Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler’s Germany by Rudolph Herzog Read Free Book Online

before the election, and then a crass stunt like the Reichstag fire,” wrote Viktor Klemperer in his diary. “I can’t imagine anyone believes in Communist culprits instead of a contract job commissioned on behalf of the swastika.” And another contemporary, Rolf Rothe, noted, “This young fellow van der Lubbe, how could he alone have ignited the Reichstag? No person could have caused such a massive stone building to burst into flames! No one believed that. It would have been completely absurd!”
    The mystery surrounding the Reichstag fire was perfect fodder for comedians. Before long, people were circulating countless jokes that unmistakably, if with varying comic success, played upon the idea that the Nazi themselves had caused the fire.
    These jokes fell into two groups. The first group blamed the SA and the SS, which many Germans hated and feared, for the catastrophe. One such joke involved a pun on the letter
S
, a homonym for Ess, German for the familiar imperative “Eat!”:
    A father and his son are sitting at the dinner table. The son asks: “Papa, who started the Reichstag fire?” The father answers: “Ess, ess
[SS],
and quit asking so many questions.”
    Other jokes in this vein took the form of riddles:
    Q. Who set fire to the Reichstag?
    A.The brothers Sass [SA+SS].
    Q. What’s the different between a regular army and an SA unit?
    A. In the army they say, “Ready, get set, fire!” In the SA they say, “Get ready and set fire!”
    The second group of jokes assigned the blame not to Nazi thugs, but rather to Göring himself. There were a number of good reasons why he was singled out. He was known as a man of immediate and cold-blooded action. As state premier of Prussia, he also controlled the executive branch of government, of which he made ample, unscrupulous use. But in the show trials after the fire, aimed at exposing the “Communist plot,” Göring’s appearances were so clumsy that people began to doubt his honesty. One of the accused Communists, Georgi Dimitrow, mounted a vigorous defense, and his eloquence repeatedly forced Göring into a verbal corner. In the end, the Communists were acquitted—a serious embarrassment for the Nazi leadership.
    The trial let the genie out of its bottle, and the Nazis had no means of containing it. During the proceedings, Dimitrow had voiced the suspicion that the Nazis had started the fire themselves, and since the trial was being broadcast live on radio, there was no way such statements could be simply suppressed. Doubts concerning Göring’s role in the blaze were brought directly into Germans’ living rooms and became the subject of a variety of witticisms:
    On the evening of February 27, Göring’s assistant arrives out of breath at his boss’s office and yells, “State Premier Göring, the Reichstag is on fire!” Göring looks at the clock, shakes his head in surprise, and says, “What, already?”
    “Yesterday, Göring was seen in Leipzig Street.” “Really? Where was the fire?”
    Time has destroyed much of the evidence, and witnesses’ testimony was contradictory, so there is no way of knowing whetherGöring really was responsible for the destruction of the Reichstag. We can assume that neither Hitler nor Goebbels planned the arson, since both reacted with shock when they heard the news that the building was in flames. In light of the most current research, the most probable, if also least spectacular, scenario is that van der Lubbe did indeed set the fire on his own.
    There is little reason to believe that any political party contracted him to do so. The Communists had no motivation, and there is no hard evidence of Nazi involvement. What is clear is that from February 27, 1933, onward, the SA and Göring, who occupied one of the highest offices in the German government, were surrounded by ugly suspicions that were kept alive in innumerable jokes. Nonetheless, despite their anger at the outcome of the show trials and the damage to their