Germany doesn’t have a reputation as a funny country, but its dark humour is currently shaming the best recent efforts of both Britain and the US. Not that there is a sudden bumper crop of talented comedians in Germany, but who needs them when reality itself is already so bleakly cartoonish? A few years ago, Germany seemed like it had all the answers: a robust economy and a stable and broad-based coalition against the far right. Now, the economy is faltering as the combined effects of mismanagement collide with a bureaucratic culture that makes investment and innovation difficult. Striking rail workers and protesting farmers have brought chaos to the cities. The only thing collapsing faster than the German economy is the country’s status as a moral example, which hit an all-time high with the refugee crisis of 2015-16 and has now tumbled like a vaudeville star on a banana peel.
Jewish critics of Israel being arrested by Berlin police for allegedly antisemitic speech? It’s a joke worthy of Franz Kafka, who would also certainly have got a kick out of the enormous disparity between the treatment of protests in support of a ceasefire in Gaza and the farmers’ protests and their cavalcades of tractors.
While the former were often broken up or banned on questionable charges of antisemitism, the latter have been tolerated or even celebrated by the press and by politicians, despite evidence that in some regions, rightwing extremists and neo-Nazis have become involved in organising the expression of rural discontent. Indeed, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the state is most permissive of protests organised by rightwing Germans. The same tactics that have been broadly tolerated in the context of the farmers’ protests have been subject to increasingly draconian punishments when deployed by climate activists. “We’re allowed,” frustrated protesters wrote on a sign at one recent traffic-stopping action, where one young man sat on a toy agricultural vehicle: “We have a tractor.”
The contradictions that have rendered German life such a darkly comedic goldmine are more than just a matter of political showmanship – they cut through the country’s political and cultural life. Germany made massive early investments in renewable energy, for example, but it also allowed the violent clearing of an old-growth forest to expand coal mining, and continues to resist reasonable steps to reduce its dependency on cars. Unsurprisingly, peer nations have been far more successful in reducing CO2 emissions. Similarly, the country’s fetish for eliminating public debt has been paired with a consistent tolerance of political corruption and tax malfeasance. Following debates about immigration policy has been like watching a ping-pong match where the country’s desperate need to care for an ageing population and attract global tech workers is engaged in a dizzying rally with the race-baiting and xenophobia that have become an increasingly normal part of German political life.
When politics in the US and the UK have been funny recently, it has largely been a matter of personalities – the cartoonish excesses of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, Liz Truss’s panicked attempts to project an aura of calm authority, Ron DeSantis’s tough guy act. Granted, that parts of the English-speaking world have been governed by such farcical figures recently is evidence of real cracks in the structure of its democracies. But in Germany, the cracks are on the surface, plain to see. Indeed, the faultlines are clear enough that the news now often seems only to confirm our suspicions. The recent revelation that members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) plotted the deportation of millions of people in a series of clandestine meetings with neo-Nazis, for example, is only the latest in a string of scandals revealing the extent to which far-right extremists have infiltrated German politics. Weapons thefts, coup plans, attacks on the Bundestag – rightwing extremists have found support in the halls of power. Still, it’s funny that they held their meetings in a house called “Villa Adlon” – which sounds like a name Mel Brooks might invent for a Nazi meeting place.
It’s essential to insist on this kind of comedy because it comes from the kinds of psychic conflict that Sigmund Freud identified as the very source of humour. German society is trying to protect the climate and drive big, powerful cars as fast as possible. Germany’s fiscal policy wants to model fiscal responsibility but has no desire to confront the country’s structural problems. Above all, the desire to atone for the crimes of the Nazis is in an increasingly desperate conflict with the reality that German society, as David de Jong and others have recently argued, was built largely by unrepentant Nazis.
And it’s important to laugh at Germany’s hypocrisy today. After all, as the Jewish German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously argued, there are some atrocities so far beyond justification that earnest moral reasoning is inappropriate. When German politicians argue that police need to beat peaceful protesters to honour the legacy of the Holocaust, it would be obscene to argue with them. When German journalists try to argue that “collective responsibility” for the crimes of Hamas lies with “Gaza’s people”, it would be inappropriate to dignify their arguments with a response. It’s better to tell a joke.
Those concerned that it is inappropriate to laugh about such very serious matters might take solace – and inspiration – in the great stock of humour left behind by the victims of nazism. Laughter in the face of catastrophe was an essential means of survival for everyone: soldiers, concentration camp inmates, resistance fighters and refugees such as Hannah Arendt, who once quipped that the only way to identify a German anti-Nazi “is when the Nazis have hanged him”.
Peter Kuras is a writer and translator based in Berlin
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
