Laughing Under Dictatorship
German Humour: Does Germany Have a Sense of Humour?
Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Laughing Under Dictatorship
Germany lived under two dictatorships in the twentieth century: the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945, and in the east the communist German Democratic Republic from 1949 to 1990. In both, humour about the rulers was risky and was nevertheless told. This chapter asks what is documented about jokes under dictatorship: what the law said, what happened to those who were caught, what official comedy was allowed, and whether the jokes were a form of resistance or only a release. It is written factually and with care: the aim is to understand what people did and what the regimes did, and not to make light of persecution. Jokes are described by type, not repeated. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
The Nazi Years: The Whispered Joke
The phenomenon
Jokes about the regime, its leaders and daily hardships circulated privately under the term Flüsterwitz, "whispered joke". Historians have collected them from diaries, reports, memoirs and the records of courts and of the secret state police (check). They were told among trusted friends and colleagues.
The law
A law of December 1934, the Heimtückegesetz ("Treachery Act"), made it an offence to make malicious or inflammatory statements about the regime or the Party (check the date and wording). Later wartime measures punished remarks that were said to undermine morale as "undermining military strength" (Wehrkraftzersetzung), and special courts and the People's Court tried such cases (check).
The risk
Records show that people were denounced by neighbours, colleagues and relatives for remarks and jokes, and that punishments ranged from warnings to imprisonment and, in some wartime cases, death (check the numbers, which are debated). Telling a joke was therefore a real risk, though the risk varied with the time, the place and the listener.
Official Comedy and Escape
- Humour was not banned. The Nazi regime promoted light entertainment, comedies and revues as part of its control of culture, especially in wartime when escapism was encouraged (check).
- Film comedies. Light comedies starring actors such as Heinz Rühmann, including Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944), were popular (check the details). Their popularity shows that audiences wanted to laugh, and that the regime wanted them to.
- Propaganda humour. The regime also used mockery as a weapon against its enemies, in cartoons and speeches. That was humour used for hatred, and it is part of the record, though not an example of free comic expression.
- Foreign mockery. Films made abroad, such as Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940), mocked Hitler directly, and could not be shown in Germany at the time. It reached West German cinemas only in the 1950s (check).
The GDR: Official and Unofficial Humour
| Institution (check each) | Note |
|---|---|
| Eulenspiegel magazine | The East German satirical weekly, founded in East Berlin in 1946 and later renamed after the trickster of Chapter 3. It published cartoons and jokes within limits set by the state and Party, and still exists. |
| Die Distel | The East Berlin cabaret, founded in 1953, which was allowed to criticise inefficiency and minor abuses but not the leadership or the system. It also still exists. |
| Other cabarets | Cabarets in cities such as Leipzig and Dresden, including Die Herkuleskeule in Dresden (1955), played similar roles (check). |
| Television and comedy | East German television offered comedy and entertainment shows, and duos such as Herricht and Preil were popular (check). |
- "Constructive criticism." Official satire was supposed to target shortcomings that the system could correct, such as waste or a rude shop assistant, and not the system itself (check).
- The art of the hint. Cabaret writers and performers learned to use double meanings, pauses and allusions, so the audience could hear what was not said. This echoed Werner Finck's technique in the 1930s (see Chapter 4).
- Censorship and the Stasi. Texts were reviewed by officials, and performances were watched by informers of the state security service, the Stasi. Archives opened after 1990 show reports on cabarets and their audiences (check). Performers could be banned or pressured.
The Political Joke in the GDR
- Subjects. Jokes about shortages and waiting lists (Chapter 8 of German Cars & the Autobahn covers the Trabant jokes), the Party leaders, the Stasi, the Soviet Union, and the gap between official claims and daily life (check).
- Radio Eriwan. A genre of question-and-answer jokes, in which a fictional Armenian radio station answers listeners' questions with an evasive "In principle yes, but..." They spread through the Soviet bloc, including East Germany, from the 1960s (check the origin and dates).
- The leader's phrase. A line attributed to Erich Honecker in 1989, that neither ox nor ass could stop socialism's course, was widely mocked in the weeks before the system fell (check the wording and date).
- The risk. The law punished "incitement against the state" and similar offences, and the Stasi collected reports of jokes. Records show that consequences existed but varied; jokes told in public to strangers were far riskier than jokes among friends (check).
- After 1990. The mixture of nostalgia and mockery for East German life, sometimes called Ostalgie, gave rise to films, shows and a debate about whether laughing at the GDR plays down its repression (check).
Resistance or Safety Valve?
| View (check each) | The argument |
|---|---|
| Resistance | Telling a joke against the regime was a small act of defiance and a way to keep a sense of independence and shared values. Where punishments existed, it took courage. |
| Safety valve | Jokes let people release anger without acting. Some historians argue that they helped the regime by making it more bearable, so they were not a threat to it (check; the "Ventil" argument). |
| A mixture | Many historians conclude that jokes served several functions at once: bonding, relief, small defiance and information about what people thought. They also warn that a joke is not a political act in itself (check). |
The honest conclusion is that jokes show what people thought, but cannot show how many people thought it, and that they were neither a movement nor an irrelevance. Studies of the Nazi joke include Hans-Jochen Gamm's work of the 1960s and Rudolph Herzog's more recent book Dead Funny (check the titles and dates).
Exercises
Make a table comparing jokes and satire in the Nazi years and in the GDR: what was legal, what was allowed, what was risky and what is documented.
Use the six-question method on the claim "Political jokes brought down the East German regime", and write a careful replacement sentence.
Explain how a historian can use a collection of whispered jokes as evidence, and what limits apply to that evidence.
Quick Reference
- Nazi years: whispered jokes; Heimtückegesetz (1934); denunciation; official escapist comedy
- GDR: Eulenspiegel magazine, Die Distel, "constructive criticism", the Stasi, Radio Eriwan
- Debate: resistance, safety valve, or a mixture
- Limit: jokes show what people thought, not how many
- Care: unsourced stories of people punished for jokes are to be checked