Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany

by Rudolph Herzog

  One day, Oskar von Hindenburg and Otto Meissner were quarreling about who should make a decision in their leader’s name. In the end, Meissner said, “Listen, who’s president here? You or me?”

  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”:

  A street cleaner is seen raking up leaves in front of the presidential palace for the tenth time in one day. A passerby asks him, “Why are you sweeping up again?” He answers, “Because otherwise, the president will sign them.”

  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.

  The complicated and often utterly silly gags, which took up more space in the film than the plot, are easily forgivable as products of the age. The film doesn’t pile on action at the hectic tempo of the postmodern era. Instead, it draws its life from the affirmative allure of the Golden Twenties.

  A cast of stars also ensured the film’s mass appeal. The Three from the Gas Station marked the beginning of the mercurial rise of the young comedian Rühmann, who quickly became a national star and a personal favorite of Goebbels, while a far less happy fate befell his costar, the Jewish cabaret performer Kurt Gerron. In The Three from the Gas Station, Gerron portrays a brash lawyer who informs the film’s hero, in a singularly absurd fashion, that they’re bankrupt. One of the high points of the picture was an almost dadaistic telephone exchange between Rühmann and Gerron. It was the collision of two talents, a young one with a bright future and an older one who was already beyond the zenith of his career.

  Gerron, who had excelled in the role of the dubious magician in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, enjoyed a successful directorial career in the early 1930s. But he was best remembered as a likeable overweight character actor. His and his fellow Jewish comedians set the tone for the years between the wars. The humorous world of the Twenties was fast-paced, full of cabaret performers, clowns, and satirists such as Gerron or Otto Wallburg, who in some fifty films played a wide range of well-meaning characters, from average Joes up to state consuls. Above all, Wallburg was popular for his strange, stuttering speech, or “blubbering,” which attracted no shortage of imitators. Another important figure was Willy Rosen, whose smart musical arrangements delighted audiences in a number of prominent Berlin theaters, including the Scala and Kabarett der Komiker.

  In Vienna, which was the other capital of Jewish humor, second only to Berlin, there was the brilliant Fritz Grünbaum, a small, weaselly, sharp-tongued actor, and his partner, Karl Farkas, a man with a large crooked nose and an amazing talent for improvisation. Farkas was known for his ability to spontaneously come up with rhymes for words called out by the audience. A contemporary wrote of his act:

  Once an anti-Semite in the audience tried to provoke him, challenging him to find a rhyme for “Jewish thief.” He took a rose from a vase and said: “Here is the rose, and there is the leaf. Here is the Jew, and there is the thief.”

  Grünbaum and Farkas were the Viennese equivalent of Laurel and Hardy in terms of both fame and popularity. Paul Morgan was another popular comic actor; Friedrich Hollaender composed much of the music used in the acts. The list could go on. It was a golden age of Jewish comedy, and all of Austria laughed along with the stars. But within a few years, all that was over. The witty remarks about everyday life, the ironic couplets and the clever dialogues fell silent. Some Jewish comedians went into exile. But Kurt Gerron, Otto Wallburg, Willy Rosen, Fritz Grünbaum, along with many others, died in Hitler’s death camps.

  III. THE NAZI SEIZURE OF POWER

  WHEN THE NAZIS came to power in 1933, they had already passed the zenith of their popularity. In the national elections of November 6, 1932, the NSDAP, or (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) had remained the strongest party, but it had lost roughly two million votes and 34 seats in parliament, mostly to parties on the far left and the conservative nationalists. The path to power seemed blocked, but weaknesses within the political system of the Weimar Republic conspired with the unhappy constellation of leaders at the head of the German state to allow Hitler to become chancellor the following year. In retrospect, it is all too obvious that mainstream politicians underestimated the Nazi leader, who easily played off his nondescript rivals against one another.

  Still, it’s difficult to comprehend how the political establishment could have allowed itself to be so manipulated. In public appearances Hitler vacillated between awkwardness and arrogance and often came off as little more than a beer tent–inspired blowhard. Nazi party events were as shrill as they were seductive, and their leader cut a bizarre figure, conflating Jews and “Bolsheviks” in endless tirades and preaching the values of Germanness while publishing garbled books written in miserable German. The pillars of Weimar society would have known all too well how deluded and extremist Nazi ideology was, and perhaps for that reason they failed to understand how dangerous its chief exponent could be. On the contrary, they thought they could tame the upstart Hitler by giving him political responsibility. Few of his contemporaries realized that he was not just a flash-in-the-pan demagogue but instead a cunning tactician who knew how to maneuver and modulate his positions.

  Most bourgeois Germans associated the NSDAP with the thugs of the SA stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, who marched through the streets in baggy military pants making a lot of noise. Their self-appointed “Führer” with his ridiculous moustache was criminally underrated. For instance, the author of this police report from 1927 was singularly unimpressed by Hitler’s oratory:

  [Hitler] speaks without notes, initially in drawn-out fashion for emphasis. Later on, the words come tumbling out, and in overly dramatic passages, his voice is strained and barely understandable. He waves his hands and arms around, jumps back and forth excitably, and always seems to be trying to captivate his attentive, thousand-strong audience. When he’s interr
upted by applause, he theatrically stretches out his hands. The word no, which occurs repeatedly toward the end of his speech, is stagy and pointedly emphasized. In and of itself, his talent as a speaker was … for this reporter nothing special.

  Hitler as a comic figure? When bizarre ranks of brown-shirted SA men marched past, singing “Germanic” songs, many left-wing intellectual observers at the time didn’t know whether they should laugh or cry.

  The new political movement was both pompous and grotesque, and Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor probably seemed to his many German detractors like a bad joke. One contemporary recalls the Nazis’ triumphant marches after Hitler attained power:

  In the torchlight, the faces under their SA caps almost resembled those of the martial warriors from the Nazis’ propaganda posters. We had often mocked those Nordic profiles. We knew the dull visages of our adversaries all too well. But now here they were, actually marching past us, intoxicated by their triumph, bellowing out their idiotic favorite song: “When Jewish blood squirts from the knife, happy days will return.”

  But these troops of thugs and their leadership were serious about their murderous words. “Now, the cleansing process will commence in all areas,” Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, declared shortly after the party seized power.

  In January 1933, Hitler’s cabinet met for the first time, with the Nazi leader ostensibly under the restraining influence of his coalition partners from the mainstream parties. But the representatives of political reason soon fell under the sway of Hitler’s lupine charm. Like the audience in the street, they were blinded by the marches and propagandistic spectacles in the initial days of the Nazi-led government and quickly became little more than marionettes, as Hitler moved to consolidate his authority. The spirit of the times, so it seemed, favored the National Socialists. With breathtaking rapidity, Hitler carried out his plans for getting rid of multiparty democracy by “legal” means. He was able to do so not just because the Nazis acted ruthlessly and effectively, but because competing political forces put up a halfhearted resistance. The general mood among the citizenry also undermined the ability of the Weimar state to resist the attack from within. Hitler succeeded in channeling the emotional energies released by the Nazi ascent to power into a feeling that things were getting better. The new enthusiasm engendered in the political mainstream was accompanied by a sense of relief, even joy, that democracy was coming to an end. Many Germans felt that the system was ineffective, outmoded, and incapable of solving problems. Hitler achieved overnight what the Weimar Republic had been unable to do in fifteen years: he won over the hearts of the people.

  With this change in the political mood and the growing desire for a strong political leadership, criticism of Hitler receded into the background. German humor, too, changed sides. Many comedians aligned themselves with the political winners, although that didn’t make their jokes any funnier. Cabaret performer Dieter Hildebrandt, who spent his boyhood in the Third Reich, recalls an evening of entertainment staged by the Hitler Youth, in which the older members played a cabaret skit skewering Weimar politics:

  “What moved people in Germany, what made them split their sides laughing, was the musty old Weimar Republic and its democracy. The entire public shared this view, and they rolled on the floor giggling. On the evening in question, the skit was set in parliament. One of the boys, dressed as a parliamentary deputy, slept the entire time. When suddenly an alarm clock went off, the audience cried with delight. Another deputy had a speech impediment; a third, a problem with flatulence. The entire evening was devoted to making fun of a democracy that had passed its sell-by date, and the audience couldn’t get enough. That was the mood. Even back then, there was a saying: Germans didn’t just reject democracy—they positively hated it. But they didn’t want their former monarchy back, either. That also put them off. In this sense, the Nazis arrived on the scene at precisely the right moment.”

  The only aspect of the Nazis’ rise that attracted popular displeasure was the abruptness with which party bigwigs seized coveted positions in society. On every front, from the police force to civic offices, people were pushed out of their jobs and replaced by party loyalists. The speed with which this happened was unprecedented. For example, in Germany’s largest bureaucracy, the Prussian Interior Ministry, dozens of “voluntary commissioners” were appointed for the purposes of political “cleansing.” They immediately began firing people and hiring replacements.

  Not everyone was pleased by the new career paths opening up for fascist loyalists, and the jokes of the period include a number of barbs directed at Nazi social climbers. More than anything, people were concerned about their own welfare, which suddenly seemed in doubt. What happens if your new director, superior commissioner, or department head is a Nazi? How do you reach an arrangement with the new fascist bosses? These were the worries expressed in a number of sarcastic jokes. One untranslatable example played on the party acronym, NSDAP. The letters, as the joke ran, actually stood for “Na? Suchst du auch Pöstchen?”—“So, you’re looking for a comfy little job as well?” For non–party members, the fear of losing positions of authority and privilege to Nazis was hardly unreasonable, and such worries stirred Germans far more than any concern for their Jewish fellow citizens or for members of the political opposition, even though the Nazis left no doubt that the future would be most unpleasant for both groups. Charity, as far as the future was concerned, began at home.

  Interviewing witnesses to this history and analyzing jokes from the time about fascist officeholders and unofficial community sheriffs, one quickly comes to the conclusion that the citizens of Hitler’s Germany did not take small-time Nazis very seriously at this point. Germans did not see them as the executors of a deeply criminal regime but rather as brazenly comic figures who were elbowing their way into the public sphere. One joke played on the occasional jibes against “reactionaries” found in Nazi propaganda:

  Question: What is a reactionary? Answer: Someone who occupies a well-paying job coveted by a Nazi.

  Similar in thrust, although somewhat more original, was another popular quip:

  A cook is trying to make fried potatoes without lard and begins waving a swastika banner over the oven. When asked why, she answers: “Under this flag, a lot of lard-asses seem to have come out pretty well.”

  One Nazi bigwig who was especially crass about taking what he wanted was Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In 1939, after the annexation of Austria, von Ribbentrop took a fancy to the idyllic Fuschl Castle and simply dispossessed its owner, Gustav Edler von Remiz. This forced entry into the landed nobility earned him the nickname “von Ribbensnob.”

  The crude behavior of Ribbentrop and other fascist officials upset the German populace far more than the brutal Nazi pogroms. Popular doubts about the party were expressed in a political joke that turned on two meanings of the German word wählen: “to dial a telephone number” and “to vote for someone”:

  The telephone rings, and a man says: “Hello, can I speak to Müller?” “Who?” “Müller. Is Müller there?” “No, my name is Schmidt.” “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have dialed the wrong person.” “No big deal, we all did that in the last election.”

  Hitler himself had not been directly elected, but as the leader of the party that came out best in the general elections he had been charged by President Paul von Hindenburg with forming a coalition to take over state power. Nonetheless, in the early days of the Third Reich, there was no significant anti-Hitler opposition. On the contrary, historical contemporaries consistently remember the time prior to World War II as the “good years” of Nazism, the period in which unemployment declined and Germans began to feel confident again after a decade of deep insecurity and depression. Such an attitude may appear cynical now, considering that along with the economic upswing came an increasing number of government strictures, the rapid dismantling of civil rights, and violent suppression of the opposition. Nevertheless, an extraordinary number of p
eople felt that that things had changed for the better.

  The noticeable improvement in the economy and the youthful optimism the Nazis spread obscured the dark side of the regime. In addition, Hitler knew how to portray his own ruthless grasp for power, which extended to the most insignificant office, as a “national uprising.” There was virtually no public resistance to the bright future that was constantly being trumpeted by the Ministry of Propaganda. The ideological techniques Joseph Goebbels used to blind the German populace were effective. It took Mussolini seven years to amass the sort of power in Italy that the Nazis were able to grab in Germany in mere months. The remaining parliamentary structures quickly collapsed, in part because they lacked popular support to begin with. People on the street suppressed any unease they might have felt at Hitler’s rapid and brutal seizure of power and told themselves it was no use going against the tide. Individual Germans repressed concerns about, or simply ignored, the terrible consequences awaiting many of their fellow citizens. They were more concerned with establishing their own place in the new Aryan racial community.

  Tellingly, in the months after Hitler came to power, the ranks of the Nazi party swelled. People from across the political spectrum ended traditional allegiances and joined the NSDAP, and conversions from Communism were particularly frequent. Both Hitler himself and the populace took bemused note of the numbers of so-called March violets, latecomers to the Nazi party. One popular joke ran: