Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

  Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

  Originally published in German as Heil Hitler, Das Schwein Ist Tot!

  Lachen unter Hitler—Komik und Humor im Dritten Reich, by Eichborn Verlag

  © 2006 by Eichborn AG, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  Translation © 2011 by Jefferson Chase

  First Melville House printing: March 2011

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.mhpbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Herzog, Rudolph.

  [Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist tot! English]

  Dead funny: humor in Hitler’s Germany / Rudolph Herzog ; translated by Jefferson Chase.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in German as Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist tot! : Lachen unter Hitler : Komik und Humor im Dritten Reich … Eichborn Verlag, c2006 … Frankfurt am Main, Germany”–T.p. verso.

  eISBN: 978-1-935554-93-6

  1. Germany–Politics and government–1933-1945. 2. National socialism. 3. Holocaust, Jewish, 1939-1945. 4. German wit and humor–History and criticism. 5. Political satire, German–History and criticism. 6. Germany–Politics and government–1933-1945–Humor. 7. National socialism–Humor. 8. Holocaust, Jewish, 1939-1945–Humor. 9. German wit and humor. 10. Political satire, German. I. Title.

  DD256.5.H3746913 2011

  943.08602′07–dc22

  2011006705

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  I. Political Humor Under Hitler: An Inside Look at the Third Reich

  II. The Rise and Development of Political Humor

  III. The Nazi Seizure of Power 31

  IV. Humor and Persecution

  Photo Insert 1

  V. Humor and War

  Photo Insert 2

  VI. Humor and Annihilation

  VII. Laughing at Auschwitz? Humor and National Socialism after World War II

  Notes

  Works Cited

  Photo Credits

  I. POLITICAL HUMOR UNDER HITLER: AN INSIDE LOOK AT THE THIRD REICH

  IS IT PERMISSIBLE to laugh at Hitler? This is a question that is often debated in Germany, where, seeing the magnitude of the horrors the Third Reich committed in their name, many citizens still have difficulty taking a satirical look at it. And when others dare to do precisely that, they are accused of trivializing the Holocaust. Nonetheless, German humorists are always trying to tackle this most sensitive of topics, and jokes at the expense of the Nazis are at their most powerful and revealing when they are spoken in the economical, matter-of-course tone of the satirist.

  Is it legitimate to approach Auschwitz using techniques of satire, or would doing so downplay crimes so monstrous that they can hardly be put into words? Whatever one’s answer to this question, the fact is that Germans have always laughed at Hitler, even during the twelve years of his terrifying reign. There was no end to political jokes under his regime. Today some of these jokes retain their power, though others seem banal, or simply bad. What they all have in common, however, is the insight they give into what preoccupied and moved Hitler’s “racial community.” Ordinary people aimed sarcastic remarks at aspects of life that got on their nerves, and Nazi-era humorists—whether they sympathized with the soon to be defunct left-wing opposition or supported the fascist powers-that-were—made political jokes.

  By analyzing these jokes, we get unusual access to what people really thought during the “thousand-year Reich,” what annoyed them and what made them laugh, and also what they knew and otherwise took pains to repress from their conscious minds. At the same time, the reactions of the Nazi state to challenges from comedians and others who told political jokes reveal what types of humor the fascist leadership actively feared. This book is intended as a journey back to what is thought of as a humorless age, not to make readers laugh but to give them a new perspective on the most terrible era of German history. It does not ignore the moral debates of the postwar period, but it does not focus upon them, either.

  The sources used include interviews with people who lived though the Third Reich, among them the friends of a Protestant pastor who was murdered by the Nazis, the son of a famous comedian and animal trainer, and a well-known German cabaret artist. Other important sources were the biographies of prominent German humorists and the various collections of “whispered jokes” that were published in the immediate aftermath of World War II. People who laughed at Hitler within their own four walls, the authors of such compilations tried to suggest, disapproved of the Nazis and were perhaps even part of a tacit resistance. Recent research, however, has revealed that this notion, though a comforting idea, is little more than wishful thinking and historical legend–making.

  Political jokes were not a form of resistance. They were a release valve for pent-up popular anger. People told jokes in their neighborhood bars or on the street because they coveted a moment of liberation in which they could let off a bit of steam. That was in the interests of the Nazi leadership, no matter how humorlessly they may have portrayed themselves in the public sphere. Many Germans were conscious of the dark side of the Nazi regime. They were also annoyed at laws forcing them to do this or that and at party bigwigs who treated themselves to lives of luxury while making arbitrary decisions about the lives of others. But that didn’t translate into anti-Nazi protests. Those people who let off a bit of steam with a few jokes didn’t take to the streets or otherwise challenge the Nazi leadership.

  Conversely and significantly, the vast majority of the joke tellers who were denounced and brought before special Nazi courts received a mild punishment, if any. Usually they were let off with a warning. “Whispered jokes” were a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage. People who lived through the Third Reich also assert that political jokes were by no means spoken only in hushed tones in the private sphere. Only during the final phase of the war, when it was clear Germany was losing, were draconian punishments handed down for people who made fun of the Nazis. They will be discussed later in this book. As the Nazi system entered its death throes and tried to resist its inevitable demise, there were a conspicuous number of especially cutting jokes, but we have no way of knowing precisely how widespread they were.

  The vast majority of political jokes during Hitler’s reign were basically uncritical of the system, playing on the human weaknesses of Nazi leaders rather than on the crimes they were committing. Imperial Marshal Hermann Göring, for instance, was a popular target because of his pompous appearance and his love of glamour and medals. One typical joke ran:

  Göring recently added an arrow to the many medals on his chest. It’s there as a directional sign: “To be continued on my back.”

  Like many Göring jokes, the tone here is familial and affectionate, rather than harsh. The political humor of the time never alluded to the fact that Göring was a sadist who became a mass murderer as well. On the contrary, the imperial marshal appears most often as a sort of pompous but ultimately likeable Falstaff. In fact, Göring’s all too apparent human weaknesses endeared the second most powerful man in the Third Reich to broad segments of the population. The fact that he was a cold-blooded, cynical despot with no regard for human dignity did not prevent Germans from sympathizing with him right up to his postwar suicide while in Allied captivity.

  THERE WERE SOME JOKES, of course, that expressed sheer hatred for and rejection of the Nazi regime. These were known in Berlin, with its coarse, blunt, cosmopolitan sense of humor, as suref
ire jokes not because they were certain to get a laugh but because they were guaranteed to land anyone caught telling them in front of a firing squad or the middle of a concentration camp. But a good argument could be made that even these most critical jokes ultimately served to stabilize the system. For though some jokes expressed dissatisfaction with the Nazi regime, they also conveyed the message that there was nothing anyone could do about it—a message of paralyzing fatalism. For example, one joke during the Third Reich parodied the Nazi slogan “The Führer leads and we follow” as “The Führer takes the lead and we take what follows.” The subtext was that ordinary Germans had no means of affecting disastrous decisions made from on high. Another joke, which was popular in Vienna after Germany’s annexation of Austria, was similar in tone:

  A poster for the Winter Relief Fund reads: “No one should be allowed to go hungry or suffer from the cold.” A workersays to a colleague: “So now we’re not even allowed to do that.”

  The Winter Relief Fund was a propagandistically inspired Nazi charity that helped poorer Germans with heating and other costs in the colder months of the year.

  The resigned attitude expressed in such humor was not unique to jokes told by Germans with what the Nazis considered the proper racial pedigree. It was typical of Jewish humor too, where it had a harder edge and much sharper sarcasm. One typical Jewish joke plays on the color of the fascists’ trademark uniforms:

  A Swiss visiting a Jewish friend in the Third Reich asks him: “So how do you feel under the Nazis?” He answers: “Like a tapeworm. Every day, I wriggle my way through a mass of brown stuff and wait to be excreted.”

  But the fundamental difference between German and German-Jewish jokes was less a matter of tone or edge than of function. Whereas “whispered jokes” among Germans served primarily as a release valve for pent-up popular frustration, jokes told by their Jewish countrymen can be interpreted as an attempt to muster courage—or, as the great compiler of Jewish-German jokes Salcia Landmann put it, as an expression of Jews’ will to survive against all odds. These jokes make fun of the terrors Jews experienced every day. As such, the blackest Jewish humor expresses defiance: I laugh, therefore I am. My back is to the wall, and I’m still laughing. One example from the final years of World War II takes this attitude to a macabre extreme:

  Two Jews are waiting to face a firing squad, when the news arrives that they are to be hanged instead. One turns to the other and says: “You see—they’ve run out of ammunition!”

  The situation for these two Jews may be hopeless, says the punch line, but there’s hope for the Jewish people: the Nazi regime is about to collapse.

  Jewish humor was uniquely bleak and pulled no punches. The contrast in message and tone between this joke and the toothless gag about Göring’s medals could hardly be more stark. It demonstrates with painful clarity how drastically the perspective of Hitler’s victims diverged from that of the millions of accessories to the Führer’s crimes.

  HUMOR IS NOT just determined by the group affiliations of its makers and audience. It can only be understood with reference to the social context of its time. Many of the jokes in this book, especially those of the professional humorists and comedians of the Nazi era, can barely be recognized as funny today. It’s difficult for us to imagine that people could have laughed at jests so stale, superficial, and sedate. What makes them important today is the way they reflect, as all old jokes do, what truly occupied, amused, and annoyed the people of their time. They open a window on the Third Reich, giving us an inside view more authentic in its way than can be found in official historical documents.

  Modern Germans don’t like to admit it, but their perception of the Hitler years is based largely on the propaganda films of the era. Weekly newsreels and Leni Riefenstahl’s films are the artifacts their documentaries always cite—artifacts that were calculated and ideologically tainted. They were never a representation of reality or an expression of what was truly going on in the Nazi system. Even today they deceive the viewer, through the force of images that even the most cautionary commentary can hardly put into proper context.

  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.

  II. THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL HUMOR

  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:

  Somewhere in the Empire a man was found who bore a striking resemblance to Augustus Caesar. He was introduced to the emperor, who, surprised at the existence of this doppelgänger, asked him, “Tell me, was your mother ever in Rome?” “No,” answered the man, “but my father sure was.”