Nationalsozialistische Satire und Deutscher Humor: Politische Bedeutung und Oeffentlichkeit popularer Unterhaltung 1931-1945 (Beitrage Zur Kommunikationsgeschichte)

by Patrick Merziger

This dissertation was awarded the Ernst Reuter Prize of the Free University of Berlin. Comedy and Nazism - these two concepts may at first seem irreconcilable. At best, one associates vicious satires of the regimes and secretly passed-on Whisper Jokes with the period from 1933 to 1945. But laughter was also found in the Nazi era, and in all media - theater, books, film, press, and radio - dominated by a form that contemporaries called the German humor. With this humor, the wishes of the audience came through, and despite the opposition of Nazi propagandists it was able to establish itself through the commitment of journalists. At the same time, German humor tried to fit in as best it could into the Nazi ideology. This analysis of its success, therefore, shows how widespread the support for Nazism was and how engaged journalists were in the Nazi state. With this study of the contemporary debate about comicality and the products of German humor, the author makes a contribution to the study of public opinion during the Nazi dictatorship. German text.

407 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009