Introduction
During the Nazi regime, and particularly under Adolf Hitler, the European Jewish community underwent a massive massacre throughout the second world war of 1945, which has been named the holocaust. They adopted humor to comfort themselves during the dark times. This paper looks at the place of humor during the holocaust.
Jewish Humour
This is the Jewish long tradition of jokes in Judaism that dates back to the Midrash and the Pentateuch but it generally refers to the more recent group of verbs that were first used in Eastern Europe and developed into the United States of America over 100 years ago. Jewish humor is grounded in several traditions like the intellectual and legal methods of Talmud which uses elaborate legal arguments and situations to tease out the meaning of the religious law. It’s often traced back to the medieval influence of the Arabic traditions on Hebrew literature (Yehuda Alharizi’s Tahkemoni). Another tradition is the egalitarian tradition among the Jewish community of Eastern Europe in which the powerful were often mocked subtly (Saul Bellow).
Jewish Holocaust
It’s also known as the “hashoa” and it means completely burnt and is used to describe the genocide of Eastern European Jews totaling over six million during world war II as part of a planned program to deliberately exterminate and execute Jews by the Nazis Germany under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. Other groups that were also executed include the Romani, Soviet civilians, the poles, the disabled, political and religious opponents. The Nazis regarded the holocaust as the final remedy to the Jewish problem and the number exterminated has been agreed to be twelve million.
Genocide and persecution were done in stages and the legislation to remove the Jews from the German society was enforced several years before the Second World War. Concentration camps were established where inmates slave-labored till death due to diseases or exhaustion. Jews and political opponents were also murdered in mass shootings while others were put into ghettos before being transported miles away in trains to death camps where they were killed by the use of poisonous gases in case they survived awful journeys. Nazi Germany’s arms of bureaucracy were all involved in the planning of the manslaughter (Dobroszycki, 1984).
Holocausts Place in the Jewish Humor
John Morreal, PH.D., describes humor during the holocaust as of three functions: critical, coping, and cohesive functions. He went ahead and notes that disaster on stage or in real situations is serious while humor creates a light moment. Dramatists like Shakespeare realized the worth of comedy that ‘it gives a different perspective on the world a round’. Mark Twain believes that the origin of humor is the sorrows and the problems that one goes through and that there is no humor in joy. One would be able to take humor seriously once he understands its value. The theory of incongenuity enables one to enjoy inconsistencies and the mental jolts are what make one laugh. It requires one to avoid emotional engagement and to be playful for one to find fun and be able to avoid fear, anger, sadness, and negative emotions whenever things take an unexpected turn (Shapiro, 1989).
Critical Function of Humor
Humor during the holocaust, as focused by the artists on the evils of the time and resulted in some degree of resistance to such evils needed critical minds to know what was being done wrongly. Humorists, entertainers, and cartoonists were among the first ones to call for attention to what was not going right that the clergy and the politicians could not recognize during the rise of both Hitler and the Third Reich when America was unaware of what exactly was happening in Germany (Dobrzynsk and Kampf, 1944).
Dozens of jokes about Hitler were written in the ghettos and this worked against Nazi propaganda because humor revealed the scary and awful facts about the Nazi party and this made them afraid of humor that they attacked the famous cartoonists like Bertold Brecht. This also made the Nazi government enact laws against treachery and this meant that listening or telling anti-Nazi jokes were treason acts and this saw hundreds of Jews put on trial for naming their pets as Adolf. Sabotage and resistance actions had humorous perspectives as whenever Nazi officials came into the city the signs of traffic and warnings signals were put on. Jews outside Europe like those in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem had greater freedom to critique Hitler and his party.
Cohesive Function of Humor
The Nazis and their allies were targeted through jokes by those groups that were opposed to them i.e. the Jews of Europe to whom humor produced solidarity and to all the other groups opposed to the Nazis. Hitler, Goering, and other Nazi leaders were demonized in cartoons by the cabaret performers like Weiss Ferdl who made satirical comments that made the Nazis look ridiculous. This saw the cabaret performers taken to prisons. They did not see freedom but humor gave them strength and the willpower to survive and resist the oppression.
The copying function of humor
Humor served as a weapon, spiritual sword against the oppressors and the horrors of daily living and this helped the Jews to keep their ‘high morale’ as asserted by Emil Fackenheim who was a survivor of the regime. Victor Frankl narrated how he taught a young fellow prisoner to understand the survival skill of humor and how he requested his comrades to be telling each other funny stories on daily basis about how their lives would be after liberation hence humor helped the inmates to face the real situation without ‘much mental torture’.
Defense Function of Humor
The Jews also employed the use of humor for self-defense against their perpetrated enemies. They would laugh at their inability to set themselves free from the hands of the Nazis. During the holocaust, the Jews made great jokes and laughed heartily to make their unavoidable predicament seem easy and bearable. This would defend them from neurological stress and duress.
Humor about the gallows i.e. the guillotine where every Jew waited to be exterminated also thrilled them a great deal knowing that it would finally be the last solution to their problems. Funny names were adopted to refer to their exterminator in an attempt to mock the killers and drive the message home that they were doing injustice to humankind.
Laughter and humor helped them to carry on surviving without having to commit suicide and this enabled them to have the right attitude towards what lied ahead of them which was unknown to them. To ‘overcome’ starvation they introduced some form of humor that was related to food and recipes since starvation was part of their existence. The inmates scrambled for their rare rations and the food remains without fear of conducting infections.
Other kinds of humor also developed like humor related to aggressiveness towards their supervisors. Inmates had gotten disillusioned and angry towards their oppressors and sounds had developed that denote certain individuals according to their character and behavior towards the inmates. The humor related to frustration also rose as most Jews held captives had their development plans which became nightmares and now we’re figuring out how they would restart their lives should they be released alive. Another humor is one related to the superiority complex as the Jews wondered about the extent of the German treatment of them as though they were not human beings. This made the Jews ask themselves a lot of questions about their origin and the future of their generation. The sexual aspect of humor was also rife in the prisons and the concentration camps where inmates shared jokes to do with their sexual prowess should they be given opportunities. This captivated mostly the young men but the majority were not interested in these erotic dimensions due to the health conditions as most of the time they stayed without food. They also lacked privacy while bathing and in toilets. The Jewish humor also had the social aspect since a single individual could not make a joke to him/herself hence humor helped to bring friends together for a chat. Humor created intellectual advantages as the laughter and satirical criticisms created mental perseverance and will to live as well as to struggle to preserve identity and personality.
Conclusion
Humor was not connected to any particular place as it was found in ghettos, death or the concentration camps and even in the streets and was expressed in paintings, drawings, caricatures, cabarets, songs, reviews, and other episodes. Humor was very instrumental in helping the European Jewish community in overcoming the massive massacre that they went through.
Work Cited
B.D. Shaw, ed., Is Hitler Dead? and Best Anti-Nazi Humor. New York: Alcaeus House, 1939.
Konnelyn Feig, Hitler’s Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979.
Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto 1941-1944. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.
Robert Moses Shapiro, “Yiddish Slang under the Nazis,” The Book Peddler: 1989.
Stanislaw Dobrzynsk and Sein Kampf. 41 Caricatures politiques. Jerusalem: Wydawnictwo “W Drodze,” 1944.
Ziv, A. Personality and Sense of Humor. New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1984.