Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany Read Online Free PDF Page A

film’s mass appeal.
The Three from the Gas Station
marked the beginning of the mercurial rise of the young comedian Rühmann, who quickly became a national star and a personal favorite of Goebbels, while a far less happy fate befell his costar, the Jewish cabaret performer Kurt Gerron. In
The Three from the Gas Station
, Gerron portrays a brash lawyer who informs the film’s hero, in a singularly absurd fashion, thatthey’re bankrupt. One of the high points of the picture was an almost dadaistic telephone exchange between Rühmann and Gerron. It was the collision of two talents, a young one with a bright future and an older one who was already beyond the zenith of his career.
    Gerron, who had excelled in the role of the dubious magician in Josef von Sternberg’s
The Blue Angel
, enjoyed a successful directorial career in the early 1930s. But he was best remembered as a likeable overweight character actor. His and his fellow Jewish comedians set the tone for the years between the wars. The humorous world of the Twenties was fast-paced, full of cabaret performers, clowns, and satirists such as Gerron or Otto Wallburg, who in some fifty films played a wide range of well-meaning characters, from average Joes up to state consuls. Above all, Wallburg was popular for his strange, stuttering speech, or “blubbering,” which attracted no shortage of imitators. Another important figure was Willy Rosen, whose smart musical arrangements delighted audiences in a number of prominent Berlin theaters, including the Scala and Kabarett der Komiker.
    In Vienna, which was the other capital of Jewish humor, second only to Berlin, there was the brilliant Fritz Grünbaum, a small, weaselly, sharp-tongued actor, and his partner, Karl Farkas, a man with a large crooked nose and an amazing talent for improvisation. Farkas was known for his ability to spontaneously come up with rhymes for words called out by the audience. A contemporary wrote of his act:
    Once an anti-Semite in the audience tried to provoke him, challenging him to find a rhyme for “Jewish thief.” He took a rose from a vase and said: “Here is the rose, and there is the leaf. Here is the Jew, and there is the thief.”
    Grünbaum and Farkas were the Viennese equivalent of Laurel and Hardy in terms of both fame and popularity. Paul Morgan was another popular comic actor; Friedrich Hollaender composed much of the music used in the acts. The list could go on. It was a golden age of Jewish comedy, and all of Austria laughed along with the stars. But within a few years, all that was over. The witty remarks about everyday life, the ironic couplets and the clever dialogues fell silent. Some Jewish comedians went into exile. But Kurt Gerron, Otto Wallburg, Willy Rosen, Fritz Grünbaum, along with many others, died in Hitler’s death camps.

III. THE NAZI SEIZURE OF POWER
    WHEN THE NAZIS came to power in 1933, they had already passed the zenith of their popularity. In the national elections of November 6, 1932, the NSDAP, or (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) had remained the strongest party, but it had lost roughly two million votes and 34 seats in parliament, mostly to parties on the far left and the conservative nationalists. The path to power seemed blocked, but weaknesses within the political system of the Weimar Republic conspired with the unhappy constellation of leaders at the head of the German state to allow Hitler to become chancellor the following year. In retrospect, it is all too obvious that mainstream politicians underestimated the Nazi leader, who easily played off his nondescript rivals against one another.
    Still, it’s difficult to comprehend how the political establishment could have allowed itself to be so manipulated. In public appearances Hitler vacillated between awkwardness and arrogance and often came off as little more than a beer tent–inspired blowhard. Nazi party events were as shrill as they were seductive, and their leader cut a bizarre