Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (8 page)

It is ironic that Ferdl, who used to open the bill for Hitler’s speeches when the Führer was still a relatively unknown agitator, was sometimes credited with anti-Nazi jokes. Though the cabaret performer sometimes allowed himself an equivocal remark, his political orientation was beyond doubt. His reputation as an adversary of Hitler was undeserved and was probably owed to his audience misinterpreting ambiguous passages in his songs.

But there was no need for even a Nazi loyalist to be enigmatic about Dachau, which was never mistaken for a sanatorium. The variety of popular idioms and jokes featuring Dachau as a concentration camp belies many Germans’ assertions after World War II that they didn’t know what was going on there. The following joke, for example, absolutely depends on the hearer’s assumption that a concentration camp is an extralegal realm where prisoners are terrorized and a place where one can be sent at any time for criticizing the Nazi regime:

This joke makes clear that even in the early days of the Third Reich, Germans were afraid that if they said the wrong thing they’d be arrested and sent to a place like Dachau. Thus the danger of humor itself quickly became the subject of humor:

Such jesting, ironically, is evidence that the concentration camps, along with emergency ordinances allowing things like “protective custody,” were indeed the effective deterrent to free speech—including free humorous speech—that they were intended to be.

After the Reichstag fire, Germany was kept in a permanent state of emergency to justify the government’s exercise of autocratic powers. The Nazis argued that “enemies of the state” could not be stopped using the regular instruments of the Weimar judicial system and with this excuse stacked the deck against those they accused of treasonous activities. There was no appeal against the decisions of the special courts the Nazis introduced, and those merely under suspicion were hardly safe, for suspect persons could be held without charge. The Gestapo, which acted independently from the regular Nazi legal system, was empowered to detain people for whatever reason and for however long it deemed fit. Those who were released from protective custody bore the stigma of being criminals, and other Germans avoided
them as if they carried a contagious disease. Government authorities rendered decisions about what behavior was permitted or forbidden more or less arbitrarily.

Most of the laws the Nazis enacted were little more than pseudo-legal window-dressing. On March 21, 1933, the “Ordinance of the Imperial President for the Defense against Malicious Attacks on the Government of National Renewal,” proclaimed that the dissemination of “untrue” (that is, critical) statements about the regime was punishable by a term of imprisonment. And although in the very first year of its existence 3744 violations were recorded, Nazi authorities felt the law was not strict enough, and it replaced it one year later with the “Law against Malicious Attacks on the State and the Party and in Defense of Party Uniforms.” This new edict included privately made criticisms of the government among the offenses to be punished by incarceration.

The exact wording of the law was as follows:

The law thus accorded the Nazi party and its representatives special legal protection, almost as though they were an endangered species, and also invited Germans to denounce one another.

Even so, the populace was not completely cowed by the new law’s harsher terms. It is impossible to determine precisely what effect the changed political climate had upon the telling of
political jokes. In the end, the system never functioned as comprehensively as the Nazis would have liked. It wasn’t possible to keep all German citizens under surveillance or to watch over what happened in every house and on every street corner. And Germans going about their daily lives no doubt knew that the state was not omnipotent.

Nonetheless, the postwar compilers of Third Reich jokes were convinced that all wisecrackers had lived dangerously. One editor, Kurt Sellin, wrote in the introduction to his book
Hitlerisms in Popular Speech
, published in 1946 with the approval of the Allied occupying forces:

Sellin went into great detail about the “personal dangers” that came with telling popular jokes. He also asserts that Germans, fearing draconian punishments, only told political jokes in private, in hushed tones or after first looking around to make sure no one else was listening in. That picture, though, does not conform to the reports of other witnesses interviewed for this book. The majority of them said that they were indeed able to tell political jokes freely, openly, and without fear of punishment.

The historian Meike Wöhlert has analyzed and compared the judgments rendered by courts responsible for malicious acts of treason in five cities. Although her research only deals with
registered cases and not unofficial ones, the results suggest that the telling of political jokes was a mass phenomenon beyond state control. In 61 percent of official cases, joke-tellers were let off with a warning, alcohol consumption often being cited as an extenuating circumstance. (People who had had one too many in bars were considered only partially responsible for their actions, and because most of the popular jokes that made it to court had been told in bars, the verdicts were accordingly lenient.) Fines were rarely handed down, and in only 22 percent of cases were those found guilty sentenced to any time in jail. Strangely,
the harshest sentences for “maliciousness” were rendered in prewar Nazi Germany, but even then the term of incarceration seldom exceeded five months.

The historical record contradicts the assumption that the Nazis sentenced large numbers of people to death during World War II for telling jokes. In the final phase of the Third Reich, some cases did receive capital sentences, but they were extreme exceptions to the rule. (We will return to them later.) The compilations of jokes that circulated in Germany after the war bore titles like
Deadly Laughter
and
When Laughter Was Dangerous
, but there is not much evidence that the jokes they contained were inevitably risky for the teller.

There is no doubt, however, that the situation became tense after the law was passed enabling the Nazis to legally target their political enemies. Even the adroit Werner Finck had to watch his step. Every night, Nazi “cultural monitors” came to the Catacomb and jotted down everything he said. These spies were so indiscreet that Finck often recognized them and built them into his act. Sometimes, he’d interrupt his performance to address them directly: “Do you want me to talk slower? Are you keeping up? Or should I wait for you?”

The Nazis among Finck’s audience weren’t amused by these impromptu barbs. In a protocol with the Kafkaesque designation Nr. 41551/35II2C8057/35, the fascist monitors reported the following:

Two years after Hitler took office, the authorities had had enough and suddenly reversed their policy of ostensible tolerance toward Finck. Up until 1935, the cabaret artist had been given minor roles in state-produced films, such as the harmless comedy
A Fresh Wind from Canada
. But his next role, in the film
April Fools
, was to be his last. Finck was arrested while on the set and taken to the much feared Gestapo headquarters in the center of Berlin.

Finck later recalled that he initially thought the whole thing would be over in an hour. But as the interrogations dragged on, and the time he was scheduled to perform at the Catacomb drew ever nearer, he started to suspect that this time the authorities were serious. What he didn’t know was that the premises of his employer had also been closed—forever. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the officials, some of whom were fans of Finck’s, told him he was being “kept on.” Finck later described the scene, which was not without some black comedy of its own, in his memoirs:

The Nazi press made a meal of Finck’s arrest. The SS organ
Das Schwarze Korps
dismissed the Catacomb as a “cultural refuse heap” and mentioned in passing that other cabaret houses, such as Larifari and the popular Tingel-Tangel, had also been forced to close their doors permanently.

Finck’s arrest was part of a larger, concerted action against cabaret performers who had gotten under the Nazis’ skin. The measures taken had been planned down to the smallest detail. One of Goebbels’s intimates, a Major Trettelsky, had even recommended that the “
breeding grounds of Jewish and Marxist propaganda should be closed during their performances and everyone involved, including the audience, should be taken into protective custody.”

Not all the performers arrested ended up in jail cells. Ekkehard Arendt pulled out his Nazi Party membership book, for example, and Rudolf Platte expressed regret and swore to change his ways. Both were released. But no such leniency was shown to Finck, Walter Gross, Walter Trautschold, Günter Lüders, or Heinrich Giesen, who were all taken to the Esterwegen concentration camp on Germany’s Dutch border. The theater formerly occupied by the Catacomb was taken over by the cabaret troupe Tatzelwurm, whose directors, Tatjana Seis and Bruno Fritz, made sure that any humor in their shows was too harmless to offend the authorities.

For Finck and his colleagues, it was the beginning of a long stretch of hard time. Esterwegen was no extermination camp, but prisoners were hardly treated gently. One form of ordeal there that shouldn’t be underestimated was the uncertainty about whether one would ever be released.

Finck was luckier than most inmates: his relative fame and popularity meant he was spared the guards’ full brutality. In fact, he was even allowed to stage an evening of cabaret while inside. His routine “Have no fear, we’re already here” has been preserved. It’s a prime example of Finck’s black humor: