Bob Moyer takes a sobering look at a serious subject: humor in Nazi Germany, and what it tells us about that terrible time.

By Robert Moyer

DEAD FUNNY: Humor in Hitler’s Germany. By Rudolph Herzog. Translated by Jefferson Chase. Melville House. 256 pages. $26.

It is unbelievable that Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. More than 90 per cent of the Jews in Germany alone were deported and killed. It is even more unbelievable, therefore, that Germans insisted they didn’t know what was happening. This book firmly refutes that assertion by examining the humor of this humorless age.

Through analysis of jokes, the author gives us “unusual access to what people really thought…, what made them laugh, and also what they knew and otherwise took pains to repress from their conscious minds.” At the same time, the “reactions of the Nazi state to challenges from comedians and others … reveal what types of humor the fascist leadership actively feared.” Using interviews with survivors of the time, victims who suffered Hitler’s policies, and/or their relatives and friends, as well as court records, the author defines a pattern of consciousness that cannot be denied.

He starts with a brief history of political humor, leading up to the period preceding the Nazi era. Many of the jokes told about the Nazis were recycled from the past, “…the shell of an ancient jest simply refilled with content appropriate to its time.” A World War I joke that asks who will be saved if a ship carrying the Kaiser and his leading advisors sinks (the answer: “Germany”) is recycled for Hitler and his cabinet. Jokes like this, which poked fun at the patriarchy and their policies, were common. Very shortly after the Nazis gained control of the country, however, telling such jokes became more dangerous.

In a period of months, not years, the Nazis began removing the rule of law, and replacing it with regulations that protected the Third Reich. This policy, roughly described as “getting Germans into the same ideological gear,” enabled the Nazis to silence or murder their critics. “Whaddaya got for new jokes?” is the set-up line; “Three months in Dachau” is the punch line of a popular joke, not just a Jewish one.

A secondary insight provided by the book’s narrative is the breathtaking speed with which Hitler’s policies became the law of the land. Many jokes made light of the Nazi’s rapacious seizure of power. Few of these jokes, however, reflected concern with Nazi brutality; most of the jokes came from the fear of losing jobs or positions of authority, not the suffering of their Jewish fellow citizens. As the author says, “Charity … began at home.”

The “Law against Malicious Attacks on the State and the Party and in Defense of Party Uniforms” afforded the Nazis and their representatives protection against almost any perceived insult. “Perceived” is the operative word here; the law was wielded arbitrarily, to say the least. Joke-telling received a warning in 61 per cent of official cases.

Although thousands of cases came before the authorities (3,000 in the first year), comics and performers, of course, suffered the worst consequences. Any who offended the Nazi censors, or, in the worst case, the rulers, disappeared from the stage and screen. Some lost their careers; some lost their lives. Karl Valentin, the German Charlie Chaplin, was forbidden to perform, and he never did again, even after the war. The Jewish performer Kurt Gerron, the voice of the Dutch-dubbed Snow White, lost all employment, was incarcerated and sent to Westerbork and then Terezin concentration camps. In both sites, he was ordered to put on productions, at one time in the same room with corpses. Then, in spite of his reported work, he was sent to Auschwitz.

Others thought to be threats suffered accordingly and arbitrarily. As the German war effort waned, prosecution waxed more fervent. A Nazi functionary told a joke in which a teacher asks her students what picture should hang in the space between Goring and Hitler. A pupil answers, “A picture of Jesus. The Bible says he was nailed up between two criminals.” In court records, the case was listed as a misdemeanor. When a priest with black marks against him told a milder version of the same joke, he was executed. His crime was not telling a joke, but rather his “belief system that contradicted National Socialism.”

In his deconstruction of German attitudes, the author examines both humor about Jews, and humor by Jews. The former reveals a knowing quality: the official from a town with no Jews requesting some be sent so they could boycott them as ordered, and the man who responds when asked how he’s doing, “Like a Jewish lawyer — no complaints,” as in cases. Jokes about anti-Jewish violence were told by hardcore Nazi supporters, as well as by what the author calls “hordes of willing opportunists and March violets.” Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda may have contributed, but “ordinary Germans seemed to have come up with the majority of anti-Jewish jokes on their own …”

The perspective of what the author calls “millions of accessories to the Fuhrer’s crimes” exhibits a completely different tenor from the my-back-is-against-the-wall-and-I’m-still-laughing humor of the Fuhrer’s victims. For instance, two Jews waiting to be executed hear they are to be hung instead of shot. One turns to the other and says, “You see – they’re running out of ammunition!” Even to the last moment, some kept their humor. The comic Fritz Grunbaum joked with his fellow prisoners that not eating was the perfect cure for diabetes. Example after example demonstrates that “…humor often appears as the only effective antidote against lingering horror.”

In a very accessible, very readable manner, Rudolph Herzog draws us to the inevitable conclusion that the Germans clearly knew what was going on from the very early days of the Third Reich; that they were aware of the persecution of their fellow citizens; and that their humor was not resistance, but a surrogate for it — letting off steam as it were. In his words: “Great numbers of people back then saw through the swindles cooked up by Goebbels and his gang.” That knowledge, articulated in this careful analysis, makes the “terrible whirlpool of Nazi crimes” all the more tragic and, finally, inexplicable.