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

figure, conflating Jews and “Bolsheviks” in endless tirades and preaching the values of Germanness while publishing garbled books written in miserable German. The pillars of Weimar society would have known all too well how deluded and extremist Nazi ideology was, and perhaps for that reason they failed to understand how dangerous its chief exponent could be. On the contrary, they thought they could tame the upstart Hitler by giving him political responsibility. Few of hiscontemporaries realized that he was not just a flash-in-the-pan demagogue but instead a cunning tactician who knew how to maneuver and modulate his positions.
    Most bourgeois Germans associated the NSDAP with the thugs of the SA stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung, who marched through the streets in baggy military pants making a lot of noise. Their self-appointed “Führer” with his ridiculous moustache was criminally underrated. For instance, the author of this police report from 1927 was singularly unimpressed by Hitler’s oratory:
    [Hitler] speaks without notes, initially in drawn-out fashion for emphasis. Later on, the words come tumbling out, and in overly dramatic passages, his voice is strained and barely understandable. He waves his hands and arms around, jumps back and forth excitably, and always seems to be trying to captivate his attentive, thousand-strong audience. When he’s interrupted by applause, he theatrically stretches out his hands. The word
no
, which occurs repeatedly toward the end of his speech, is stagy and pointedly emphasized. In and of itself, his talent as a speaker was … for this reporter nothing special.
    Hitler as a comic figure? When bizarre ranks of brown-shirted SA men marched past, singing “Germanic” songs, many left-wing intellectual observers at the time didn’t know whether they should laugh or cry.
    The new political movement was both pompous and grotesque, and Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor probably seemed to his many German detractors like a bad joke. One contemporary recalls the Nazis’ triumphant marches after Hitler attained power:
    In the torchlight, the faces under their SA caps almost resembled those of the martial warriors from the Nazis’ propaganda posters. We had often mocked those Nordic profiles. We knew the dull visages of our adversaries all too well. But now here they were, actually marching past us, intoxicated by their triumph,bellowing out their idiotic favorite song: “When Jewish blood squirts from the knife, happy days will return.”
    But these troops of thugs and their leadership were serious about their murderous words. “Now, the cleansing process will commence in all areas,” Hitler’s chief ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, declared shortly after the party seized power.
    In January 1933, Hitler’s cabinet met for the first time, with the Nazi leader ostensibly under the restraining influence of his coalition partners from the mainstream parties. But the representatives of political reason soon fell under the sway of Hitler’s lupine charm. Like the audience in the street, they were blinded by the marches and propagandistic spectacles in the initial days of the Nazi-led government and quickly became little more than marionettes, as Hitler moved to consolidate his authority. The spirit of the times, so it seemed, favored the National Socialists. With breathtaking rapidity, Hitler carried out his plans for getting rid of multiparty democracy by “legal” means. He was able to do so not just because the Nazis acted ruthlessly and effectively, but because competing political forces put up a halfhearted resistance. The general mood among the citizenry also undermined the ability of the Weimar state to resist the attack from within. Hitler succeeded in channeling the emotional energies released by the Nazi ascent to power into a feeling that things were getting better. The new enthusiasm engendered in the political mainstreamwas accompanied by a sense of relief,