Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany (9 page)

In the end, Finck and his colleagues were imprisoned for only six weeks. This was not due to any mercy on Goebbels’ part, but rather to the fact that an actress named Käthe Dorsch who had
once been Hermann Göring’s lover, intervened on their behalf with him. And Göring was very ready to listen because he loved putting one over on his eternal rival Goebbels. Nonetheless, Finck’s release from the concentration camp did not mean the comedian had been pardoned. All the performers from the Catacomb and Tingel-Tangel were required to answer for themselves before a court.

The case was tried in front of the Special Court of the State of Berlin. The defendants were accused of violating the law against “maliciousness,” and the proceedings were to go down in cabaret history. The authorities had made the mistake of admitting the public. While prosecutors read out the charges, which consisted almost entirely of political jokes and chanson lyrics, ripples of amusement began to spread among the auditors. The judge then ordered Finck to recapitulate “The Fragment of the Tailor,” his most offensive routine from the state’s point of view.

The sketch was built around a quick exchange between a tailor and a customer. The tailor asks: “How may I serve you, sir?” To which the customer replies, “Serve, serve—everyone wants to serve! I need leisurewear, warm. There’s something chilling in the air.” The tailor asks: “For camping?” To which the customer responds, “Camping? No, no—nothing to do with camps!” The tailor then measures the customer’s right arm outstretched (the measurements are sly references to the years of communist unrest, 1918–19, and to the year the Nazis seized power, 1933). When the customer doesn’t immediately lower his arm, the tailor asks: “Why haven’t you put your arm down?” Finally the customer replies: “Right’s suspended!”

In front of the court, Finck recited a harmless version of the sketch with garbled punch lines. His coerced performance ended with the words “raised right hand,” a reference to the Hitler
greeting, and when the prosecutor reminded him that the sketch originally concluded with the phrase “right’s suspended,” Finck shot back, “You said it, not me.” Uproarious laughter broke out in the courtroom. The trial ended with Finck being acquitted for lack of evidence. Finck had survived with just a scare. But he was prohibited from performing for one year, and his employer had fallen victim to the Nazis’ cultural cleansing. The courageous wisecracker was a free man once more, but detainment in a concentration camp still represented just the beginning of a caesura in his life.

IN THE END, the Nazis’ early pseudo-liberalism and the later intensification of their efforts to eliminate real and imagined political enemies were neither accidents nor creations of the moment. The new, harsher version of Nazism had been a long time coming and indeed had been presaged in 1934 by an outburst of cannibalistic homicide within the party itself. In a party purge that came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives, the SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm and other members of the SA leadership fell victim to this orgy of violence. Once an intimate friend of Hitler’s, Röhm had insisted on a “second revolution” as the initial euphoria surrounding Hitler’s rise to power began to wane. He wanted more attention paid to the weaker members of German society and also demanded a greater role for the SA.

The ex-soldier saw himself caught between a rock and hard place: the organization he headed was a revolutionary militia that had never had a chance to flex its muscles, thanks to Hitler’s nonviolent rise to power. Röhm sought to give the SA more weight in Germany by staging increased numbers of marches and purchasing additional weapons. In doing so, however, he stepped
on some powerful toes. He earned the enmity of the Prussian generals in command of the German army by suggesting that Germany’s armed forces be subjugated to the SA. At the same time, ordinary Germans feared the SA’s uncontrolled thuggery and brutal readiness to turn violent. Röhm and his private army of cloddish thugs, frustrated in their need for action, had few allies, and Röhm’s demands and darkly threatening posturing did little to help the SA’s reputation.

Hitler had issued a series of warnings aimed at Röhm, voiced first in small circles and then in front of an assembly of the party’s district leaders. The gist of these speeches became known to the general populace, who understood the threats they contained. Röhm quickly became the butt of a number of jokes. Significantly, most of the witticisms revolved around Röhm’s relatively open homosexuality rather than the violent excesses of his brownshirts.

In official Nazi ideology, there was hardly any sin worse than homosexuality. In the male-dominated militarized social order of the new regime, there was no room for “femininity.” And a number of stock “gay jokes” were adapted to feature Röhm personally. One example played on the German
Po
, baby talk for “ass,” also the name of a river in Italy:

The quips had not been created for Röhm personally; they had already been pointed at similar figures under other governments in German history. They were only political insofar as they were recycled in order to highlight Röhm’s fatal weakness for his party comrades.

But Röhm’s enemies in 1934 were not content just to draw attention to his violation of mainstream sexual mores. The SA leader’s archenemies, above all SS boss Heinrich Himmler and his overambitious deputy Reinhard Heydrich, invented a complicated conspiracy, supposedly headed by Röhm, to topple Hitler’s government. On June 30, Hitler struck out with extreme brutality at the alleged “counterrevolutionaries.” Accompanied by two armed police detectives, Hitler woke up the leader of the mythical putsch, Röhm, in the middle of the night and had him arrested. Another SA leader and supposed conspirator, Edmund Heines,
was dragged out of the bed he was sharing with his male lover.

The arrests were followed by hours of homicidal violence. At least 85 people died in the purge. Röhm was executed on July 2 after he refused to commit suicide. The Night of the Long Knives threw a spotlight on the Nazi regime’s true disposition, seen not just in Germany but around the world. And though many cheered the fact that something had finally been done to rein in the louts of the SA, the explosion of bloodshed that had accomplished it was not reassuring. The liquidation of the storm troopers’ leadership showed the citizens of Germany that their government would stop at nothing to achieve its ends. A joke soon began to circulate that the German constitution had been changed to read: “The Führer executes the appointment of ministers and, if necessary, the ministers as well.”

Hitler himself appeared a bit insecure in the weeks following the assassination of his former ally. In subsequent public speeches,
he sometimes justified the killing spree as an act of “state defense” against a planned SA putsch; sometimes he said it had been necessary for moral reasons. On July 13, Hitler addressed the Reichstag with a conspicuously muddled speech. One passage referred directly to Röhm’s homosexuality:

The German populace gratefully caught the ball that Hitler had unintentionally thrown them and came up with a number of extremely macabre jokes about Röhm’s bitter end. Röhm’s chauffeur, they cracked, had applied for a widow’s pension. And ever since Röhm had gone to heaven, the angels had been wearing their fig leaves on their behinds.

Such jokes made it clear that few tears were shed over the death of the SA chief of staff. But others were potshots at the entire Nazi leadership. One played on Röhm’s reputation as a violent revolutionary and a German idiom,
von hinten anfangen
, meaning both “to start from behind” and “to start from the beginning”:

Another joke, one of the few not to revolve around Röhm’s homosexuality, was uncharacteristically blunt about the other Nazi
leaders. It played on the double meaning of the word
erhalten
in the phrase
Gott erhalte
, or “God save” (as in “God Save the Queen”), which also means “receive” (as in “God has received Röhm in Heaven”):

We do not know how popular this joke was and whether it was told directly after Röhm’s assassination or not. But one thing is clear: Germans must have known by that time that their country was in the hands of a terrible regime that didn’t shy away from violations of basic human rights, torture, or murder. What should have been apparent with the establishment of the Dachau concentration camp in March 1933 became blindingly obvious after the Night of the Long Knives on July 30, 1934, which claimed not only the lives of the SA leadership but also those of several conservative politicians.

Long after the end of World War II and the demise of the Third Reich, a generation of Germans kept insisting that they knew nothing of the Nazis’ crimes. But the jokes popular in the early years when the Nazi regime was still consolidating its power suggest that such claims were untrue, even from the beginning of Hitler’s rule.

DURING THE FIRST months of their rule, the Nazis used persecution and murder chiefly to get rid of political opponents, but once they had repressed the Communists, Social Democrats, and bourgeois traditionalists, they quickly turned their sights on German Jews. The more the Nazis consolidated their power, the safer they felt from political opposition, the more destructive force they felt able to direct at this minority, which had previously been solidly integrated into German society. As early as March 1933, marauding SA units had engaged in anti-Semitic violence, although other Nazis were worried about the criticism in the foreign press. Joseph Goebbels and Julius Streicher, the party’s leading anti-Semite, wanted to give the go-ahead for a major pogrom on the streets of Germany, but Hitler was more cautious. In the end, the party leadership agreed to call for a national boycott of Jewish-owned shops and Jewish doctors and lawyers. On April 1, armed SA men took up positions in front of Jewish businesses and tried to prevent customers from spending money in them. Some troops painted anti-Semitic slogans and Stars of David on display windows; others were content to hold up signs calling for a boycott and to curse at Jewish businessmen. Some areas also saw looting and acts of violence.

All in all, this display of activism made a very negative impression on most people, and the thuggish SA men with their uneducated bellowing were left even less popular among the general population than they had been before. Although very few
Germans openly declared their solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, the boycott did not, as it was intended to do, set German gentiles against German Jews. On the contrary, ordinary people felt sorry for them, and if reports by the Nazis, who were disappointed by the boycott, are to be believed,
the amount of commerce done afterward by Jewish-owned business did not decline at all.

Jewish Germans came up with a number of jokes revolving around the boycott, the first nationwide anti-Semitic initiative carried out by the Nazi government. One running theme—hardly a surprise—was the arbitrary nature of this state coercion. Despite the considerable horror they had felt when the SA men were bellowing crude anti-Semitic slogans, in retrospect the joke-tellers were very much aware of the boycott’s inherent absurdity:

The punch line played on the fact that it was usually impossible to tell the difference between gentile and Jewish Germans.

The boycott made it clear that the Nazis were serious about their promise to drive even fully assimilated Jews out of German society. Germany’s relatively small Jewish minority was made into a magnet for racist resentments that were deeply anchored in the German social core. In the copious propaganda that accompanied
the boycott, Jews were made the scapegoats, however improbably, for a whole range of social ills, though in many rural regions of Germany there were no Jews at all—a fact that give rise to the following joke:

The boycott was the first of what soon seemed an endless series of anti-Jewish measures, minutely described in the diaries of Viktor Klemperer and other chroniclers of the time. The Third Reich did not begin with Auschwitz. The extermination camps were the terrible culmination reached after German anti-Semitism had been ratcheted up over several years. The earliest anti-Semitic laws were aimed at forcing as many Jews as possible to emigrate, since the state was eager to get its hands on the property that would be left behind by those who—in Nazi terminology—“pulled out.”

The inaugural piece of official anti-Semitic legislation by the Nazi government was the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” enacted April 7, 1935. This law sent all “non-Aryan civil servants” into forced early retirement and arbitrarily defined non-Aryans to be those persons with at least one Jewish grandparent. A certificate of heritage was introduced, and the stricture on civil servants was later extended to notary publics, midwives, druggists, and other professionals. This absurd piece of official paper was also required to obtain a loan and even made a qualification for a certificate of sports training.