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Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler's Germany
In Nazi Germany, telling jokes about Hitler could get you killed
Hitler and Göring are standing on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the Berliners’ faces. Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
When a woman told this joke in Germany in 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to death by guillotine—it didn’t matter that her husband was a good German soldier who died in battle.
In this groundbreaking work of history, Rudolph Herzog takes up such stories to show how widespread humor was during the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating and frightening from the suppression of the anti-Nazi cabaret scene of the 1930s, to jokes made at the expense of the Nazis during WWII, to the collections of “whispered jokes” that were published in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Herzog argues that jokes provide a hitherto missing chapter of WWII history. The jokes show that not all Germans were hypnotized by Nazi propaganda, and, in taking on subjects like Nazi concentration camps, they record a public acutely aware of the horrors of the regime. Thus Dead Funny is a tale of terrible silence and cowardice, but also of occasional and inspiring bravery.
Hitler and Göring are standing on top of the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on the Berliners’ faces. Göring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
When a woman told this joke in Germany in 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to death by guillotine—it didn’t matter that her husband was a good German soldier who died in battle.
In this groundbreaking work of history, Rudolph Herzog takes up such stories to show how widespread humor was during the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating and frightening from the suppression of the anti-Nazi cabaret scene of the 1930s, to jokes made at the expense of the Nazis during WWII, to the collections of “whispered jokes” that were published in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Herzog argues that jokes provide a hitherto missing chapter of WWII history. The jokes show that not all Germans were hypnotized by Nazi propaganda, and, in taking on subjects like Nazi concentration camps, they record a public acutely aware of the horrors of the regime. Thus Dead Funny is a tale of terrible silence and cowardice, but also of occasional and inspiring bravery.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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September 14, 2015
I came across this book serendipitously. A few months back, there was a debate raging on GR (even now going on with reduced decibel levels) that whether anyone should be allowed to satirise Hitler. This was triggered by the publication of Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes. One GR member, without even reading the book, effectively cursed all the people who would read this book and post a positive review about it.
I was intrigued. Being a person who finds humour in everything, I was surprised that someone could take such an extreme view. Then I found that she was not alone in her views; for many people, the Holocaust was a tragedy which cannot be compared to anything which came before and after, and Hitler was an evil beyond description, which should not be analysed or interpreted, just condemned. As far as I was concerned, this was pure poppycock. Hitler was a dictator who committed genocide to a previously unprecedented level, and I would not choose him as a dinner companion - but he was human, just like you and me.
So I embarked on a journey to discover Hitler and the Third Reich in general, and came across a reference to this book in one of the discussions. Immediately, I decided that it was a must-read. Thankfully, I could find a copy online.
------------------------------------------------------
This is not just a history of humour in the Reich, though it is that too. Herzog traces the evolution of political humour and satire in Germany during Hitler's ascent, reign, decline and demise: and in the process, asks some relevant questions.
Yes, the Germans have always laughed.
------------------------------------------------------
Political humour existed in Germany for a long time. The first German adventure novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, follows the exploits of a simple shepherd in the devastated and lawless landscape of Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. The horrors that Simplicius sees, Herzog writes, is described in language that is “cheerful and disarmingly ironic”. To quote from the book:
Herzog says the same black humour can be found in Jewish jokes, who may have found the strength to tolerate their unbearable situation by laughing at it.
The second joke, when Germany had its back to the wall during the war and Hitler was trying to finish off all the Jews as quickly as possible, made me laugh out loud and brought tears to my eyes at the same time.
------------------------------------------------------
Up until the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were not seen as the dangers to society they were, and consequently the butt of many political jokes, albeit in a good-natured way. Hitler’s over-the-top rhetoric and shameless posturing was especially suited for satire.
Some of the Hitler jokes (one of which was popular even in my schooldays) show an extremely irreverent approach:
It seems that the Nazi leadership did not crack down on the jokers in the initial phases of the consolidation of power. In fact, they even promoted it to a certain extent, to make a show of the liberal nature of the government. One interesting case in point is the publication of a book of anti-Hitler caricatures, edited by Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the Nazi responsible for dealing with the foreign press. Hanfstaengl published the cartoons with explanatory notes to show how the foreign press was “maligning” the beloved Fuhrer.
One has to understand there was an even more ludicrous entity to be made fun of in Germany – the ineffective Weimar democracy. Many people saw Hitler’s assumption of power as a good thing, something to bring the broken nation back to its feet. And jokes at the expense of the Weimar government were welcome to the Nazis.
There were many artists and intellectuals who were fans of the Nazi government. The Munich cabaret performer and early Nazi sympathizer Weiß Ferdl, for example, wrote a song praising Nazification and comparing it to the Nazi campaigns against jazz and other forms of “nigger music.” He wrote a song, in all seriousness, about how Hitler has brought all supposedly degenerate elements “into line”. (Sadly, we can see this attitude among many people in modern democracies too: people don’t understand how valuable freedom is until they lose it.)
Nazis also used humour to their advantage by encouraging the creation of slapstick without any satirical content, and by encouraging offensive and tasteless anti-Jew jokes which nobody would find funny today (to be frank, I find many similarities among these jokes and present-day political jokes targeting Muslims). People, in their need to vent off frustration, must have laughed at these – it must have helped satisfy their hidden anti-Semitic urges also.
However, those comedians who refused to toe the Party line soon fell out of favour. The creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture which was affiliated to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, which required any artist, writer or actor who wanted to work in Germany to join it effectively killed all creative protest, by ensuring that they would get no work. Also, acts of active persecution like book burnings, the jailing of artists and writers etc. started in right earnest, supported by intellectuals like Ferdl.
The German cabaret, however, decided not to sit idle – and it is this entity which has the longest comic (and tragic!) history under the Reich.
------------------------------------------------------
The cabaret had a long history of satirical humour, and they lampooned everybody mercilessly, including the Nazis. The story of Werner Finck is a case in point. This courageous comedian kept on lampooning the Nazis under their very own noses, and was tolerated for a surprisingly long time. Herzog quotes the following verses, built on Nazi slogans but cleverly putting them on their head:
Werner Finck
Finck was ultimately arrested and sent to a concentration camp. However, his relative popularity helped spare him the guards' brutality. Finck managed to keep his humour alive even within the camp, and Herzog quotes the following lines from an evening’s entertainment he managed to put up there:
(I find this equivalent to the story of the Jester who was sentenced to be hanged for making puns. Reprieved at the last minute on the condition that he will pun no more, he cannot pass up the chance to say “No noose is good news!” and is immediately hanged. You can’t keep the wisecrackers down!)
Many of the cabaret performers migrated to Austria, among them Klaus and Erika Mann, the children of Thomas Mann. Their cabaret house, known as the “Pepper Mill”, subjected the Nazi regime to scathing criticism, using the medium of metaphors and allusions. The following lines from Erika, which are transparently about Hitler, illustrate the point:
This is only an example: there were many others who were equally vitriolic. However, as Hitler increased his geographic spread, there was nowhere for the satirists to run to, and criticism within the Reich stopped.
The most tragic fate befell the Jewish comedians, who could not even escape by toeing the Nazi line. The case of Kurt Gerron is illustrative. Gerron tried to escape the horror by emigrating; but he was ultimately captured and sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Czech Republic. The Nazis used to use this ghetto to fool the Danish Red Cross workers into thinking that the Jews were getting humane treatment. So, immediately ahead of a visit from them, the camp commandants would ship off large numbers of inmates to Auschwitz, set up temporary facades of coffee-shops and theatres, and the prisoners would be ordered to stage operas.
Kurt Gerron
Gerron was forced to form a cabaret inside the ghetto with fellow Jewish performers waiting for deportation to the gas chambers, and perform for the benefit of fellow inmates and camp officers – not only when the Red Cross visited, but whenever the sadistic Nazis were in mood for entertainment. (He was once even forced to perform in an area in which dead corpses had been piled up. Gerron took the help of blind inmates who could not see the bodies to pass them from hand to hand and clear the area before the performance.) He was even forced to direct a propaganda film.
Ultimately, just a couple of days before Auschwitz was closed down, Kurt Gerron met his end in the gas chambers there – a tragic end to a life dedicated to laughter.
------------------------------------------------------
In the last chapter of the book, Herzog asks the pertinent question: are we allowed to laugh at Hitler?
In a previous chapter, he had cited the instance of two great comedies from Hollywood, one a huge hit (Chaplin’s The Great Dictator) and the other a failure (To Be or Not To Be by Ernst Lubitsch). According to Herzog, Chaplin’s movie was a success because it was released before the USA entered the war: the events of Europe were still far away. In the case of To Be or Not To Be, Americans were fighting on the front when the movie came out, the scale of Nazi atrocities were more clearly understood, and people felt that it was no laughing matter –so the film was universally panned.
In a way, this informs the critique of the whole question of laughing at Hitler. American Holocaust scholar Terence Des Pres has summed up three conventions regarding representations of the Holocaust, which has been added to by cultural historians Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert to form five rules in all:
From Mel Brooks's 1968 movie The Producers
However, in 1968, Mel Brooks (a Jew himself) broke all conventions with The Producers, and followed it up with his remake of To Be or Not To Be in 1983. Roberto Benigni of Italy came up with Life is Beautiful in 1997, a fairy tale story of heartbreak and survival in a concentration camp – an “almost-fantasy”. There was a British TV comedy in 1990 titled Heil, Honey, I’m Home depicting Hitler as a suburban twit which was criticised widely; and most provocatively, the German cartoonist Walter Moers’ comic series Adolf, the Nazi Sow in which Hitler has survived the war and is living in suburban Germany along with Goering, who is working as a transvestite prostitute.
And of course, the book which I mentioned in the beginning, which started me on this trail.
Clearly, taboos are melting.
------------------------------------------------------
I think I will end this review with a final quote from Herzog.
(Emphasis mine)
Yes, that is indeed the pertinent question - and one that we should be asking ourselves in the current political scenario, when xenophobia is on the rise worldwide. There may be potential Hitlers waiting in the wings, waiting to ride to power on our prejudices.
I was intrigued. Being a person who finds humour in everything, I was surprised that someone could take such an extreme view. Then I found that she was not alone in her views; for many people, the Holocaust was a tragedy which cannot be compared to anything which came before and after, and Hitler was an evil beyond description, which should not be analysed or interpreted, just condemned. As far as I was concerned, this was pure poppycock. Hitler was a dictator who committed genocide to a previously unprecedented level, and I would not choose him as a dinner companion - but he was human, just like you and me.
So I embarked on a journey to discover Hitler and the Third Reich in general, and came across a reference to this book in one of the discussions. Immediately, I decided that it was a must-read. Thankfully, I could find a copy online.
------------------------------------------------------
This is not just a history of humour in the Reich, though it is that too. Herzog traces the evolution of political humour and satire in Germany during Hitler's ascent, reign, decline and demise: and in the process, asks some relevant questions.
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.
Yes, the Germans have always laughed.
------------------------------------------------------
Political humour existed in Germany for a long time. The first German adventure novel, The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus, follows the exploits of a simple shepherd in the devastated and lawless landscape of Europe after the Thirty Years’ War. The horrors that Simplicius sees, Herzog writes, is described in language that is “cheerful and disarmingly ironic”. To quote from the book:
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.
Herzog says the same black humour can be found in Jewish jokes, who may have found the strength to tolerate their unbearable situation by laughing at it.
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.”
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 second joke, when Germany had its back to the wall during the war and Hitler was trying to finish off all the Jews as quickly as possible, made me laugh out loud and brought tears to my eyes at the same time.
------------------------------------------------------
Up until the Reichstag fire, the Nazis were not seen as the dangers to society they were, and consequently the butt of many political jokes, albeit in a good-natured way. Hitler’s over-the-top rhetoric and shameless posturing was especially suited for satire.
Some of the Hitler jokes (one of which was popular even in my schooldays) show an extremely irreverent approach:
Hitler visits a lunatic asylum, where the patients all dutifully perform the German salute. Suddenly, Hitler sees one man whose arm is not raised. “Why don’t you greet me the same way as everyone else,” he hisses. The man answers: “My Führer, I’m an orderly, not a madman!”
Tünnes and Schäl are walking across a cow pasture, when Tünnes steps in a mound of cowshit and almost falls down. Immediately he raises his right arm and yells, “Heil Hitler!” “Are you crazy?” asks Schäl. “What are you doing? There’s no one else around here.” “I’m following regulations,” Tünnes answers. “Whenever you step into anywhere, you’re supposed to say ‘Heil Hitler.’ ”
A drunkard passes a vendor on the street who is crying, “Heilkräuter!”(“Medicinal herbs!”). “Heil Kräuter?” he ponders. “We must have a new government.”
It seems that the Nazi leadership did not crack down on the jokers in the initial phases of the consolidation of power. In fact, they even promoted it to a certain extent, to make a show of the liberal nature of the government. One interesting case in point is the publication of a book of anti-Hitler caricatures, edited by Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the Nazi responsible for dealing with the foreign press. Hanfstaengl published the cartoons with explanatory notes to show how the foreign press was “maligning” the beloved Fuhrer.
One has to understand there was an even more ludicrous entity to be made fun of in Germany – the ineffective Weimar democracy. Many people saw Hitler’s assumption of power as a good thing, something to bring the broken nation back to its feet. And jokes at the expense of the Weimar government were welcome to the Nazis.
There were many artists and intellectuals who were fans of the Nazi government. The Munich cabaret performer and early Nazi sympathizer Weiß Ferdl, for example, wrote a song praising Nazification and comparing it to the Nazi campaigns against jazz and other forms of “nigger music.” He wrote a song, in all seriousness, about how Hitler has brought all supposedly degenerate elements “into line”. (Sadly, we can see this attitude among many people in modern democracies too: people don’t understand how valuable freedom is until they lose it.)
Nazis also used humour to their advantage by encouraging the creation of slapstick without any satirical content, and by encouraging offensive and tasteless anti-Jew jokes which nobody would find funny today (to be frank, I find many similarities among these jokes and present-day political jokes targeting Muslims). People, in their need to vent off frustration, must have laughed at these – it must have helped satisfy their hidden anti-Semitic urges also.
However, those comedians who refused to toe the Party line soon fell out of favour. The creation of the Reich Chamber of Culture which was affiliated to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, which required any artist, writer or actor who wanted to work in Germany to join it effectively killed all creative protest, by ensuring that they would get no work. Also, acts of active persecution like book burnings, the jailing of artists and writers etc. started in right earnest, supported by intellectuals like Ferdl.
The German cabaret, however, decided not to sit idle – and it is this entity which has the longest comic (and tragic!) history under the Reich.
------------------------------------------------------
The cabaret had a long history of satirical humour, and they lampooned everybody mercilessly, including the Nazis. The story of Werner Finck is a case in point. This courageous comedian kept on lampooning the Nazis under their very own noses, and was tolerated for a surprisingly long time. Herzog quotes the following verses, built on Nazi slogans but cleverly putting them on their head:
A fresh wind is blowing
We want to laugh again
Humor, awaken!
We’ll give you free rein.
While the lion is crowned
And Mars rules the hour
Good cheer, which we all love,
Is slowly turning sour.
Let’s not allow the devil
Or any other powers
To rob us of the fun
That is rightfully ours.
Let the power of words
Vibrate the eardrums
And if anyone objects, he can
Kiss us on our bums.
Werner Finck
Finck was ultimately arrested and sent to a concentration camp. However, his relative popularity helped spare him the guards' brutality. Finck managed to keep his humour alive even within the camp, and Herzog quotes the following lines from an evening’s entertainment he managed to put up there:
Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.
And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.
You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are good reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.
(I find this equivalent to the story of the Jester who was sentenced to be hanged for making puns. Reprieved at the last minute on the condition that he will pun no more, he cannot pass up the chance to say “No noose is good news!” and is immediately hanged. You can’t keep the wisecrackers down!)
Many of the cabaret performers migrated to Austria, among them Klaus and Erika Mann, the children of Thomas Mann. Their cabaret house, known as the “Pepper Mill”, subjected the Nazi regime to scathing criticism, using the medium of metaphors and allusions. The following lines from Erika, which are transparently about Hitler, illustrate the point:
I am the prince of the land of lies
I can lie to shake the trees
Good lord, am I a skillful liar!
No one lies so brilliantly.
I lie so inventively
That the blue falls from the sky
See lies flying through the air
That lying gale’s source am I.
Now summer is a-comin’ in
And the trees are all in bud
The field are full of violets
And war does not shed blood.
Ha, ha. You fell for it.
In your faces I can read it.
Although it was completely false,
Every one of you believed it.
Lying is nice
Lying is fine
Lying brings luck
Lying bucks you up.
Lying has lovely long legs.
Lies make you rich
Lies are well-stitched
Seem like they’re true
Wash sin from you
And follow on a leash like dogs.
Back in my home, the land of lies,
The truth must remain unspoken.
A colorful web of lying strands
Keeps our great Empire unbroken.
We have it good, we have it nice
We kill all our enemies
And award ourselves the highest device
Of honor for our false glories.
Once a liar, nevermore trusted;
Always a liar, always believed!
That he speaks anything but truth
Is an utterly intolerable idea.
Lying is easy
Everything’s grand
If you can do it,
False means to our end.
To the land of lies
Lying brings fame
Lies are colorful and elegant
While gray truth looks always the same.
In order to protect my land
I mix the poison and set the fires
If you doubt me, I’ll shut you up,
I, the prince of the land of lies.
This is only an example: there were many others who were equally vitriolic. However, as Hitler increased his geographic spread, there was nowhere for the satirists to run to, and criticism within the Reich stopped.
The most tragic fate befell the Jewish comedians, who could not even escape by toeing the Nazi line. The case of Kurt Gerron is illustrative. Gerron tried to escape the horror by emigrating; but he was ultimately captured and sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto in the Czech Republic. The Nazis used to use this ghetto to fool the Danish Red Cross workers into thinking that the Jews were getting humane treatment. So, immediately ahead of a visit from them, the camp commandants would ship off large numbers of inmates to Auschwitz, set up temporary facades of coffee-shops and theatres, and the prisoners would be ordered to stage operas.
Kurt Gerron
Gerron was forced to form a cabaret inside the ghetto with fellow Jewish performers waiting for deportation to the gas chambers, and perform for the benefit of fellow inmates and camp officers – not only when the Red Cross visited, but whenever the sadistic Nazis were in mood for entertainment. (He was once even forced to perform in an area in which dead corpses had been piled up. Gerron took the help of blind inmates who could not see the bodies to pass them from hand to hand and clear the area before the performance.) He was even forced to direct a propaganda film.
Ultimately, just a couple of days before Auschwitz was closed down, Kurt Gerron met his end in the gas chambers there – a tragic end to a life dedicated to laughter.
------------------------------------------------------
In the last chapter of the book, Herzog asks the pertinent question: are we allowed to laugh at Hitler?
In a previous chapter, he had cited the instance of two great comedies from Hollywood, one a huge hit (Chaplin’s The Great Dictator) and the other a failure (To Be or Not To Be by Ernst Lubitsch). According to Herzog, Chaplin’s movie was a success because it was released before the USA entered the war: the events of Europe were still far away. In the case of To Be or Not To Be, Americans were fighting on the front when the movie came out, the scale of Nazi atrocities were more clearly understood, and people felt that it was no laughing matter –so the film was universally panned.
In a way, this informs the critique of the whole question of laughing at Hitler. American Holocaust scholar Terence Des Pres has summed up three conventions regarding representations of the Holocaust, which has been added to by cultural historians Kathy Laster and Heinz Steinert to form five rules in all:
1. The Holocaust shall be represented, in its totality, as a unique event, as a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history.
2. Representations of the Holocaust shall be as accurate and faithful as possible to the facts and conditions of the event, without change or manipulation for any reason—artistic reasons included.
3. The Holocaust shall be approached as a solemn or even sacred event with seriousness admitting no response that might obscure its enormity or dishonor its dead.
4. The province for depictions of the Holocaust is “high culture.” Popular cultural productions are automatically considered suspect and more superficial. Comedies appeal mostly to an audience that isn’t necessarily well educated. Therefore, it’s more difficult for comedies to be taken seriously as high culture.
5. The artist needs to have the correct attitude and motivation: altruism, good intentions, the proper moral and didactic aims. Even when a piece of culture is comic, the artist has to display appropriate seriousness.
From Mel Brooks's 1968 movie The Producers
However, in 1968, Mel Brooks (a Jew himself) broke all conventions with The Producers, and followed it up with his remake of To Be or Not To Be in 1983. Roberto Benigni of Italy came up with Life is Beautiful in 1997, a fairy tale story of heartbreak and survival in a concentration camp – an “almost-fantasy”. There was a British TV comedy in 1990 titled Heil, Honey, I’m Home depicting Hitler as a suburban twit which was criticised widely; and most provocatively, the German cartoonist Walter Moers’ comic series Adolf, the Nazi Sow in which Hitler has survived the war and is living in suburban Germany along with Goering, who is working as a transvestite prostitute.
And of course, the book which I mentioned in the beginning, which started me on this trail.
Clearly, taboos are melting.
------------------------------------------------------
I think I will end this review with a final quote from Herzog.
Is it permissible to laugh at Hitler? Is a comedy like Mel Brooks’s The Producers immoral? The respective answers are yes and no. Brooks’s film does not decrease the significance of the Holocaust; it reduces Hitler to human dimensions so that people can see him as something other than the evil demon promoted by the historiography of the 1950s. Germans in the Third Reich were neither possessed by an evil spirit nor collectively “hypnotized” by their Führer. They have no claim upon either mitigating circumstance. When we laugh at Hitler, we dismiss the metaphysical, demonic capabilities accorded to him by postwar apologists. All the more pertinent is the question of how the empty trickery of the Nazis, which was already all too well exposed by critics in the late 1920s and 1930s, could have ended in the Holocaust.
(Emphasis mine)
Yes, that is indeed the pertinent question - and one that we should be asking ourselves in the current political scenario, when xenophobia is on the rise worldwide. There may be potential Hitlers waiting in the wings, waiting to ride to power on our prejudices.
October 11, 2011
I wasn't sure what to expect out of this book, but I was impressed by it. The thesis is that you can prove just by the jokes floating around Nazi Germany that the German people knew perfectly well what that terrible things were going on. Maybe they didn't know exactly what was happening, but they had a pretty good idea. There are also mini-biographies of German comedians (which sounds like an oxymoron, I know) and filmmakers, and how they were affected by the Third Reich and censorship. I learned a lot from this book, including some nice jokes I'll be sure to try out on my friends.
July 2, 2012
A very interesting book, translated from the German.The author analyses jokes told about the Nazis while they were on the rise in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, then during the time they were in power, and also after they were finally defeated.
The types of jokes told can say a lot about peoples' reactions to the Nazis, just as the way the Nazis reacted to jokes tell us a lot about their sensitivities to criticism; basically they didn't like being criticised at all and it took a lot of courage to tell jokes against them.
Some brave performers told anti-Nazi jokes on-stage, in public. Many of these brave souls ended up out of work, exiled, thrown into prison, assigned into concentration camps, ruined, murdered and executed, all for poking fun at a guy with a stupid moustache,a silly hairdo and a liking for uniforms, flags, goosesteps and exaggerated salutes.
The types of jokes told can say a lot about peoples' reactions to the Nazis, just as the way the Nazis reacted to jokes tell us a lot about their sensitivities to criticism; basically they didn't like being criticised at all and it took a lot of courage to tell jokes against them.
Some brave performers told anti-Nazi jokes on-stage, in public. Many of these brave souls ended up out of work, exiled, thrown into prison, assigned into concentration camps, ruined, murdered and executed, all for poking fun at a guy with a stupid moustache,a silly hairdo and a liking for uniforms, flags, goosesteps and exaggerated salutes.
January 19, 2020
Quite an interesting topic, and not one all that much has been written about. I probably would have found this more entertaining in the original German, but alas, I only had the English translation to hand. On occasion it felt like the author couldn't quite decide whether he was going for entertaining or educating his readership, ending up with a book that was, while worth the read, just a little too shallow on both counts.
February 8, 2018
You could wish this entirely tasteful and engrossing book were longer and more in-depth - though perhaps lack of available material would preclude this - but for a night's read and a nudge to the brain you can't do much better than this.
April 25, 2011
A while back I read a book by Ben Lewis titled
Hammer & Tickle
, subtitled either "A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes" or "A Cultural History of Communism" depending on edition, which was a disappointment — a magazine article stretched out to book length. Now, the good news is that Herzog's work (original German title: Heil Hitler, das Schwein ist tot!) is a better book than Lewis's. The bad news is that that's damning with faint praise, as it's still not that great of a book.
It may be possible that part of the problem can be laid at the feet of the book's English publisher, Melville House, for choosing the subtitle "Humor in Hitler's Germany", as only part of the book concentrates on that subject. (Also given brief chapters: political humour in Imperial and Weimar Germany; German cabaret in exile; the Hollywood films The Great Dictator and To Be or Not to Be; post-war humour about Hitler and the Nazis: Mel Brook's original The Producers, Benigni's La vita è bella, and the comic "Hitler the German Sow".) The structure itself makes sense, as the work was originally a German television documentary, but it does lead to a bit of a feeling of having been sold a false bill of goods.
The origins are also apparent in the structure of the individual chapters, as they mostly follow similar lines: an example of jokes, an interpretation of what they said about the citizens' relationship with the government, and a more in depth discussion of a particular example of someone who told those jokes. In the case of the Nazi-era chapters, these are generally someone who either got in trouble for telling them or someone who told uncritical Nazi jokes.
Now, there are some interesting and informative bits in the work: for instance, Herzog observes that the majority of joke tellers weren't arrested, and those who were usually had a number of black-marks already on their record. In other words, the jokes were the excuse for getting rid of who the regime already considered troublemakers, rather than as a means of identifying them. On the other hand, the documentary origins means that other claims are presented with a degree of certainty they may not necessarily warrant — Herzog's frequent observation that many of the jokes show that the majority of the public were aware of the exact nature of Nazi crimes in the east — or without any amount of critical examination. (The result of the post-Anschluss referendum is presented without mention of the actions taken before the vote to suppress opposition that lead the 99% number to be suspect as a representation of the actual public division on the matter.)
Overall, an interesting book but one that could have merited a less wide-ranging focus and a more rigorous examination of conclusions.
A final note: the translation, by Jefferson Chase, is worth mentioning as humour, particularly ones based as heavily on wordplay and puns as the examples included, is difficult to translate. Chase, in my opinion, does a noteworthy job of explaining the joke's original nature, noting where it relies on the double-meaning or similar sounds of a particular German word, without changing the original beyond recognition. The translated jokes may not be funny, but then translated jokes so rarely are, but the representations at least leave one with an understanding of what the original was. (A complaint made against the Italian translation of the book, for instance.)
It may be possible that part of the problem can be laid at the feet of the book's English publisher, Melville House, for choosing the subtitle "Humor in Hitler's Germany", as only part of the book concentrates on that subject. (Also given brief chapters: political humour in Imperial and Weimar Germany; German cabaret in exile; the Hollywood films The Great Dictator and To Be or Not to Be; post-war humour about Hitler and the Nazis: Mel Brook's original The Producers, Benigni's La vita è bella, and the comic "Hitler the German Sow".) The structure itself makes sense, as the work was originally a German television documentary, but it does lead to a bit of a feeling of having been sold a false bill of goods.
The origins are also apparent in the structure of the individual chapters, as they mostly follow similar lines: an example of jokes, an interpretation of what they said about the citizens' relationship with the government, and a more in depth discussion of a particular example of someone who told those jokes. In the case of the Nazi-era chapters, these are generally someone who either got in trouble for telling them or someone who told uncritical Nazi jokes.
Now, there are some interesting and informative bits in the work: for instance, Herzog observes that the majority of joke tellers weren't arrested, and those who were usually had a number of black-marks already on their record. In other words, the jokes were the excuse for getting rid of who the regime already considered troublemakers, rather than as a means of identifying them. On the other hand, the documentary origins means that other claims are presented with a degree of certainty they may not necessarily warrant — Herzog's frequent observation that many of the jokes show that the majority of the public were aware of the exact nature of Nazi crimes in the east — or without any amount of critical examination. (The result of the post-Anschluss referendum is presented without mention of the actions taken before the vote to suppress opposition that lead the 99% number to be suspect as a representation of the actual public division on the matter.)
Overall, an interesting book but one that could have merited a less wide-ranging focus and a more rigorous examination of conclusions.
A final note: the translation, by Jefferson Chase, is worth mentioning as humour, particularly ones based as heavily on wordplay and puns as the examples included, is difficult to translate. Chase, in my opinion, does a noteworthy job of explaining the joke's original nature, noting where it relies on the double-meaning or similar sounds of a particular German word, without changing the original beyond recognition. The translated jokes may not be funny, but then translated jokes so rarely are, but the representations at least leave one with an understanding of what the original was. (A complaint made against the Italian translation of the book, for instance.)
August 20, 2017
This book was an unexpected gift from my sister-in-law, and right from the beginning, an interesting premise. Right away I noticed it was less whimsical, but ultimately more interesting, than what I expected.
Yes the jokes themselves are there, some told by Nazis, some told by their victims, and many told by sceptical Germans of the era.
But mostly this book is a history of the rise, empowerment, and ultimate fall of the Third Reich as viewed through the lens of the dark humour of the time. After so many years of learning about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust through secondary and tertiary sources, it was kind of fascinating to see it through the primary source of these jokes, jokes which, through their viral nature, survived censorship that other sources suffered. They provide some interesting insights:
- Perhaps most importantly, the Nazis started out the 1930s as a laughingstock. They wore silly military uniforms during peacetimes, they marched around, they gave weird salutes. Nobody took them seriously, and so nobody resisted them. During the time they rose to power, they were on nearly their last death rattle of any kind of political influence at all, but once they got their foot in the door, they could shut down the processes of democracy, and that's all it took.
- Even after the Nazis were in power, people still found them affected and silly, e.g. their "Heil Hitler" greetings. The greeting became a bit of a shibboleth, because only the hardcore base who viewed them unironically could execute it without smirking. Same for some of their other affectations.
- Unlike the common narrative that German citizens were blissfully unaware of what happened to the Jews after they were put on trains out of town, at least some significant portion of both Germans and Jews were generally aware of the camps and their outcomes. People knew. They just didn't do anything about it.
It's also a really good intro to the history of this era in general: who the people were, what the general timeline is. You've heard the names Goebbels, Himmler, Rommel, etc, all your life, but here's a way to learn who's who. At only 200 pages, if you've ever wanted a relatively easy and light intro into Nazi Germany (compared to those 1200-page tomes on the World History shelves at the bookstore), this is a pretty good place to start.
Yes the jokes themselves are there, some told by Nazis, some told by their victims, and many told by sceptical Germans of the era.
But mostly this book is a history of the rise, empowerment, and ultimate fall of the Third Reich as viewed through the lens of the dark humour of the time. After so many years of learning about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust through secondary and tertiary sources, it was kind of fascinating to see it through the primary source of these jokes, jokes which, through their viral nature, survived censorship that other sources suffered. They provide some interesting insights:
- Perhaps most importantly, the Nazis started out the 1930s as a laughingstock. They wore silly military uniforms during peacetimes, they marched around, they gave weird salutes. Nobody took them seriously, and so nobody resisted them. During the time they rose to power, they were on nearly their last death rattle of any kind of political influence at all, but once they got their foot in the door, they could shut down the processes of democracy, and that's all it took.
- Even after the Nazis were in power, people still found them affected and silly, e.g. their "Heil Hitler" greetings. The greeting became a bit of a shibboleth, because only the hardcore base who viewed them unironically could execute it without smirking. Same for some of their other affectations.
- Unlike the common narrative that German citizens were blissfully unaware of what happened to the Jews after they were put on trains out of town, at least some significant portion of both Germans and Jews were generally aware of the camps and their outcomes. People knew. They just didn't do anything about it.
It's also a really good intro to the history of this era in general: who the people were, what the general timeline is. You've heard the names Goebbels, Himmler, Rommel, etc, all your life, but here's a way to learn who's who. At only 200 pages, if you've ever wanted a relatively easy and light intro into Nazi Germany (compared to those 1200-page tomes on the World History shelves at the bookstore), this is a pretty good place to start.
January 13, 2015
There is a building at Auschwitz, one of the disarmingly bourgeois brick two storey buildings that in any other context might be from a thirties suburban development and which was wild with jonquils on the verges when I visited in glorious Spring, that is labelled "Physical Evidence of the Holocaust."
Rather carefully worded.
This book documents a slippery thing - what was humour under the Reich like? Who told the jokes and what were they like? Did people die because of them?
I was drawn to this book because of my fascination with the film of Baron Munchhausen made by UFA under Goebbels, who was obsessed by the wonderous fantasy of The Thief of Baghdad and sought to best it with his own frothy concoction. It's beautiful and full of sly humor, and the irony of the Nazis choosing to make their fantasia about the greatest liar of all time, well...
There is an argument here that everyday Germans, via the evidence of their recorded humor, knew far more of the extermination of the racially impure, the misfits, the outspoken critics and all those stamped expendable by the fastidious Party far earlier in the war than was once discussed. This isn't a new revelation - the early 90s? was I think when scholars beyond academic circles began to widen the understanding of the incremental acceptance and inevitable psychic burden of so much dreadful hatred on the German people - but what Hertzog gives us here is more "evidence of knowledge of the Holocaust" from a fresh angle
His theory that humour was a relief mechanism that shielded Germans from the need to act to stand against the Nazi regime is build subtly and chillingly enough through the book. And most affecting of all is the surviving jokes that Jews told to each other at the time. The humour of the abyss.
Rather carefully worded.
This book documents a slippery thing - what was humour under the Reich like? Who told the jokes and what were they like? Did people die because of them?
I was drawn to this book because of my fascination with the film of Baron Munchhausen made by UFA under Goebbels, who was obsessed by the wonderous fantasy of The Thief of Baghdad and sought to best it with his own frothy concoction. It's beautiful and full of sly humor, and the irony of the Nazis choosing to make their fantasia about the greatest liar of all time, well...
There is an argument here that everyday Germans, via the evidence of their recorded humor, knew far more of the extermination of the racially impure, the misfits, the outspoken critics and all those stamped expendable by the fastidious Party far earlier in the war than was once discussed. This isn't a new revelation - the early 90s? was I think when scholars beyond academic circles began to widen the understanding of the incremental acceptance and inevitable psychic burden of so much dreadful hatred on the German people - but what Hertzog gives us here is more "evidence of knowledge of the Holocaust" from a fresh angle
His theory that humour was a relief mechanism that shielded Germans from the need to act to stand against the Nazi regime is build subtly and chillingly enough through the book. And most affecting of all is the surviving jokes that Jews told to each other at the time. The humour of the abyss.
February 7, 2017
"Hitler and Goring are standing atop the Berlin Radio Tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners faces. Goring says 'why don't you jump'?"
When we reflect on Germany in World War II, our thoughts rarely turn first to humor. And yet the author argues, with significant documentation and examples, that political humor of all kinds was abundant before, during, and after the Reich. In the early to mid 30's, the Nazis in fact turned a semi-blind eye to it and the cabarets where it flourished. As time wore on however and the war began in earnest, the jokes continued but the authorities became increasingly concerned by them and began levying punishments. Even these were relatively minor(fines or short terms of imprisonment) until the war began to seem lost and a desire to clamp down on dissent set in. What was once a lighthearted joke about Hitler that would draw you a fine in 1939 became a death sentence in 1944. That many comedians and ordinary citizens continued to express dissent through humor is a testament to their bravery, as well as to the power of laughter.
Even many Jews living in the worst possible conditions in concentration camps were able to, through the use of black humor, take their minds off the misery around them for a short time.
Perhaps they understood something that was expressed many years later by another famous Jew and comedian, Mel Brooks.
"If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator,you never win. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."
When we reflect on Germany in World War II, our thoughts rarely turn first to humor. And yet the author argues, with significant documentation and examples, that political humor of all kinds was abundant before, during, and after the Reich. In the early to mid 30's, the Nazis in fact turned a semi-blind eye to it and the cabarets where it flourished. As time wore on however and the war began in earnest, the jokes continued but the authorities became increasingly concerned by them and began levying punishments. Even these were relatively minor(fines or short terms of imprisonment) until the war began to seem lost and a desire to clamp down on dissent set in. What was once a lighthearted joke about Hitler that would draw you a fine in 1939 became a death sentence in 1944. That many comedians and ordinary citizens continued to express dissent through humor is a testament to their bravery, as well as to the power of laughter.
Even many Jews living in the worst possible conditions in concentration camps were able to, through the use of black humor, take their minds off the misery around them for a short time.
Perhaps they understood something that was expressed many years later by another famous Jew and comedian, Mel Brooks.
"If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator,you never win. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."
July 28, 2016
Herzog, son of Werner, posits that ample humor during the Third Reich was less an indication of quiet resistance than a way to let off steam. He does a nice job of contextualizing the jokes without too much extra info. No jokes are known of Hitler’s suicide. After the war, West Germans did not care to reflect and those on the East were absolved from dealing as fascism was a Western affliction. Although everyone in the West accepted The Great Dictator and The Producers (we tried showing this to our kids who walked out in protest while my husband and I laughed and sang along) still not much satire from within Germany. Things got heated among the generations in the 1970s. More satire-free soul searching. Then came La Vita e Bella, a risky fairy tale. Acceptable. After that the Germans began to enjoy some homegrown satire, Adolf, the Nazi Sow. They are, thankfully, I hope, more relaxed now and it no longer seems strange for Hitler to be portrayed by a comedian in all his hideous, ridiculous pomposity.
“When we laugh at Hitler, we dismiss the metaphysical, demonic capabilities accorded him by postwar apologists. All the more pertinent is the question of how the empty trickery of the Nazis, which was all too well exposed by critics in the 1920s and 30s, could have ended in the Holocaust.”
“The many disrespectful jokes about the Nazi Party leadership that circulated during the Third Reich also support the conclusion that Germans were by no means unwilling victims of propaganda.” They saw through Goebbels.
“.. 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.”
From the Nazi side: Der Sturmer contained “…repressed pornography and homoeroticism,” “adolescent sexual envy,” and “primitive” and “lascivious” caricatures of Jews.
Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s sense of humor was based on “insults” a la his on-again, off-again bro, Stalin. “Hitler’s bizarre sense of humor displayed his utter inability to make fine distinctions, and he wasn’t the only one in Nazi Germany who suffered from this deficiency.” One popular, Nazi-approved movie had a “supporting cast who looked like the product of centuries of Alpine incest.”
“The distorted image of Jewishness … was part of a coolly planned larger strategy… [making] audiences receptive to campaigns that lead to … the extermination of Jews.”
My version of an anti-Hitler joke: Trump and Manafort gazing out over Manhattan from the top of Trump Tower. Trump: "How do I make America great again?" Manafort: "Jump."
A Jewish joke of the time: “How many types of Jews are there? Two: optimists and pessimists. All the pessimists are in exile, and the optimists are in concentration camps.”
Offered me a unique perspective on history, devoid of direction from elites. Thanks, Rudolph.
“When we laugh at Hitler, we dismiss the metaphysical, demonic capabilities accorded him by postwar apologists. All the more pertinent is the question of how the empty trickery of the Nazis, which was all too well exposed by critics in the 1920s and 30s, could have ended in the Holocaust.”
“The many disrespectful jokes about the Nazi Party leadership that circulated during the Third Reich also support the conclusion that Germans were by no means unwilling victims of propaganda.” They saw through Goebbels.
“.. 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.”
From the Nazi side: Der Sturmer contained “…repressed pornography and homoeroticism,” “adolescent sexual envy,” and “primitive” and “lascivious” caricatures of Jews.
Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s sense of humor was based on “insults” a la his on-again, off-again bro, Stalin. “Hitler’s bizarre sense of humor displayed his utter inability to make fine distinctions, and he wasn’t the only one in Nazi Germany who suffered from this deficiency.” One popular, Nazi-approved movie had a “supporting cast who looked like the product of centuries of Alpine incest.”
“The distorted image of Jewishness … was part of a coolly planned larger strategy… [making] audiences receptive to campaigns that lead to … the extermination of Jews.”
My version of an anti-Hitler joke: Trump and Manafort gazing out over Manhattan from the top of Trump Tower. Trump: "How do I make America great again?" Manafort: "Jump."
A Jewish joke of the time: “How many types of Jews are there? Two: optimists and pessimists. All the pessimists are in exile, and the optimists are in concentration camps.”
Offered me a unique perspective on history, devoid of direction from elites. Thanks, Rudolph.
June 11, 2013
Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany purports to be about the history of jokes about Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust within the bounds of Germany before and during WWII. And indeed, it does start off this way, expounding on the history of political jokes and how they're used to relieve stress, and were actually good for Hitler's government. However, after that, it rapidly falls apart into a disorganized jumble that can't even decide which continent it wants to focus on. While subjects like the treatment of the Holocaust through humor by the Jews, the treatment of jokers, and the changing attitudes of the Nazis toward political jokes are broached, they're tossed in with confusing accounts of Hollywood comedies and BBC radio skits. While those certainly pertain to Nazi humor, they don't exactly pertain to humor in Hitler's Germany, and they don't pertain to telling jokes in Hitler's Germany, either. The German title of the book is Heil Hitler, Das Schwein Ist Tot! Lachen unter Hitler--Komik und Humor im Dritten Reich, which seems to translate to Heil Hitler, the Swine is Dead! Laughter Under Hitler--Comedy and Humor in the Third Reich, which retains the focus on Germany, so there's no clarity there, either.
Additionally, I think there's a problem with the translation. Or, not so much a problem with the translation--it's a very comprehensible translation--but a problem with the concept of this particular book being translated. Herzog repeatedly says that certain jokes are completely untranslatable, which makes their inclusion seem pointless when there are so many others which, when translated to English, retain their point if not their clever wordplay. Paired with the disorganization and seeming inability to focus on one topic, jumping from jokes in Germany to cabarets in Switzerland to a long-winded explanation of the plot of an American movie, it's not exactly a riveting read. It does have its moments, of course, but overall it reminded me more of a poorly-conceived thesis paper than a professional, structured book.
Additionally, I think there's a problem with the translation. Or, not so much a problem with the translation--it's a very comprehensible translation--but a problem with the concept of this particular book being translated. Herzog repeatedly says that certain jokes are completely untranslatable, which makes their inclusion seem pointless when there are so many others which, when translated to English, retain their point if not their clever wordplay. Paired with the disorganization and seeming inability to focus on one topic, jumping from jokes in Germany to cabarets in Switzerland to a long-winded explanation of the plot of an American movie, it's not exactly a riveting read. It does have its moments, of course, but overall it reminded me more of a poorly-conceived thesis paper than a professional, structured book.
August 19, 2011
This very short book covered more ground than I thought it would. The author starts in 1933 and ends with Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Roberto Benigni’s Life if Beautiful. The book itself reads like an interesting textbook. I’m not going to blame this on the fact that the book is translated because that is not the problem. The problem is the subject matter, and I’m not talking about the history of the Third Reich either. I’m talking about jokes.
Political humor, at it’s very best, is only funny for a very short time, and even then, how funny is it? Not that funny, is my point. Also what’s not funny? Racist jokes. So the problem here is that most of the humor that is discussed in this book is of course, political humor and racist jokes. When two of the unfunniest types of humor are being disected and explained, even if it’s putting them into their cultural relevance, it’s tedious. Which is why I compare it to a textbook. This is not to say the book is boring. It is not. It’s fascinating.
But it isn’t entertaining. If you’re not into history or historical popculture, I’d stay away from this book. However, if you do like history and if you’re interested in any way about humor during the Third Reich, who used it and how and why, get this book. It’s very short, very readable, the subject matter is engaging, and had me thinking about it after I’d put the book down. The way the people used political jokes and the establishment used racists jokes was absolutely fascinating to read about. To think about people, comedians, actors, being put to death for telling a joke or acting in a sketch that made fun of the government? Terrifying.
One thing I found surprising about the book is that when the 1960s and ’70s are discussed, there’s no mention of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I’m certain they made fun of Hitler. It’s curious that their sketches aren’t mentioned.
Political humor, at it’s very best, is only funny for a very short time, and even then, how funny is it? Not that funny, is my point. Also what’s not funny? Racist jokes. So the problem here is that most of the humor that is discussed in this book is of course, political humor and racist jokes. When two of the unfunniest types of humor are being disected and explained, even if it’s putting them into their cultural relevance, it’s tedious. Which is why I compare it to a textbook. This is not to say the book is boring. It is not. It’s fascinating.
But it isn’t entertaining. If you’re not into history or historical popculture, I’d stay away from this book. However, if you do like history and if you’re interested in any way about humor during the Third Reich, who used it and how and why, get this book. It’s very short, very readable, the subject matter is engaging, and had me thinking about it after I’d put the book down. The way the people used political jokes and the establishment used racists jokes was absolutely fascinating to read about. To think about people, comedians, actors, being put to death for telling a joke or acting in a sketch that made fun of the government? Terrifying.
One thing I found surprising about the book is that when the 1960s and ’70s are discussed, there’s no mention of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I’m certain they made fun of Hitler. It’s curious that their sketches aren’t mentioned.
September 18, 2013
I decided to check this book out after reading Herzog's A Short History of Nuclear Folly and finding it enjoyable. I also have an interest in World War II history and enjoy learning about some of the behind the scenes sort of things occasionally as opposed to just troop movements and big battles.
As a whole, Dead Funny was okay. While I enjoyed the information I was reading and learning about the book itself seemed haphazardly put together and chapters felt only loosely related to each other at times. It often read like an ambitious academic paper that really wanted to discuss this cool idea the author wanted to know more about, but had a hard time coming up with enough resources for a coherent piece (Believe me, I've written those history papers). I've read somewhere that this may have been adapted from a television miniseries on the same subject, which would make sense given how fragmented it is at times.
That aside, it was informative and well translated. Given the fact that a lot of the jokes seemed to lose their oomph being translated from German to English, I think the translator took it in stride and Herzog, in places, set up the joke's odd language well enough that it could be understood when you knew the context.
Overall, it was a neat book. I wish it could've done more with the subject matter, but I imagine there isn't a whole lot of surviving material fits the author's point of view on the existence of critical humor in the Third Reich. It's worth a read given how short it is and if you have an interest in the subject.
As a whole, Dead Funny was okay. While I enjoyed the information I was reading and learning about the book itself seemed haphazardly put together and chapters felt only loosely related to each other at times. It often read like an ambitious academic paper that really wanted to discuss this cool idea the author wanted to know more about, but had a hard time coming up with enough resources for a coherent piece (Believe me, I've written those history papers). I've read somewhere that this may have been adapted from a television miniseries on the same subject, which would make sense given how fragmented it is at times.
That aside, it was informative and well translated. Given the fact that a lot of the jokes seemed to lose their oomph being translated from German to English, I think the translator took it in stride and Herzog, in places, set up the joke's odd language well enough that it could be understood when you knew the context.
Overall, it was a neat book. I wish it could've done more with the subject matter, but I imagine there isn't a whole lot of surviving material fits the author's point of view on the existence of critical humor in the Third Reich. It's worth a read given how short it is and if you have an interest in the subject.
January 5, 2011
Il libro è abbastanza mediocre, niente di speciale. Ma il voto è così basso a causa della PESSIMA traduzione italiana: si parla di battute, barzellette, canzoni, giochi di parole IN LINGUA TEDESCA... La traduttrice, invece di riportare il testo in lingua originale e parafrasarlo, magari in nota, come sarebbe logico, in modo che si possano apprezzare, sia pure a un livello minimo, riscrive tutto di sana pianta IN ITALIANO, si inventa rime e significati di acronimi, fa ridicoli adattamenti a canzoni/poesie italiane, senza (quasi) mai riportare anche il testo tedesco... Oltre tutto si ha l'impressione di poca cura nella confezione dell'edizione italiana, rimandi a note a pie' di pagina collocati nel posto sbagliato, oppure la nota manca del tutto.
The book is average, nothing special. But the rating is low because of the HORRIBLE Italian translation.
The book is average, nothing special. But the rating is low because of the HORRIBLE Italian translation.
August 5, 2011
Many Germans laughed and joked about Hitler and the Nazis before and after their rise and fall, for the same reasons that people throughout history have done - to criticise or support the powers-that-be; to let off steam; and (especially as life under the Nazis got worse and worse) to help get themselves through dark days.
Dead Funny is a gripping, moving and thought-provoking history of laughs about the Nazis. In a highly-readable style, Herzog details the history of the humour up to the controversial 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, and how the Nazis reacted.
Dead Funny is a gripping, moving and thought-provoking history of laughs about the Nazis. In a highly-readable style, Herzog details the history of the humour up to the controversial 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, and how the Nazis reacted.
August 20, 2011
Fascinating account of humor, dark and otherwise, and its part in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler.
May 9, 2013
A short read, but nevertheless an interesting and illuminating look at an infamous period of history through the lens of political jokes.
March 12, 2017
"Dead Funny" presents a curious and fascinating archive of humor — jokes, songs, turns of phrase — against the backdrop of the fall of the Weimar republic and the rise (and eventual fall) of the Third Reich: humor as told by ordinary German citizens uneasy about the Nazi seizure of power; as told by the Nazis themselves about their victims; as told by the rest of the world; as told by German and Jewish actors, artists, comedians and cabaret performers who were punished and sometimes killed in the concentration camps, and even the Jews themselves at Auschwitz.
People enjoy laughing at their leaders, and have done so throughout history. Contrary to expectation, "political jokes [as told by the Germans] were NOT a form of resistance" but rather a means of letting of steam by those living under the trying and maddeningly bureaucratic rule of the Reich; such "'whispered jokes' were a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage." They were often indicative of resignation, a "paralyzing fatalism" about the situation at hand. Indeed, according to the author "in 61 percent of the official cases, [political] joke-tellers were let off with a warning and alcohol consumption often being cited as extenuating circumstances."
There were exceptions, however — Joseph Muller, a priest who found himself sentenced by the People's Court, taken to the guillotine and beheaded — less for what he did as what he represented (Catholicism was despised by the Nazis as it presented an alternative belief system). Likewise for serial critics of the regime within the theater or cinema, the telling of an occasional joke would serve as pretext for arrest by Nazis simply looking for an excuse to remove them from the community.
The Jewish people, likewise, differentiated themselves from their countrymen by their humor, perceived as "… an expression of Jews' will to survive against all odds. These jokes make fun of the terrors Jews experienced every day … the blackest Jewish humor expresses defiance: I laugh, therefor I am. My back is to the wall, and I'm still laughing."
Many of the jokes relayed are best understood in context. And so the book offers a condensed, yet very substantial and informative, account of the rise of National Socialism — beginning with the early and myriad ways of dealing with its opposition (the eradication of the free press; the subversion of the educational system; the popular incitement of anti-semitism among the masses; the establishment of anti-semitic laws and the subversion of the legal system — together with the jokes and "gallows humor" that accompanied it. Much attention is given to the fate of artists like Werner Finck, Fritz Grunbaum, Kurt Gerron — performers of the cabaret clubs and German-Jewish cinema — whose participants would be indicted by "cultural monitors", persecuted and sent to the camps.
The book concludes with a brief evaluation of contemporary Hitler and/or Holocaust humor in comic strips, the cinema (such as Mel Brooks "The Producers" or Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful") and even failed television sitcoms ("Heil, Honey I'm Home").
Altogether I found this a very informative and intriguing read.
People enjoy laughing at their leaders, and have done so throughout history. Contrary to expectation, "political jokes [as told by the Germans] were NOT a form of resistance" but rather a means of letting of steam by those living under the trying and maddeningly bureaucratic rule of the Reich; such "'whispered jokes' were a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and personal courage." They were often indicative of resignation, a "paralyzing fatalism" about the situation at hand. Indeed, according to the author "in 61 percent of the official cases, [political] joke-tellers were let off with a warning and alcohol consumption often being cited as extenuating circumstances."
There were exceptions, however — Joseph Muller, a priest who found himself sentenced by the People's Court, taken to the guillotine and beheaded — less for what he did as what he represented (Catholicism was despised by the Nazis as it presented an alternative belief system). Likewise for serial critics of the regime within the theater or cinema, the telling of an occasional joke would serve as pretext for arrest by Nazis simply looking for an excuse to remove them from the community.
The Jewish people, likewise, differentiated themselves from their countrymen by their humor, perceived as "… an expression of Jews' will to survive against all odds. These jokes make fun of the terrors Jews experienced every day … the blackest Jewish humor expresses defiance: I laugh, therefor I am. My back is to the wall, and I'm still laughing."
Many of the jokes relayed are best understood in context. And so the book offers a condensed, yet very substantial and informative, account of the rise of National Socialism — beginning with the early and myriad ways of dealing with its opposition (the eradication of the free press; the subversion of the educational system; the popular incitement of anti-semitism among the masses; the establishment of anti-semitic laws and the subversion of the legal system — together with the jokes and "gallows humor" that accompanied it. Much attention is given to the fate of artists like Werner Finck, Fritz Grunbaum, Kurt Gerron — performers of the cabaret clubs and German-Jewish cinema — whose participants would be indicted by "cultural monitors", persecuted and sent to the camps.
The book concludes with a brief evaluation of contemporary Hitler and/or Holocaust humor in comic strips, the cinema (such as Mel Brooks "The Producers" or Roberto Benigni's "Life is Beautiful") and even failed television sitcoms ("Heil, Honey I'm Home").
Altogether I found this a very informative and intriguing read.
December 28, 2024
I learned of this book from another one, A Higher Call—one of the best books I read in 2024. The book starts with a question: “Is it permissible to laugh at Hitler?” Do it, and some will accuse you of trivializing the Holocaust, even though Germans laughed at Hitler during the twelve years of his reign. Jokes were not so much a form of political resistance but more of a release valve for pent-up anger. Most caught spreading jokes received mild punishment, though some got the death penalty later on when it was clear Germany was losing World War II. Most of the jokes are not that funny today and dealt more with the human foibles of the Nazi leaders than the crimes they were committing. There’s some interesting details on Charlie Chaplin’s strange coincidences with Hitler (same mustache, born only four days apart). It wasn’t Chaplin’s idea to play Hitler in his movie, The Great Dictator, but by his director and producer Alexander Korda. Also, To Be or Not to Be, by Ernst Lubitsch (regarded as a classic, and a remake was done by Mel Brooks in 1983) starring Robert Stack, Carole Lombard, Jack Benny), is discussed, as is Mel Brooks The Producers. Marianne Elise K., received the death penalty (by guillotine) for telling this joke:
Hitler and Goring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Goring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
Another joke:
"The Gestapo is about to shoot some Jews when the commanding officer walks up to one of them and growls, “You almost look Aryan, so I’ll give you a chance. I wear a glass eye, it’s not easy to tell. If you can guess which eye it is, I’ll let you go.” Immediately, the Jew answered, “The left one!” “How did you know?” asks the Gestapo commander. “It looks so human.”
Not the easiest book to read, but it does give you some sociological insight about the humor during the Third Reich. I thought the USSR gallows humor was bleak, but this humor was far more dark.
Hitler and Goring are standing atop the Berlin radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Goring says, “Why don’t you jump?”
Another joke:
"The Gestapo is about to shoot some Jews when the commanding officer walks up to one of them and growls, “You almost look Aryan, so I’ll give you a chance. I wear a glass eye, it’s not easy to tell. If you can guess which eye it is, I’ll let you go.” Immediately, the Jew answered, “The left one!” “How did you know?” asks the Gestapo commander. “It looks so human.”
Not the easiest book to read, but it does give you some sociological insight about the humor during the Third Reich. I thought the USSR gallows humor was bleak, but this humor was far more dark.
February 10, 2017
I have to say I got more than I bargained for by reading this book. Here I was expecting a collection of jokes with perhaps some sort of analysis and connective tissue, but instead Herzog goes two steps farther and actually does a partial sociological analysis based on the jokes themselves.
As a result there are relatively few jokes in the book, but Herzog appears (and I say "appears" because without having an extensive knowledge on the subject it's impossible to judge if his judgment is balanced or definitive) to be doing a great work at establishing the mores and morals of the Germans during that period. The resulting image is a rather repulsive one (though Herzog is very calm in dishing it out), exposing how Germans feel (or didn't) about their government, politicians and apocalyptic drama unfolding around them, showing how vital can humour be not only in dealing with circumstances but also as an analytical tool.
I have to say that at points Herzog does see to veer off and explain things to a larger degree than he should with regards to historical events, and he does that at the expense of the actual jokes and their analysis, but the book is always written in a very accessible and interesting way.
A rather unique book, and I'm really glad it turned out to be a good one.
As a result there are relatively few jokes in the book, but Herzog appears (and I say "appears" because without having an extensive knowledge on the subject it's impossible to judge if his judgment is balanced or definitive) to be doing a great work at establishing the mores and morals of the Germans during that period. The resulting image is a rather repulsive one (though Herzog is very calm in dishing it out), exposing how Germans feel (or didn't) about their government, politicians and apocalyptic drama unfolding around them, showing how vital can humour be not only in dealing with circumstances but also as an analytical tool.
I have to say that at points Herzog does see to veer off and explain things to a larger degree than he should with regards to historical events, and he does that at the expense of the actual jokes and their analysis, but the book is always written in a very accessible and interesting way.
A rather unique book, and I'm really glad it turned out to be a good one.
February 9, 2016
This is a book that is a rewarding read for those who take humor seriously [1]. What this book provides that is different from any of the many books I have read about World War II is the way that it uses the humor of Hitler's Germany before and during World War II as an entrance into critiquing the anti-Semitism and essentially complicit nature of Germany with Hitler's regime. This is a book about humor that comes with a sting, in that it shows the various responses of humor representing a crass acceptance of dangerous buffoonery on the part of political leaders, a sense of fatalism about one's fate and the desire to let off steam without making a moral choice to oppose evil, and as a way that people got wholly undeserved credibility in the postwar period as opponents of Hitler when in reality they knew what was going on and deliberately shut their eyes to the evil. Although this is a book about humor, and about comedians, it is not a funny book, but rather a deeply tragic one especially since our own political system in the United States is under similar threat from both the right and the left in the form of people like Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump who are equally easy to lampoon for their all too easily seen flaws and also equally dangerous to the health of our own vulnerable republic.
The book's contents are organized in a way that is both thematic and chronological, for the most part, examining political humor in the Third Reich, the rise and development of political humor, the Nazi seizure of power, humor and persecution, humor and war, humor and annihilation, and laughing at Auschwitz in the postwar period. The author defends the humor of To Be Or Not To Be and Brooks' The Producers, as well as the daring of Life Is Beautiful, and also defends the humor of Jews during Hitler's regime, which was often laced with a deeply poignant melancholy [2]. The author is particularly skilled in pointing out the various nuanced meanings of humor in Hitler's Germany, pointing out that most humor was meant to humanize and point out the ridiculousness of many Nazi leaders, who were vain and worthy of ridicule, without in any way criticizing the Nazi regime itself, while other types of humor were in fact pro-Nazi or ambiguous, even if many comedians sought to distance themselves from the Nazi regime after its defeat, while others ran afoul because they were judged to be defeatist or for their political leanings or identity rather than merely for their humor.
What is perhaps most notable is that there was a massive double standard when it came to how humor was judged. Many who made tasteless jokes in their cups were given a slap on the wrist and a warning, even during the darkest days of German defeat, while other comedians were placed in concentration camps and exterminated or driven into exile, or even in some cases driven to volunteer for the army or be placed in a suicide squad as a result of their reputations. Hitler's regime sought to co-opt humorists to produce escapist comedies that distracted people from social problems, but showed themselves remarkably thin-skinned to the humor and satire that was directed at them as well, and showed some serious inconsistencies in how they dealt with comedy. The author makes a point to avoid demonizing Hitler or allowing him to serve as a scapegoat for the sins of the German people, who come off particularly poorly in this exhaustive account of humor in the Third Reich that looks at puns, caberet skits, comedy movies, as well as crude bar humor in a masterful work that points out the fact that while humor may not necessarily be funny, it does often reveal a lot about the people who are making as well as repeating and recycling the jokes that exist. The author does not let Germans off the hook for their lack of compassion and empathy for Jews and other political and cultural outsiders who were savagely dehumanized during the Third Reich, and neither should it. This book provides a great deal of evidence for the complicit nature of the German populace for the horrors of the Final Solution in the content of jokes and in their knowledge of Hitler's actions long before the war began, and ought to prompt a soul-searching in the hearts of many, in the knowledge that should similar horrors happen, most of us would no sooner speak out against evil than the Germans of that dark time.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
[2] Witness, for example, the following jokes, extant in Hitler's Germany:
"Julian Streicher, the spokesman for the anti-Jewish boycott, received a telegram from a small town in northern Germany. It read: "Send Jews immediately--stop--otherwise boycott impossible (83)."
"A school inspector visits a classroom and sees a blond girl sitting all alone on a bench. The inspector takes pity on her and asks, "Why are [you] sitting all by yourself, my child?" The girl answers, "Ask grandma (84)."
"A Jewish child forced to listen to his teacher's anti-Semitic tirades in school goes home and asks his parents, "Mama, Papa, can't you exchange me for some other kid? (84)"
"The Nazis take over Austria, and a Viennese Jew goes to a travel agency to inquire about the possibility of emigrating. The agent takes out a globe and points at various countries. "Emigration to Palestine is forbidden, the American quota is already used up, it's hard to get a visa for England, you need financial guarantees for China, Paraguay, and Brazil, and Poland won't even let Polish Jews back in." So the Jew says, "Don't you have another globe? (211)"
The book's contents are organized in a way that is both thematic and chronological, for the most part, examining political humor in the Third Reich, the rise and development of political humor, the Nazi seizure of power, humor and persecution, humor and war, humor and annihilation, and laughing at Auschwitz in the postwar period. The author defends the humor of To Be Or Not To Be and Brooks' The Producers, as well as the daring of Life Is Beautiful, and also defends the humor of Jews during Hitler's regime, which was often laced with a deeply poignant melancholy [2]. The author is particularly skilled in pointing out the various nuanced meanings of humor in Hitler's Germany, pointing out that most humor was meant to humanize and point out the ridiculousness of many Nazi leaders, who were vain and worthy of ridicule, without in any way criticizing the Nazi regime itself, while other types of humor were in fact pro-Nazi or ambiguous, even if many comedians sought to distance themselves from the Nazi regime after its defeat, while others ran afoul because they were judged to be defeatist or for their political leanings or identity rather than merely for their humor.
What is perhaps most notable is that there was a massive double standard when it came to how humor was judged. Many who made tasteless jokes in their cups were given a slap on the wrist and a warning, even during the darkest days of German defeat, while other comedians were placed in concentration camps and exterminated or driven into exile, or even in some cases driven to volunteer for the army or be placed in a suicide squad as a result of their reputations. Hitler's regime sought to co-opt humorists to produce escapist comedies that distracted people from social problems, but showed themselves remarkably thin-skinned to the humor and satire that was directed at them as well, and showed some serious inconsistencies in how they dealt with comedy. The author makes a point to avoid demonizing Hitler or allowing him to serve as a scapegoat for the sins of the German people, who come off particularly poorly in this exhaustive account of humor in the Third Reich that looks at puns, caberet skits, comedy movies, as well as crude bar humor in a masterful work that points out the fact that while humor may not necessarily be funny, it does often reveal a lot about the people who are making as well as repeating and recycling the jokes that exist. The author does not let Germans off the hook for their lack of compassion and empathy for Jews and other political and cultural outsiders who were savagely dehumanized during the Third Reich, and neither should it. This book provides a great deal of evidence for the complicit nature of the German populace for the horrors of the Final Solution in the content of jokes and in their knowledge of Hitler's actions long before the war began, and ought to prompt a soul-searching in the hearts of many, in the knowledge that should similar horrors happen, most of us would no sooner speak out against evil than the Germans of that dark time.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
[2] Witness, for example, the following jokes, extant in Hitler's Germany:
"Julian Streicher, the spokesman for the anti-Jewish boycott, received a telegram from a small town in northern Germany. It read: "Send Jews immediately--stop--otherwise boycott impossible (83)."
"A school inspector visits a classroom and sees a blond girl sitting all alone on a bench. The inspector takes pity on her and asks, "Why are [you] sitting all by yourself, my child?" The girl answers, "Ask grandma (84)."
"A Jewish child forced to listen to his teacher's anti-Semitic tirades in school goes home and asks his parents, "Mama, Papa, can't you exchange me for some other kid? (84)"
"The Nazis take over Austria, and a Viennese Jew goes to a travel agency to inquire about the possibility of emigrating. The agent takes out a globe and points at various countries. "Emigration to Palestine is forbidden, the American quota is already used up, it's hard to get a visa for England, you need financial guarantees for China, Paraguay, and Brazil, and Poland won't even let Polish Jews back in." So the Jew says, "Don't you have another globe? (211)"
September 19, 2017
Talks about the type of jokes and political humour that existed in the Third Reich. It doesn't have jokes per se (it has some), it's mostly a record of the state of humour at the time, and countering some common ideas about jokes and the nazis.
By looking at the criminal records, it shows that telling jokes about the Nazis wasn't too serious a crime, there weren't prosecuted too often. The standard of jokes tells us what people mocked about the nazis, and alas, it didn't seem to be about them being genocidal dictators (merely other things like oppertunistic job seekers, or fans of pomp and ceremony).
It has lessons for today, because there were plenty of people taking the piss out of Hitler at the start, and that didn't stop him becoming dictator, so why do you think you can stop the next dictator by comedy.
If you're curious to read lots about the Third Reich, I'd recommend this.
By looking at the criminal records, it shows that telling jokes about the Nazis wasn't too serious a crime, there weren't prosecuted too often. The standard of jokes tells us what people mocked about the nazis, and alas, it didn't seem to be about them being genocidal dictators (merely other things like oppertunistic job seekers, or fans of pomp and ceremony).
It has lessons for today, because there were plenty of people taking the piss out of Hitler at the start, and that didn't stop him becoming dictator, so why do you think you can stop the next dictator by comedy.
If you're curious to read lots about the Third Reich, I'd recommend this.
June 24, 2020
Before I get all harsh on this book, I should state I was really interested in the subject. Approaching a culture through studying its humour (as pioneered by Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History[1]) can be very revealing. Humour is often intended to be ephemera, it relies on shared assumptions that are often forbidden or taboo to address directly, is generally much more unguarded than most other forms of social criticism. In the Third Reich, a culture where criticising the government was punishable by death and an awful lot of facts could be fatal to admit knowing, it seemed certain that its humour, even if very carefully worded and shared, could be quite revealing.
This is a very tragic book, butI don't think there was much new historical insight to be gained. There's a chance for readers to become acquainted with some less well-known victims of Nazi violence, to admire people who bravely kept on running anti-Nazi cabarets until they were imprisoned for it, or continued telling jokes while incarcerated in camps. Also, if a reader wasn't aware of how unpopular the Nazi regime was with large swathes of the population throughout its existence, then this book might be illuminating in that respect. There are so many jokes about how great it would be for Hitler to die, jokes that were clearly in broad, if whispered, circulation.
Unfortunately, the author seems to think that what the readers really need help to understand, is that the Nazis were bad. Given how most of the book describes mass murder, violent racism and torture, as practiced by the Nazis, I think he could have relied on us getting it. Instead there is purple prose, tortured clauses, dramatic suspenseful paragraphs. When you are describing acts of extreme brutality by a regime, I don't think you need to find fifty synonyms of brutality every time you mention the regime. It is irritating, and actually emotionally distracting from what would have been more effective if described simply.
There is also a lot of gratuitous heaping of coals on the head of Germany, and Germans, and I think it gets in the way, as it does for a lot of books about fascism written by Germans[2]. The author will describe a joke about Goebbel's vanity, or the vicious infighting amongst the Nazi rulers, and then try and explain that these jokes aren't anti-Nazi jokes because they aren't about their worst crimes, really its a form of affection, and shows how awful the Germans. I disagree. Lots of people currently tell jokes about Trump being vain and his cronies infighting, and don't tell jokes about him keeping children in cages. I don't for a second believe this is because those joke tellers have a hidden affection for Trump, it's because telling jokes about really really awful things is a lot harder to do. The author also reiterates several times that telling jokes about Hitler, an apparently common past-time, was not really a form of resistance, because very few people were executed for it and most were really only risking several months in a Nazi-era prison! As I read the account of poor Marianne K. who was guillotined for telling a very lame joke about Hitler to the wrong co-worker, I almost whether the author was being sarcastic. Actually it's just the liberal German tradition of downplaying resistance to the point of absurdity, because they don't want to be seen as apologists.
There is also much re-litigation of an argument that is long-dead in the English speaking world, as to whether humour, even savagely critical humour, on the topic of the Holocaust is immoral. Maybe this is a generational/cultural thing, because I get the impression from my grandparents that they did believe there are taboo topics, not just views. While I've never known anyone seriously argue for it, and it felt pointless to revisit this so much, the author's rebuttal that Jewish people, even in the camps, were telling jokes about the Nazis and their plight, is unanswerable.
[1] Actually Darnton suggested we approach cultural history by finding the elements of a culture that seem most alien to us, as trying to understand the apparently inexplicable in terms of the society that produced it both gives us interesting insights and helps us not be mislead by our own preconceptions of meaning. A mass killing of pet cats in the 18th Century Paris is something that modern people generally find revolting and cruel, so trying to work out why a lot of young men of the time found it absolutely hilarious provides a lot of insight into their culture. Humour isn't necessarily the most alien thing about historical cultures (certainly the prevalence of sadism in the Third Reich is harder to understand than the mostly oppositional jokes made under it) but it was rarely studied for its historical value before this book.
[2]In case this sounds like I'm suggesting "Germans should stop apologising for the Nazis" like a far-right parrot, that is not what I mean. I mean that Germans consistently underplay how unpopular the Nazi regime was amongst Germans, and ignore the resistance to it, primarily because they feel it seems like a disavowal of responsibility. I'm a non-German immigrant to Germany, and the granddaughter of a former Slavic concentration-camp internee, so it's perhaps easier for me to say, but I think this is the wrong approach. It tends to put Hitler and the Nazis in the camp of monsters, suggesting that any support comes from a supernatural charisma or the inherent badness of Germans, and obscures the reality that they were a human government that could have been resisted. There is a tiny little plaque on a building 200 m from my home where about 20 workers were murdered for organised sabotage. This should be an inspiration for resisting in the most difficult of circumstances, not hidden away under a pretence that everyone was equally guilty. If no-one resisted, it makes it seem like resistance wasn't possible.
This is a very tragic book, butI don't think there was much new historical insight to be gained. There's a chance for readers to become acquainted with some less well-known victims of Nazi violence, to admire people who bravely kept on running anti-Nazi cabarets until they were imprisoned for it, or continued telling jokes while incarcerated in camps. Also, if a reader wasn't aware of how unpopular the Nazi regime was with large swathes of the population throughout its existence, then this book might be illuminating in that respect. There are so many jokes about how great it would be for Hitler to die, jokes that were clearly in broad, if whispered, circulation.
Unfortunately, the author seems to think that what the readers really need help to understand, is that the Nazis were bad. Given how most of the book describes mass murder, violent racism and torture, as practiced by the Nazis, I think he could have relied on us getting it. Instead there is purple prose, tortured clauses, dramatic suspenseful paragraphs. When you are describing acts of extreme brutality by a regime, I don't think you need to find fifty synonyms of brutality every time you mention the regime. It is irritating, and actually emotionally distracting from what would have been more effective if described simply.
There is also a lot of gratuitous heaping of coals on the head of Germany, and Germans, and I think it gets in the way, as it does for a lot of books about fascism written by Germans[2]. The author will describe a joke about Goebbel's vanity, or the vicious infighting amongst the Nazi rulers, and then try and explain that these jokes aren't anti-Nazi jokes because they aren't about their worst crimes, really its a form of affection, and shows how awful the Germans. I disagree. Lots of people currently tell jokes about Trump being vain and his cronies infighting, and don't tell jokes about him keeping children in cages. I don't for a second believe this is because those joke tellers have a hidden affection for Trump, it's because telling jokes about really really awful things is a lot harder to do. The author also reiterates several times that telling jokes about Hitler, an apparently common past-time, was not really a form of resistance, because very few people were executed for it and most were really only risking several months in a Nazi-era prison! As I read the account of poor Marianne K. who was guillotined for telling a very lame joke about Hitler to the wrong co-worker, I almost whether the author was being sarcastic. Actually it's just the liberal German tradition of downplaying resistance to the point of absurdity, because they don't want to be seen as apologists.
There is also much re-litigation of an argument that is long-dead in the English speaking world, as to whether humour, even savagely critical humour, on the topic of the Holocaust is immoral. Maybe this is a generational/cultural thing, because I get the impression from my grandparents that they did believe there are taboo topics, not just views. While I've never known anyone seriously argue for it, and it felt pointless to revisit this so much, the author's rebuttal that Jewish people, even in the camps, were telling jokes about the Nazis and their plight, is unanswerable.
[1] Actually Darnton suggested we approach cultural history by finding the elements of a culture that seem most alien to us, as trying to understand the apparently inexplicable in terms of the society that produced it both gives us interesting insights and helps us not be mislead by our own preconceptions of meaning. A mass killing of pet cats in the 18th Century Paris is something that modern people generally find revolting and cruel, so trying to work out why a lot of young men of the time found it absolutely hilarious provides a lot of insight into their culture. Humour isn't necessarily the most alien thing about historical cultures (certainly the prevalence of sadism in the Third Reich is harder to understand than the mostly oppositional jokes made under it) but it was rarely studied for its historical value before this book.
[2]In case this sounds like I'm suggesting "Germans should stop apologising for the Nazis" like a far-right parrot, that is not what I mean. I mean that Germans consistently underplay how unpopular the Nazi regime was amongst Germans, and ignore the resistance to it, primarily because they feel it seems like a disavowal of responsibility. I'm a non-German immigrant to Germany, and the granddaughter of a former Slavic concentration-camp internee, so it's perhaps easier for me to say, but I think this is the wrong approach. It tends to put Hitler and the Nazis in the camp of monsters, suggesting that any support comes from a supernatural charisma or the inherent badness of Germans, and obscures the reality that they were a human government that could have been resisted. There is a tiny little plaque on a building 200 m from my home where about 20 workers were murdered for organised sabotage. This should be an inspiration for resisting in the most difficult of circumstances, not hidden away under a pretence that everyone was equally guilty. If no-one resisted, it makes it seem like resistance wasn't possible.
December 6, 2022
¿Nos podemos reír del nazismo teniendo en cuenta las barbaridades que se cometieron? Si algo ha demostrado el ser humano es que es capaz de reírse de cualquier cosa. Los propios alemanes se reían de Hitler y su séquito ya fuera por sus ridiculas ideas o por la pinta que tenían. Los judíos también se reían de sus miserias, quizá porque era mejor reír que llorar. Este libro resulta muy ilustrativo con infinidad de ejemplos que demuestran que hubo chistes anti-nazis desde antes de su llegada al poder. Otra cosa que desgraciadamente conocemos bien es como muchos de los que se rieron de los nazis fueron asesinados por ellos. Los grandes cómicos de los años 20, los actores estrella (una mayoría judios) de la UFA y otros tantos ciudadanos de a pie que osaron contar un chiste y acabaron liquidados bajo la maquinaria.
Como nota a la edición, en la parte final del libro me he encontrado varias erratas: letras que faltaban a varias palabras.
Como nota a la edición, en la parte final del libro me he encontrado varias erratas: letras que faltaban a varias palabras.
July 1, 2024
I like the idea of this book.
Looking at the Third Reich through the lens of comedy. It was particularly terrifying learning that some people were executed for telling jokes critical of Nazi leadership. This kind of thing isn't terribly shocking if you have ever learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust, but hearing particular examples brings a firm sense of reality to that practice. I also learned that the families of people executed were billed for the service of executing their family members. FUCKED.
The parallels between the Third Reich and the US Republican party are pretty stark, but it's good to review topics like this so we can have more visibility if this shit should happen again. As I was reading this book there were times when I thought to myself, Well, at least it isn't this bad in America, or at least yet.
Looking at the Third Reich through the lens of comedy. It was particularly terrifying learning that some people were executed for telling jokes critical of Nazi leadership. This kind of thing isn't terribly shocking if you have ever learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust, but hearing particular examples brings a firm sense of reality to that practice. I also learned that the families of people executed were billed for the service of executing their family members. FUCKED.
The parallels between the Third Reich and the US Republican party are pretty stark, but it's good to review topics like this so we can have more visibility if this shit should happen again. As I was reading this book there were times when I thought to myself, Well, at least it isn't this bad in America, or at least yet.
June 27, 2017
Not so much about the jokes, but rather about freedom of speech, expression, criticism and satire in Nazi Germany as well as an overview of the way art was influenced and shaped. Some jokes provide an indication of the relationship between the populace and the regime, with the most funny ones appearing near the end of the book:
"The German capital was being transformed into a heap of rubble and people joked that Rommel would soon be appointed Berlin's Nazi district leader since he was so effective in the desert."
And "one guy says to another: Tell me what are you going to do after the war? - I'm finally going to take a vacation and see all of Germany. - And what are you going to do in the afternoon?"
"The German capital was being transformed into a heap of rubble and people joked that Rommel would soon be appointed Berlin's Nazi district leader since he was so effective in the desert."
And "one guy says to another: Tell me what are you going to do after the war? - I'm finally going to take a vacation and see all of Germany. - And what are you going to do in the afternoon?"
February 1, 2025
3,5 stars
Almost two years ago I read Chaya Ostrower's book, It Kept Us Alive, which deals with Jewish humor during the Holocaust. As strange and absurd as it may seem, I laughed at some of the dark humor jokes in the book. Perhaps I was expecting a similar feeling in this book by Rudolph Herzog, but in terms of "being funny", the book leaves a lot to be desired (we can blame the Germans, after all, I believe that there must be no people in the world as unfunny as the Germans). For most of the jokes in the book, we can't even conclude whether the joke is subversive or complicity with the Nazi regime.
It also lacked some comparison with other totalitarian regimes and how they deal or dealt with humor as a form of resistance.
Almost two years ago I read Chaya Ostrower's book, It Kept Us Alive, which deals with Jewish humor during the Holocaust. As strange and absurd as it may seem, I laughed at some of the dark humor jokes in the book. Perhaps I was expecting a similar feeling in this book by Rudolph Herzog, but in terms of "being funny", the book leaves a lot to be desired (we can blame the Germans, after all, I believe that there must be no people in the world as unfunny as the Germans). For most of the jokes in the book, we can't even conclude whether the joke is subversive or complicity with the Nazi regime.
It also lacked some comparison with other totalitarian regimes and how they deal or dealt with humor as a form of resistance.
June 4, 2017
Humor is one of the deepest expressions of human culture.
I don't think there is a genre that ages faster than humor. (accept slapstick).
So I found it interesting to learn about humor in Nazi Germany.
It was an interesting read, and I was surprised on how well Herzog summerises the strategic situation in the different stages of the war.
I was a bit put off by how Herzog makes sure to tell me how I should interpret each joke he quotes.
It is clear that his is an apologetic work intended to refute claims that humor in the third rich was a form of resistance to the Nazis. But Herzog is laying it a bit too thick.
I don't think there is a genre that ages faster than humor. (accept slapstick).
So I found it interesting to learn about humor in Nazi Germany.
It was an interesting read, and I was surprised on how well Herzog summerises the strategic situation in the different stages of the war.
I was a bit put off by how Herzog makes sure to tell me how I should interpret each joke he quotes.
It is clear that his is an apologetic work intended to refute claims that humor in the third rich was a form of resistance to the Nazis. But Herzog is laying it a bit too thick.
January 19, 2020
Interesting and a surprisingly quick read, but I wanted more academic depth than this book offered. Herzog is interested in the role of humour under the Nazis, and I very much appreciated him pointing out that telling jokes might relieve some emotional pressure but does nothing to actually resist a murderous regime. I liked the quoted jokes and I liked his analysis, I just wanted more of everything.
June 9, 2018
This is perhaps more interesting as a cultural history of comedy during the Third Reich than anything else. Worth reading but probably not unless you're already pretty familiar with the principals involved.
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