Dead Funny
About This Book
In 1943, a woman working in a German factory repeated a joke about Hitler and Göring on top of the Berlin radio tower. A colleague reported it, and she was arrested and sentenced to death by guillotine. It made no difference that her husband was a loyal German soldier who had died in battle. Rudolph Herzog uses cases like hers to show how much humor lived on under the Third Reich, and how dangerous it could be. Dead Funny follows the story through several stages. It covers the crushing of the anti-Nazi cabaret scene of the 1930s and the persecution of comedians and of comic film and stage actors. It ends with the collections of "whispered jokes" that appeared in print just after the war. Herzog argues that these jokes fill a missing chapter in the history of the Second World War. They suggest that not every German was taken in by Nazi propaganda. Some jokes took on subjects such as the concentration camps, which shows that ordinary people were well aware of the regime's horrors. The result is a book about silence and cowardice, but also about rare and inspiring acts of courage. It is both fascinating and frightening, and it carries an obvious warning about what happens to humor when power turns against those who mock it.
ISBN: 9781685892814
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