Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

  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:

  The first thing these knights did was to tie up their horses, whereupon each one went about his strange tasks, all of which yielded demise and ruin. While some of them set about to butcher, boil, and roast, others stormed the house from top to bottom. Even the secret master chamber was not safe, as if the Golden Fleece were concealed within.

  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:

  During a native rebellion in German East Africa, the Imperial Ministry in Berlin issued the following order to its representatives on the ground: “The natives are to be instructed that on pain of harsh penalties, every rebellion must be announced, in writing, six weeks before it breaks out.”

  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:

  A customer goes into the gifts section of a big department store to buy himself a keepsake. But all he sees are busts and more busts of the Kaiser. They’re made of plaster, and there’s no visible difference between any of them. The customer stands there at a loss, until a salesman walks up, coughs, and asks politely: “Have you made your selection?”

  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.

  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:r />
  There once was a Kaiser who ruled over an endlessly big, rich and beautiful land. Like all other emperors, he possessed a chamber full of treasures in which, amidst all of the shining and glittering jewels, there was a piper’s pipe. It was a strange instrument. When one looked through one of its four holes, what wonders there were to see! There was a landscape, tiny but full of life: a Thomas landscape with clouds by Böcklin and lakes by Leistikov. Tiny women in the style of Reznicek turned up their noses at figures by the caricaturist Zille, and a Meunier farm girl carried an armful of flowers by Orlik. In short, the whole of “modern” German art was in the pipe. And the Kaiser? He couldn’t give a whistle.

  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:

  After the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg visited Frankfurt am Main. He stopped in front of a building he didn’t know and asked what it was. “That’s St. Paul’s Cathedral,” someone explained. With characteristic modesty, Hindenburg replied: “Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered, I’m just here for a few days.”

  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:

  Saint Peter’s complaint: “Every time Hindenburg visits for the weekend, I find a star missing.”

  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 Germany, a new measure is to be introduced. One Gör equals the maximum number of medals that can be hung on a single human chest.

  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:

  In East Germany, a new measure was introduced at the end of the Sixties: the Ulb.

  One Ulb was the time an East German needed to get out of his chair and change the channel when the secretary was speaking on TV. And what was one one-hundredth of an Ulb? A Schnitz.

  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:

  Who would be saved if the Kaiser, the Chancellor, and their generals all capsized while on a voyage at sea? Germany.

  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:

  Stresemann is traveling by train, and the engineer has to stop at a small station because of damage to the tracks ahead. The station master is then arrested. Why? Because just as Stresemann is alighting, the unfortunate employee says to the panicky passengers, “Please step down.”

  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:

  After the Nazis came to power, a decree was issued that a picture of Hitler must be hung in all government offices. Werner Finck created a comic routine out of it … Willi Schaeffer [the director of the cabaret] carried a picture onto the stage so that the audience could only see the back. Everyone in the audience, though, thought, “That’s a picture of Hitler.” Suddenly Schaeffer stumbled and almost dropped it. Finck hurried up to him, calling out, “Don’t topple, don’t topple!”—which was greeted with uproarious laughter.

  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: