Dead Funny

Dead Funny: Humour in Hitler’s Germany, by Rudolph Herzog, translated by Jefferson Chase, Melville House Publishing, RRP£18.99, 256 pages

A well-known joke has it that one of the shortest books ever written is entitled 1,000 years of German Humour. Rudolph Herzog’s intriguing, if flawed, study of German humour dares to take a much shorter time period – the rise and fall of the Third Reich – yet manages to wring considerable substance out of it.

What is immediately fascinating about the jokes being told in Germany in the early 1930s was how many were made about the hypocrisy and pomposity of the new Nazi regime. “Dear God,” went a comic prayer, “Please make me blind so I can tell myself Goebbels is Aryan.” Another joke, aimed at the Nazis’ rampant cronyism, asked, “What is a reactionary? Answer: Someone who occupies a well-paying job coveted by the Nazis.”

While these jokes suggested a reality far from the monolithic adoration of the Nazis found in the films of Leni Riefenstahl, they spoke less of a profound discomfort with the new regime than of a mild, almost affectionate, irritation. They offered no bite and no tension and seemed more like normalising gestures than subversive ones. As such they were tolerated by the Nazis, who saw the necessity to let the populace blow off steam while the country was undergoing rapid change.

There were limits, however. When it was decreed that “Heil Hitler!” should be the mandatory greeting in all public buildings, an entertainer taught his trained chimpanzees to extend their arms in a Nazi salute every time they saw someone in uniform. A directive was swiftly issued forbidding apes from using the greeting under penalty of death. It was a sign of things to come.

As militarisation intensified, the Berlin cabarets, for so long the breeding ground for caustic anti-Nazi humour, were shut down. Even gentle ribbing of Nazi leaders in a bar could see you arrested thanks to the growing network of informants. The constant threat of being reported to the authorities led, in turn, to its own jokes: “A man goes to the dentist, who says ‘Open your mouth, please’. The man answers, ‘No way. I don’t even know you.’ ” Most shockingly, many popular jokes began to reference the concentration camps with punchlines mocking the Jews and “subversives” sent there. Not only do such jokes clearly give the lie to the idea that the majority of the country was unaware of the camps but they also show with startling clarity that just as humour can provide solace to the persecuted it can also provide reassurance to the persecutor.

Increasingly brutal punitive measures were instigated for even the weakest of political jokes under the theory that they “undermined defensive strength”. In 1942, as the tide of war turned against Germany, the widow of a German soldier was arrested for telling the following joke: “Hitler and Göring are standing atop the Berlin Radio tower. Hitler says he wants to do something to put a smile on Berliners’ faces. So Göring says ‘Why don’t you jump?’ ” The court found her guilty of being a “defeatist”. She was executed by guillotine.

Unsurprisingly, however, the bleakest, most fatalistic jokes were told by German Jews. One from the end of the war tells of two Jews waiting to face a firing squad. Suddenly a messenger arrives saying they are going to be hanged instead. One turns to the other and says: “You see, they’ve run out of ammunition.”

Herzog, the son of the film-maker Werner Herzog, shares his father’s curious and mordant wit. However, translating jokes suffused with wordplay is an almost hopeless task, and too often the witticisms repeated here sparkle like lead. If you can forgive this flaw you will find that Herzog’s book contains an intriguing tension. On the one hand there has been an almost unbroken proscription against telling jokes about Hitler and the Holocaust for nearly 70 years, particularly in Germany, where this book was first published. Yet against this prohibition stands the unstoppable human urge to make jokes about suffering. “In the aftermath of a catastrophe,” writes Herzog, “humour often appears as the only effective antidote against lingering horror.” This book shows how it can serve both sides in the very midst of disaster too.