Discourse and Defiance Under Nazi Occupation: Guernsey, Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (40 page)

Other factual stories provide a clear one-upmanship for the Guernseyman in encounters with the Germans in charge. Following a hurricane and intense storms in November 1940, Captain Henderson had to go to see Dr. Brosch of the Feldkommandantur. He took great pleasure in relating the ensuing conversation to Winnie Harvey:

“What weather! What weather!” said Dr. Brotsch.

“Weather?
We
like it.”

“Like it!”

Captain Henderson said, “Oh, well, it's only autumn yet, we haven't had the winter.”

“Autumn! Winter!” exclaimed Dr. Brotsch, “What is it like here in winter, then?”

“Oh, winter! In the winter we have
storms.
”
⁵⁷

This actual conversation has the same rhythm that builds to a punch line as that mainstay of American folk humor, the Farmer and the Stranger joke (“Say, Farmer, you been living here all your life?” “Not yet.”) In this case, the story pits the Guernseyman as the Farmer, steeped in local knowledge and common sense, against the German as the clueless, effete Stranger passing through.

Jack Sauvary related another purportedly true story of native wits confounding endless rules and regulations. Early on, farmers were allowed to keep half of their own pigs when they were slaughtered, the rest having to be surrendered. One farmer, on slaughtering a pig, cut the animal across the back, sending in the front part and keeping the back portion for himself. Jack heard that the authorities “made a little fuss,” but the farmer maintained that he had only done what the law demanded by sending in half. His technical compliance was indisputable, but the law was quickly changed to specify that the pig must be divided down the center of the spine. In relating this story of clever circumventing of the powers-that-be, Jack put in parentheses, “Trust a Guernsey farmer to be cute.”
⁵⁸

Some of the one-upmanship stories about the Germans were brief and likely apocryphal. A common tale (Robin called it “the tale of the day”) from October 1940 was that a German officer stopped a Guernseyman in the Grange, asking in broken English, “Heil Hitler—Which is the way to the Regal?” Whereupon, the local man supposedly replied, “God save the King—first turn on the left.”
⁵⁹
Other jokes at the Germans' expense were throwaway lines,
bon mots
made in the company of friends. An example of such witticisms would include a running joke in Kitty Bachmann's circle. During the time when so many private homes were being seized by the Germans, La Guelle remained untouched for the time being. Kitty claimed to be tempted
by an unidentified friend's advice to “rename the house ‘Stalingrad’ because it had not been taken.”
⁶⁰
This is the humor found in difficult circumstances that binds a subordinate group together in common viewpoint and understanding. It finds a “chink in the armor” of those in control and exploits that flaw to diminish perceptions of their power and competence.

Before leaving the stories and jokes told at the expense of the Germans, it is interesting to examine more formal jokes, ones that are presented as purely fictional and structured to build to an actual punch line.
⁶¹
These jokes have a particularly subversive potency. One such joke is found in both Ambrose Robin's diary and in the diary of Violet Carey, their accounts appearing only a week apart. Robin worked for the States, and Violet Carey was not only related to the Bailiff but was also married to a jurat of the Royal Court. Thus, they would have heard many of the same jokes that were passed around the States offices and then filtered through to the homes of States officials. Both indicate that the joke is from German sources. The joke starts with Goering believing that London had been bombed to the ground. Eager to see his handiwork up close, he flew in a plane to London. After he had been in the air for an hour or so, he passed over a city that was completely flattened. Leaning out to look, he rubbed his hands together saying, “Gut! Gut! My Luftwaffe has done well indeed.” The pilot became very red in the face and said, “I am sorry your Excellency, we have half an hour more to go, that town is Wilhelmshaven!”
⁶²

Told first as an acknowledgment of weakness by the Germans, this joke would likely continue to make the rounds long after its origin was forgotten. Some German jokes had a more sinister purpose, as Rev. Ord learned from Reinhold Zachmann. The joke Reinhold told Ord went like this. Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels were taking a drive to try out the new Volkswagen when they passed a farm that had posted a notice, “Pig for Sale!” When inquiries were made about the pig, the farmer asked for 185 marks. The three leaders each put down that they would give 15 marks, carefully writing down:

15
15
15
185

The math was based on the new Nazi accounting method: 5 and 5 and 5 make 15. Put down the 5 and carry on from column one, counting “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen” and put down the 18. “Ah!” said the farmer. “Now I see how you compute the British naval and merchant shipping losses.” Reinhold then said that to repeat this joke in Germany could literally cost a person his head. It had been devised specifically to serve as a trap for those disloyal to the Third Reich.
⁶³

F. K. M. Hillenbrand has written about the speed with which anti-regime jokes traveled through Germany, and the ongoing rumors that these jokes originated with Goebbels as a test of loyalty among the German people. The fear involved in the covert passing of such humor, and the subversive nature of joking may be seen in the habit that developed of scanning one's environment before delivering the joke. The term coined for this act was the “German glance” (
der Deutsche Blick
), and when combined with another term, “the whispered joke” (
Flüsterwitze
), the role of covert joking in undermining panoptical power becomes clear.
⁶⁴
For our purposes, the fear in being caught passing anti-Party humor indicates that Germans viewed
narratives (stories or jokes) as accurately reflecting the teller's internal beliefs, and as powerful enough in their effects to be treated as treason.

Humor directed at the Germans—whether stories based on contact with them or more formal jokes—met Sigmund Freud's definition of the “tendentious joke.” This kind of humor makes the target appear small and foolish, easily thwarted by circumstances and at the mercy of his/her own shortcomings. Significantly, Freud saw tendentious humor as a substitute for violent action, as a means of besting an enemy when physical action is impossible or unwise. Freud claimed that “by making our enemy small, inferior, despicable or comic, we achieve in a roundabout way the enjoyment of overcoming him.”
⁶⁵
Such humor during the Occupation provided an outlet for aggression during a time when direct attacks would put the actor and the community in danger for no good purpose. At the same time, by diminishing the Germans, this humor also taught the Islanders not to live in fear of them. This control over how the powerful are perceived is vital if those under their control are ever to take effective action. So, we would expect to (and do) see the use of tendentious humor prior to, and in the early stages of, great social movements. It is a mainstay of the hidden transcript of the powerless, not just because it effectively paves the way for later action, but also because of its own subversive power.

Although Germans served as the object of ridicule for most jokes told by Islanders, the other most common form of structured, narrative humor might today be called the “idiot joke.” Various versions of this joke were put forward, basing the humor on the person too unintelligent or too out of it to understand circumstances the way they were. Rev. Ord related a classic of this genre of humor in the story of the simple-minded man whose wife had evacuated in 1940. Now, this “grass-widower of three year's standing” received news via a Red Cross message that his wife had just delivered a baby. With the pride of a new father, the man told this happy news to a friend, who was having some difficulty concealing his surprise. “You're surprised,” said the simple-minded husband. “There's no reason to be. You see, there's a good five years between my brother and me!”
⁶⁶
Like many “idiot” or “moron” jokes, this humor may have been based on the simplicity of the slow of wit, but it pointed to a common anxiety. Only a fool, this joke argues, believed he had an accurate picture of what was happening in the lives of evacuated spouses.

The other butt of Island stories and jokes was the elderly woman, a staple of humor throughout history. Although modern eyes read into these stories an unpleasant ageism and sexism, the fact is that some were based on true incidents. One story told by Winifred Harvey, a woman over fifty herself, occurred while she was in the post office. The “old countrywoman” in front of her was drawing some money from her savings bank account and requested that her book be sent up this month, presumably to the London bank headquarters. The clerk said that it could not be sent now and would not be sent until after the war. Whereupon the woman replied, “Then they not settled the war yet?”
⁶⁷
Rev. Ord had a true weakness for such stories, loving the blend between the rural innocence of some of his parishioners and the perceived dottiness of elderly women. He told of an incident following a raid made by the RAF in July 1941, when the fire brigade had been summoned. When some of the brigade went to a country cottage for water, they were greeted by an old woman who took one look at their uniforms, mistook them for British parachutists, and exclaimed, “I knew you'd come some day!”
⁶⁸

Ord managed to combine a classic joke at German expense with some follow-up humor provided by elderly women. The formal joke involved Hitler staring out at the Straits of Dover
in 1940, angry over the obstacle that the Channel presented to his invasion plans. A staff officer (toadying for credit) said that he knew of a great Führer who conquered just such a barrier:

“Who was he?” asked Hitler.

“A man called Moses, my Führer.”

“Ah! A Jew! Nevertheless, how did he do it?”

“Sir, he waved his rod and the waters parted.”

“Where is that rod now?”

“My Führer, it is in the British Museum!”

But Ord continued that he told this joke to an acquaintance, who then related it to “two elderly maiden ladies of most retired habits.” When Ord's friend reached the end of the joke, one of the elderly women looked up and said with great interest, “That is a very nice story. But is the rod really in the British Museum?”
⁶⁹
Thus, this joke functions in two standard ways. The first part is the typical joke of diminishment, with Hitler as the stooge, and is told with clear contempt for the principals. The addendum, which would join the original joke in subsequent retelling, is of a different nature entirely. It embraces the target in its gentle humor and is the type of story that we tell on ourselves or on one that we love. In a nostalgic way, it argues for a return to innocence, for a time when elderly women could be of “most retired habits,” untroubled by Nazi occupiers and a world at war.

In addition to full stories and jokes, another way to read fantasy types is through examining wordplay, particularly narrative equivalencies such as similes and metaphors. Not surprisingly, the primary metaphor that emerged in contemporaneous documents compared the Island to a prison and the Guernsey population to prisoners. Jack Sauvary, immediately after the Occupation, began to refer to being “in Camp.” In a light vein, Jack maintained, “Our camp is not barbed wire, but surrounded by water, and it's too far to swim the Channel, and these days too cold!”
⁷⁰
And Jack was right that there was little need of barbed wire considering Guernsey's location and the inherent difficulty in escape. Ambrose Robin felt acutely the restrictions of this “miserable cramped existence” and believed that it combined with wide-spread illness, unhealthy diet, and generally depressing conditions to make Guernseymen and women feel “interned good and proper.”
⁷¹

Other metaphors bolstered the concept of imprisonment. Bill Warry described how the final seizing of wireless sets left them “cut off from the world,” with no concept of “how the war is going on at all or what is happening to our & other people.” It was clear to Bill that “
We are rats in a trap proper
.”
⁷²
Many commented on the transformation of the Island under Nazi control into a foreign, almost bizarre place. It was not merely the presence of German troops crowding out the civilians, but the deserted streets of St. Peter Port after dark. Newly forced by eviction to move to St. Peter Port, Ambrose Robin found it lonely to walk the streets with Tim in the evening; with the hotels and shops closed and the streets deserted, “I am a stranger in a strange land.”
⁷³

If some of the common talk among civilians described a desolate and empty landscape, other fantasy types emphasized the danger inherent in their new world. Kitty Bachmann described how a particularly bleak piece of war news filtering through the Island, or the imposition of some new German order would “descend upon us like a pall.” It was then that Islanders realized “how narrow is the towpath, how deep and swift the torrent on either side.”
⁷⁴
Kitty was often aware that Islanders now lived “on the edge of a volcano which may
erupt at any moment.”
⁷⁵
All of these metaphors and similes emphasized the precarious nature of life under Occupation, the belief that they were walking a narrow ledge with destruction a simple misstep away.