Art from the Concentration Camps: Gallows Humor and Satirical Wit

"Il faut bien rire, pour ne pas pleurer.""It's nice to laugh in order not to cry."

Lillian Halevy, Belgian Holocaust Survivor

In his award winning history of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevitch relates the story of a conversation with an officer from the Rwandan Patriotic Army about humor in America, especially by Black comedians. The RPA colonel was curious that Blacks might be comedians, and even funny. His ending comment was "No comedians in Rwanda. Plenty of black people, plenty of adversity—no comedians."¹ Gourevitch goes on to comment that not only are jokes absent in Rwanda, but also the poverty of art in Rwanda, especially after the genocide. Maybe this is the normal situation of genocide, especially with the Rwandan model, where eight hundred thousand people were killed in approximately one hundred days.

The situation of humor and art in Rwanda, as well as other twentieth century genocides outside of the Holocaust, suggests an essential uniqueness (not to use the word in the sense of Professor Steven Katz) about the place of art and humor. The relatively long period of enactment of the Final Solution of the Jewish question, some unique conditions in concentration camps and ghettos, plus a pre-existing Diaspora Jewish culture that appreciated humor led to both humor and satire being part of Jewish life even on the verge of extermination.

Of course, the ghettos established for Jews by Nazi Germany, as well as the concentration camps, should never be viewed as places of humor. Certainly, there was a high amount of Schadenfreude (jokes and tricks played by the perpetrators at the expense of the victims), best seen in the numerous "health slogans" that adorned the walls of barracks in the camps associating lice and disease, while, in fact, the camp conditions actually promoted such health risks. While the Holocaust is not something to joke about, it is important that humor was maintained during this difficult period, and even helped some to survive. According to John Morreall, "the dominant theory of humor is incongruity theory," which, in a story creates a "derailment" or "mental jolt" in thought, producing laughter.² Morreall notes that during the Holocaust, humor served three functions:

First was its critical function: humor focused attention on what was wrong and sparked resistance to it. Second was its cohesive function; it created solidarity in those laughing together at the oppressors. And third was its coping function: it helped the oppressed get through their suffering without going insane.³

Within the coping function was the memory of a normal life, and the hope that it would return. It would appear also that a fourth category can be added to this typology: humor was also an act of resistance, since telling jokes, mocking Nazi rites, regalia, speeches and many times the "Aryan" looks of leaders like Hitler, who had neither blond hair nor blue eyes, that could lead to time in a concentration camp or even execution. If Nazism considered the people with imagination enemies, humorists and nightclub comedians ranked right at the top in terms of personification of the enemy.

Even before the rise of the Nazis to power, artists were satirizing NSDAP. The best known were the photomontages of John Heartfield, a communist whose work appeared first in German periodicals, particularly the Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (The Workers' Illustrated Magazine, or AIZ), and then in the many countries he passed through, ending up in England. Heartfield began making photomontages in 1918. Even at an earlier date, he was prompted toward this medium, implicitly sarcastic, because, as he noted, "The main thing is that I saw in the newspapers what was being said and not said, both."⁴ Comedian Werner Finck, a co-founder of the Berlin cabaret "Catacomb," was arrested in 1935 and banned entirely in 1939 because of his humor.

Satiric and humorous art is a different story of sorts, as it necessitates not only the act of telling, but also creation on paper with paint or other media which leaves a trail of physical evidence. One of the unique aspects of the...