Tricksters and Satirists

German Humour: Does Germany Have a Sense of Humour?

Course 1 · Chapter 3 · Tricksters and Satirists to 1914

The German comic tradition does not begin with the cabaret. Printed jokes and clowning stories go back to the Renaissance, a great poet made irony his weapon, a cartoonist-poet gave the world a cautionary tale of two naughty boys, and in the decade before the First World War a Munich magazine was prosecuted for mocking the Kaiser. This chapter follows the tricksters, the fools, the liars and the satirists up to 1914, and it asks the course's usual question: what is documented, and what is legend? Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Till Eulenspiegel: The Trickster

The stories

Till Eulenspiegel is a peasant rogue who wanders through northern Germany playing tricks, usually by taking instructions literally. A collection of tales about him was printed in Strasbourg around 1510 to 1511 (check the printer and date), and was soon translated into other languages. The English name "Owlglass" comes from his German name.

A real man?

Tradition says that he lived in the early 1300s and died in Mölln, near Lübeck, where a gravestone is shown. Historians doubt that he can be identified as a real person, and treat the book as a collection of folk tales gathered around one name (check).

Why it matters

The trickster who exposes the pompous by literal-mindedness is a basic comic pattern, with relatives in many countries. Eulenspiegel later inspired a tone poem by Richard Strauss (1895) and gave his name to an East German satire magazine (see Chapter 6, check).

Fools and Liars

The Schildbürger. The citizens of the fictional town of Schilda do everything foolishly: they build a town hall without windows and then try to carry the daylight in on sacks. The book Das Lalebuch of 1597 told of a similar group of fools, and the Schilda stories were collected later (check the dates and the relation between the books). The word Schildbürgerstreich still means a foolish act.
Baron Münchhausen. A real nobleman, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Münchhausen (1720 to 1797), was known for telling tall tales about himself. Rudolf Erich Raspe published an English collection of the stories in 1785, and the poet Gottfried August Bürger translated and expanded it for German readers in the following year (check). The Baron, who rides a cannonball and pulls himself out of a swamp by his own hair, became an international figure of the comic liar.
The tradition. These are stories about foolishness, boasting and trickery, with no obvious political target. They show a taste for absurd logic and the unmasking of pretension that recurs later in the course.

Wit in the Age of Enlightenment

Lessing and the stage comedy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is usually cited as the first great German comedy of the Enlightenment (check). Heinrich von Kleist's Der zerbrochne Krug (The Broken Jug, 1808) is a comic play still often performed, built on a village judge who is himself the culprit (check).
Lichtenberg's aphorisms. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 to 1799), a professor in Göttingen, wrote short, sharp observations on life and people that were collected after his death and have remained admired for their wit (check).
The tone. Much of this is the humour of reason: it takes pleasure in pricking pretension and in logical surprise.

Heinrich Heine: Irony as a Weapon

A poet under censorship Heinrich Heine (1797 to 1856), born into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf and later baptised, wrote lyric poems that were set to music by many composers, and also biting prose and verse satire against reaction, nationalism and pomposity. His long poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (Germany. A Winter's Tale, 1844) mocks the Prussian state and German patriotism (check). Censorship in the German states, after measures such as the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, limited what could be printed, and Heine lived in Paris from 1831 (check). His method of ironic understatement and sudden deflation is often considered the finest example of German satirical writing, and his works were later burned and banned under the Nazis (check).

Heine shows that German irony was a practised and sophisticated art by the 1800s, and that it often took a political form because open criticism was dangerous.

Wilhelm Busch and the Children's Cautionary Tale

Work (check each)	Note
Struwwelpeter (1845)	By Heinrich Hoffmann, a doctor in Frankfurt. A collection of illustrated verse stories in which naughty children suffer grotesque punishments. Mark Twain made an English version as Slovenly Peter (check).
Max und Moritz (1865)	By Wilhelm Busch (1832 to 1908). Seven pranks by two boys, who are finally ground up in a mill and eaten by ducks. The verse is brisk, the drawings are lively and the tone is darkly comic.
Other Busch works	Busch also wrote Hans Huckebein (a raven) and Die fromme Helene (1872), a satire on a hypocrite, which was attacked by some critics for mocking piety (check).
Influence	The American cartoonist Rudolph Dirks created The Katzenjammer Kids (1897) in the tradition of Max und Moritz, and Busch is often seen as a forerunner of the comic strip (check).

The cautionary tale combines moral instruction with a relish for the disaster. It is comic cruelty with a stated moral, a mix that British readers may know from Hilaire Belloc and Roald Dahl.

The Satirical Magazines

Magazine (check each)	Note
Fliegende Blätter	Munich, founded 1845. Gentle, illustrated humour about middle-class life, with many cartoons, running until 1944.
Kladderadatsch	Berlin, founded 1848. A political satirical weekly with a mostly nationalist and conservative drift, running until 1944.
Simplicissimus	Munich, founded 1896 by the publisher Albert Langen, with a red bulldog as emblem. The sharpest of the three, with drawings by Thomas Theodor Heine and others, and contributions from leading writers.

Mocking the Kaiser: The "Palästina" Case

The offence. German law punished insults to the monarch as Majestätsbeleidigung (lèse-majesté) (check). A person who mocked the Kaiser risked prison.
The 1898 issue. In 1898 Simplicissimus published a special issue satirising Kaiser Wilhelm II's journey to Palestine, with a cartoon by Heine and a poem by Frank Wedekind. The authorities seized the issue and charged the artist, the poet and the publisher (check the details).
The result. Reports say Heine was sentenced to a term of fortress imprisonment, Wedekind served a prison term, and Langen fled to Switzerland before returning (check the sentences and dates). The affair made the magazine famous.
What it shows. Satire existed and was popular, and it also met a legal limit. In the German Empire a joke about the head of state could be a crime.

A British comparison Britain's best-known magazine, Punch, was founded in 1841 and developed a tame, middle-class humour, while earlier cartoonists such as James Gillray had mocked kings and prime ministers with few legal consequences after the 1790s (check). In Scotland Robert Burns wrote satires such as "Holy Willie's Prayer" (1785), which attacked religious hypocrisy and circulated in manuscript before printing (check). The comparison shows two things: that British freedom to mock rulers was greater than German, and that both countries had a strong tradition of satire against hypocrisy.

Check the details Stories about Eulenspiegel, Münchhausen and the Simplicissimus affair are often retold with confidence and little evidence. Dates of first printings, sentences and the lines of poems are specific facts that should be checked in a reliable edition or history. Treat anecdotes about authors as claims until a source is named.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Make a table of four comic figures or works from the chapter, with the date of the earliest printing, the type of humour and one point on which the legend is stronger than the evidence.

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Exercise 2

Explain why Heine used irony and indirection, and what a modern reader needs to know to understand a poem of his.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Use the six-question method (who, record, when, definition, who gains, what would change my mind) on the claim "German satire did not exist until the cabaret", and write a careful replacement sentence.

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Quick Reference

Eulenspiegel: trickster tales printed c. 1510 to 1511; the man is legend (check)
Fools and liars: the Schildbürger, Münchhausen (Raspe 1785, Bürger 1786, check)
Heine: irony under censorship; Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844)
Busch: Max und Moritz (1865); a forerunner of the comic strip
Magazines: Fliegende Blätter, Kladderadatsch, Simplicissimus (the 1898 "Palästina" case)