University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Faculty Publications and Creative Activity, School Theatre and Film, Johnny Carson School of of Theatre and Film 1999 "Ersatz Comedy in the Third Reich" William Grange Prof. Dr. University of Nebraska, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/theatrefacpub Part of the Cultural History Commons, German Language and Literature Commons, and the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Grange, William Prof. Dr., ""Ersatz Comedy in the Third Reich"" (1999). Faculty Publications and Creative Activity, School of Theatre and Film. 14. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/theatrefacpub/14 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Theatre and Film, Johnny Carson School of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications and Creative Activity, School of Theatre and Film by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Ersatz Comedy in the Third Reich William Grange University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska U.S.A. 1 The idea performing comedy, and performing a lot of comedy, during one the most systematic reigns of terror the world has ever known may at first blush seem somewhat degraded; researching comedy during the Third Reich may appear downright perverse, but my research to date informs me that even Nazis were capable of innocent laughter. The perception of most people, especially in the English-speaking world, is that “German comedy” in the first place is an oxymoron. The fact is, however, that 42,000 productions were staged between 1933 and 1944 in the Third Reich, and the majority of them were comedies. The most frequently performed were plays by the now forgotten likes of August Hinrichs, Maximilian Böttcher, and Fritz Peter Buch, Jochen Huth, and Charlotte Rissmann. Who were these playwrights? Why were their plays so popular? What kind of experience did they offer to audiences under a regime like Hitler’s? The most popular comedy in the Third Reich by a contemporary playwright1 was August Hinrichs’ Wenn der Hahn kräht (When the Rooster Crows), the kind of comedy that accorded with Nazi taste. It is a “rustic comedy” in a bucolic setting, imitating Carl Zuckmayer’s Der fröhliche Weinberg (The Merry Vineyard), one of the most popular and frequently performed plays during the Weimar Republic.2 After seeing Zuckmayer's enormously popular comedy in 1The most frequently produced comedy of all was Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, with 203 productions. Hinrichs can claim to be the most frequently produced comic playwright, however; When the Rooster Crows was produced 182 times, and his Krach um Iolanthe (Row Over Iolanthe) was close behind, with 157 productions. Together, those comedies were performed nearly 20,000 times. 2The Merry Vineyard, while stupendously successful, was not even Zuckmayer’s most frequently performed play. The playwright’s work was banned en toto in March of 1933; that included all his published short stories, poems, children’s plays, translations (e.g. Anderson and Stallings’ melodrama about American soldiers in World War I, What Price Glory?) and even his 2 1926, Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary, “The play itself is pure swinery.”3 In a way, Goebbels was right: the play prominently features a sow, and most of the action takes place in or near a barnyard. But barnyards became almost de rigueur after Hitler assumed power in 1933 because the Nazis glorified rural life. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was, however, particular in the choice of barnyards. When he and other Nazi officials called for more “Heimat-Kunst” (“Hearth and Home Culture”), the absence of Zuckmayer and other creators of “Abusive and Undesirable Literature” (Schädliches und Unerwünschtes Schriftum) an ersatz, or substitute “Hearth and Home Culture,” filled the void. Thus When the Rooster Crows and comedies like it succeeded, but they did so in an artificially created market. National Socialism aspired to keep the German theatre tradition vital and was especially desirous of fostering comedy that embodied the “will of the people.” National Socialists saw themselves, after all, as stewards of all that was best in German culture. Once the Nazis settled into the saddle of power, they assigned comedy an important role in the task of “re-awakening the spirit of the people” because comedy “comes from the heart. It springs from the depths of the screenplay for Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). Zuckmayer's comedies, however, were the immediate target because they presented German “folk life” with a generally leftist political slant and were also extremely popular. They comprised 2% of all plays done in Germany between 1929 and 1933, a remarkable figure for a contemporary playwright. Leading the list was Der Hauptmann von Köpenick (The Captain of Köpenick), with eighty one productions and Katherina Knie with seventy eight. 3”Das Stück war einfach saumäßig.” Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, ed. Elke Fröhlich, vol. I, entry for Sept.10, 1926 (Munich: Sauer, 1987): 207. Goebbels and members of the Frankfurt am Main SA (Storm Troopers, the Nazi Party militia) disrupted the performance of the play on September 9, 1926 by throwing stink bombs and shouting insults at the actors. He boasted that “five women fainted,” but he was himself physically escorted from the theatre and the performance resumed. 3 peoples’ roots as a nation,” according to one comedy expert in the Propaganda Ministry, for “it unites us as a people.”4 Comedies like Zuckmayer̓s, while widely popular, had done “enormous damage to the integrity of the German people” because they exposed “life-sustaining values” to “cheap, easy laughter.”5 German audiences nevertheless preferred cheap, easy laughter and wanted more of it. Playwrights and theatre directors were therefore under enormous pressure to produce “politically correct” comedies that also attracted audiences. Hinrichs’ When the Rooster Crows epitomizes the kind of comedy that accorded with Nazi taste. At first glance it is a “peasant comedy” set in a rural village with action concentrating on the hardy Volk, foolish though those individuals may at times appear. On closer inspection it reveals itself to be a rustic detective story, in which the local Gemeindevorsteher (a kind of village factotum) is suspected of and nearly arrested for breaking and entering. In the end, he resolves what turns out to be a mirthful case of mistaken identity, largely at the expense of his neighbor (a greedy tailor). Meantime his daughter falls in love with the newly arrived veterinarian and all ends happily. When the Rooster Crows had characters who featured nearly everything dear to heart of official theatre culture in Nazi Germany. They speak in a stage-adapted dialect which was originally in Plattdeutsch, and they refer to each other with the required number of barnyard 4Wilhelm Westecker, quoted in Peter Bumm, Drama und Theater der konservativen Revolution (Munich: Verlag UNI-Druck, 1971) 130. 5Walter K. G. Best, Völkische Dramaturgie (Würzburg: 1940), 92. “[Sie] haben dem völkischen Bestand enormen Schaden zugefügt . weil sie lebenserhaltende Werte dem wiehernden Gelächter preisgaben.” 4 abuses (Schafskopf, or “sheep’s head,” Döskopf, or “sleepy head,” Torfkopf, or “peat moss head”) to keep an urban audience amused. Yet the play also included some extremely subtle mockery of authority in the character of Police Inspector Kröger, whose officiousness blinds him to the nuances of genuine folk mischief. Kröger actually gains status, however, by allowing the folk to solve their own problems. That they do so in the end is less an indictment of official authority than it is of well-accomplished caricature. There is no barbed criticism here, only gentle parody. Maximilian Böttcher’s Krach im Hinterhaus (Uproar in the Inner Courtyard) was the second most frequently performed comedy by a contemporary playwright in the Third Reich. It premiered April 4, 1934 in Eisenach, followed by 166 subsequent productions; by 1940 it had been performed over 5,000 times.6 The play’s action revolves around a poor but honest war widow named Frieda Bock, who takes in ironing to support her daughter Ilse and to pay the rent in their meagre rooms in the courtyard of a large Berlin apartment building. She heats their humble dwelling with a small stove fired by briquettes of brown coal, as do the other residents in the building. One day a tenant reports that someone has been stealing briquettes from his bin in the basement; there is a cursory investigation which results in the building superintendent’s conclusion that Frau Bock is the thief. There is consternation among the tenants, leading to a demand that Frau Bock be evicted. Outraged by what she considers calumny, resolved to defend herself, and determined to find the real culprit, Frau Bock conspires with the aggrieved tenant to 6These figures are based on surveys completed in archives at the Institute for Theatre History at the Free University of Berlin. 5 bore holes in four of his remaining briquettes. She then fills them with gunpowder and places them where the thief can readily find them. Soon comes the “uproar” of the title, as a stove explodes in the apartment of the actual malefactor, who turns out to be the superintendent himself. Uproar in the Inner Courtyard is an imitation “Berlin Folk Comedy,” which achieved its greatest popularity beginning in the mid-19th century and culminated in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat). Many Nazi-era newspaper critics noted similarities between Böttcher and Hauptmann, while carefully avoiding any direct praise of The Beaver Coat. Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, after all, declared that Hauptmann had not really written plays but had instead “merely gnawed at the rotten roots of the 19th century middle classes and constructed theatrical pieces from newspaper reports.”7 Hauptmann had nevertheless won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Nazis always tried to acknowledge him as one of the leading figures in their cultural pantheon.