiegel staff was taken to task much more energetically.72
Although Eulenspiegel was permitted greater domestic criticism than Brennessel, neither periodical tolerated any criticism aimed at the fundamentals of the society or criticism coming from other countries. Both gave considerable space to suggesting that criticisms directed toward their countries from abroad were ignorant, stupid, and wrong.
Hitler’s Germany received more negative coverage from the foreign press than did Honecker’s Germany and did not like it at all. Brennessel’s general line was that foreign criticism was the work of the Jews or émigré malcontents. In a typical item, one man asks another if he had read an article in an emigrant paper: “I read a bit of the paper, a few articles even, but I don’t know which article you mean. Is it the one that was made up, or This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:45 UTC
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the one that wasn’t true, or the one that’s a fraud, or the one that’s a pack of lies?”73
Dozens of other articles and cartoons made the same point. Each suggested that criticism from abroad was false or absurdly exaggerated.
Other items suggested that although there might be minor problems in Germany, things were far worse elsewhere. A remarkable item in 1934, for example, reported: “The Austrian concentration camps will supposedly get cemeteries and crematories to help them better fulfill their purposes.”74 A later cartoon showed two Englishmen outraged because their German neighbor is beating a carpet in his yard, but in a third house the Russians are shooting people while rats creep under the fence to infest the neighboring house.75
Eulenspiegel gave frequent space to similar material. Once a month a page titled “The Other Side” purported to be a Western publication commenting on the problems of the GDR and the joys of capitalism. Each version included a picture from the GDR with a specious explanation. One photo showed a child standing beside a pond feeding ducks, noting that in the GDR children were forced to work to meet the party-dictated plan for livestock.76 Eulenspiegel’s efforts on these lines were more challenging than Brennessel’s, since most GDR citizens regularly watched West German television and thus saw (as well as experienced firsthand) that the difficulties of the GDR were rather more serious than Eulenspiegel’s satire suggested.
Anti-Semitism was a mainstay of Brennessel. A 1935 article discussed the uses of humor in the war against the Jews. Too often, anti-Jewish jokes simply make Jews laughable, the author claimed. Effective humor points out the “satanic nature” of the Jews: “The Philistines who prove their anti-Semitism with cheap Jewish jokes and at the same time strengthen the Jews economically are a plague, for they ignore that which is of deadly seriousness!”77 Jews were presented as ugly caricatures capable of every manner of evil.
Particular effort was given to denigrating those Jews who had fled Germany. A typical article in 1935 attacked Georg Bernhard, former editor of the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung. The writer had recently seen a film with clips of Bernhard from the 1920s, during which he claims the audience laughed, unable to believe that such a fossil had once thrived in Germany: “Your face—we don’t really want to talk about it—but look in the mirror at that thing you have to carry around as a face. You didn’t do so well there. Your racial characteristics do not come across in an attractive way. On top of it all, the camera man caught you, how shall I put it, from This content downloaded from 198.91.37.2 on Sun, 05 Jun 2016 03:34:45 UTC
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the Tel Aviv side. Not attractive, not attractive at all, Georg Bernhard! And then you begin to speak. It was frightfully comic. Try it yourself, say a few words loudly. Then you will know that your German reeks of Yiddish. Do you have any idea how that sounds to us?”78 The content of the cartoons and articles was repetitive, unvarying, and tiresome.
The GDR was in an awkward position with respect to Jews. As a part of the Germany that committed genocide, it was ill at ease satirizing Jews, but as part the socialist bloc it was on the side of Israel’s foes. The result was that little was said about Israel or Jews in the GDR press. Jews were an unknown people, Israel an unknown country.
No major articles or cartoons during the period here considered addressed Israel in any detail. There were only occasional brief mentions. A 1985 editorial noted that the world condemned Israeli policy, but the United
States supported it.79 Another item satirized Israel’s policy of retali-ation: “In a bold strike, Israeli commandos Tuesday night blew up the dome of St. Peter’s cathedral after one of the twelve hundred visitors had been observed in conversation with an Arab whose sister-in-law had been frequently observed by the Israeli secret service publicly carrying a black and white PLO banner.”80 In comparison to Eulenspiegel’s satire directed against the United States or West Germany, however, this was gentle material indeed, an indication that Israel was a topic the magazine preferred to avoid.
The penultimate issue of Brennessel in 1938 announced to its readers that it had fulfilled its purpose and would shortly cease publication. The magazine provided its own obituary:
It was our Brennessel that tens of thousands of National Socialist readers enjoyed during the period of struggle as it gave the sharp and hated blows that gradually wore down the old system.
It was Brennessel that after the seizure of power took sure aim at external enemies and at the moaners and complainers at home.
It was Brennessel whose scorn inflicted deep wounds on the enemy, that made them the laughing stock of the world, that made them ridiculous.
We thank our readers for their loyalty. They know how much Brennessel (a piece of the history of our party) served the idea through sharp attack and resolute defense until its great goal was realized, the goal of its entire struggle: the creation of the Greater German Reich!81
But Brennessel did not cease publication because it had fulfilled its mission.
It failed because people did not buy it. In 1933 Brennessel’s circulation was about 32,000. It had fallen to 23,000 by its final issues.82
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Brennessel’s competitors did little better. Simplicissimus sold 86,000 copies in 1908. By 1939 circulation was down to 19,000 (although the influx of Brennessel subscribers raised it temporarily to over 40,000). The Third Reich had little appetite for tame satire. People got enough propaganda in the rest of their activities. Since Brennessel’s satire hardly relieved the tensions of everyday life, indeed it suggested one was disloyal for having tensions, most Germans chose to spend their 30 pfennig elsewhere.
Brennessel failed because it was too much like everything else in the Third Reich. There were no surprises, no risks taken. Humor is often a way of dealing with the stresses of everyday life, rendering them more en-durable through laughter, but Brennessel permitted no such release. The complainers, the moaners, the dissatisfied, they were the magazine’s enemies, its frequent targets. It suggested that to criticize life’s difficulties was to be a traitor. This hardly made for good humor. Even Hitler called Brennessel “the dreariest rag imaginable.”83
Eulenspiegel, on the other hand, sold out issue after issue. Nearly 500,000
copies were printed (given population differences between Hitler’s Germany and the GDR, Brennessel would have needed a circulation of about two million to equal Eulenspiegel’s). Even the copies it did print were not enough. New subscriptions were not accepted; issues reaching the kiosks sold out rapidly. The editorial staff estimated that twice as many copies could have sold if sufficient paper (in perennially short supply in the GDR) had been available.
Both magazines attempted to force humor into the constraints of propaganda. Why did the one fail, the other succeed?
Brennessel simply failed to interest its readers. It offered them little they could not get elsewhere, and its humor lacked the bite that makes satire appealing. Eulenspiegel addressed some of the real difficulties of life in the GDR. Few read Eulenspiegel for international satire, nor were they impressed by its attempts to show “the qualitative differences that the satirist must make between using satire as internal criticism and as a means to reveal the external enemy, imperialism and militarism.”84 Although it had its share of blundering satire, it gave considerable space to at least modest criticism of conditions in the GDR. It avoided badgering its readers to participate in Mach mit actions (semivoluntary efforts to clean up an area or perform some other kind of civic work) or scolding them for failing to make a contribution to a solidarity drive. Part of its popularity resulted from being in short supply (since people by nature prefer that which is hard to get to that which is easy to obtain).
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The man frustrated because he could not find a spare part for a washing machine, the woman annoyed by the survival of sexism in a society where the conditions necessary for it had supposedly been eliminated, the traveler angry because for the third time in a week the train had been late, the person tired of poor working conditions, these people could laugh, perhaps resignedly, as Eulenspiegel attacked their problems. True, the magazine rarely got beyond the specific outrage. It never suggested that perhaps there was a systemic reason for the GDR’s problems, but a single issue contained more detailed criticism of life in real existierende Sozialismus than a month of Neues Deutschland.
After the GDR collapsed, the magazine quickly dropped the heavy-handed satire of the Honecker era and began printing genuinely funny and biting material on life in a transformed Germany. Now a monthly, it still survives, though its satire takes substantially different lines.
Summary
Both the Nazi and the GDR systems viewed the arts as important. Just as a large proportion of European art reinforced the Christian worldview for centuries, so totalitarian art reinforced new worldviews. Both systems had difficulty defining exactly what approved art was, but neither hesitated to try. As usual, the Nazi system was more tangled than the GDR’s.
Both systems guided art by controlling admission to the professional organizations that were a prerequisite to artistic life. In Hitler’s Germany, only members of the relevant body of the Reich Chamber of Culture could be employed in the arts. In the GDR, only members of the relevant professional organization were likely to find a publisher or a gallery. Those who did not follow the proper paths were expelled from the professional organizations.
Both systems also resisted artistic ambiguity. Approved art had clear messages that echoed the ideological metanarrative. Nazi paintings glorified a vanished pastoral world, the party’s leaders and history, great building projects, and the military. Nazism rejected “modern” art either because its meaning was unclear or too clear (for example, antiwar art). Approved socialist art glorified workers and the accomplishments of socialism. Neither liked jazz or other forms of “decadent” modern music.
The SED, for all its artistic twists and turns, allowed more artistic license than the NSDAP. Films and television dealt more directly with the problems of the day. Eulenspiegel certainly addressed more of life’s daily annoyances than did Brennessel.
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Art still reinforced both systems. With some exceptions, artists were
“bought” by the benefits of cooperation. Robert Von Hallberg’s argument about artists in the GDR applies as well to the Nazi era. Most intellectuals were not that difficult to control. They were guided less by explicit censorship (although that was used if necessary) than by the obvious benefits of cooperation. His conclusion is worth citing at length: One might think that in a totalitarian society fear of the police would back up the directives and suggestions received by intellectuals, but nothing of the sort seems to have occurred in the GDR. GDR intellectuals—not just literary intellectuals—now often say, “In fact, we could have done a lot more.”
The reason they did not do so was rarely the threat of imprisonment or torture but, rather, fear of
professional obstacles. My claim is not simply that certain professional structures, such as the Writer’s Union or the Central Institute for Literary History, enforced particular kinds of conformity. The more interesting phenomenon is that the elaborateness of GDR professional organizations seemed to have rendered intellectual life devastatingly predictable: one knew that one would indeed be read carefully, if only by censorious authorities; one thought one knew what would happen if something in particular were said.85
Intellectuals and artists in both systems were generally willing to avoid actions that would endanger their status. This did not make them any different than most citizens, who also wished to avoid trouble, but their visibility and prestige contributed in a significant way to maintaining the system.
Their credibility gave credibility.
In both systems, art served valuable propaganda functions. It met the public need for entertainment in a way that supported, or at least did not undermine, the official line. Humor and satire, for example, diverted attention from the real failings and evils of Nazism and socialism to the sometimes real failings of their enemies. Rather than having citizens laugh or scorn their governments, totalitarian societies attempt to divert that scorn in other directions.
Art also added significantly to the international stature of both states.
Thus the Nazis encouraged the building of theaters and art galleries, and the SED, despite a general shortage of building capacity, put major effort into restoring theaters damaged during the war or in building new ones. It even maintained two opera houses in Berlin, popular with foreign visitors.
Art did not exist for the sake of art in either system; artists who thought differently learned that quickly.
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7
Public and Private Life
The Propagandas of Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic Page 18