Uncertain, Fugitive, Half-fabulous

Naturally, one doesn't expect a lot of laughs from this book, humor aside. It's an incredibly, unflinchingly stark look at Nazi Germany and the people therein. Herzog's painful thesis is that, essentially, German political humor from the 30s and 40s at the expense of Hitler and the Nazis does not constitute rebellion, risk, or transgressive ideas, but does show that the German people of that era simply can't say "we didn't know what was going on" or the "we were all in a trance from how charismatic Hitler was."

It's a depressing thought. Herzog points out, with a lot of proof, that telling jokes about Hitler didn't usually put one's life in danger, didn't mean one was in opposition, and in fact may have made it easier for one to overlook certain things. A sort of safety valve to get out of being genuinely outraged. At the same time, he theorizes that if people were willing to look at Hitler as a ridiculous loudmouth in 1940, they couldn't have been completely and utterly in his sway either. The sad fact is that the opinions, as expressed in jokes, only turned really sour toward the Third Reich when the owners of those opinions were hurt by it -- when it was everyone else, they just joked like anyone else.

Along with this, the book has a lot of information about the entertainment industry, and what various actors and comedians did, or didn't do, in the face of all this. There is also a chapter on the jokes that Jews told in the midst of the Final Solution. That chapter is extremely depressing: it also may be the funniest. But that might just be because I'm particularly attuned to the strange, dark humor of my progenitors.

The book isn't the most well-written in the world, and it goes on some tangents, and makes some assumptions. I'd probably put it at three and a half stars if I could, but I averaged up to four based on the gut reaction that it often got out of me, although that's probably entirely personal. It achieved that reaction because humor shows so much of the humanity in the people telling it, that it made the horrors of the Third Reich all the more palpable, as I could imagine the people suffering from, butting against, and allowing it.