Werner Finck, a dissenting comic in the Third Reich

Leonard Moseley, On Borrowed Time: How World War II Began (1969), chapter 6, "Hitler over Bohemia": 

The Kabarett der Komiker was a small night club which operated in a back room of a building on the Kurfürstendamm in the fashionable West End of Berlin, and any foreigner who visited it in 1939 was astonished at what he saw and heard. Not that the entertainment offered was prurient; when the Nazis came to power in 1933, one of their first acts had been to close down the homosexual and lesbian joints and the sadomasochistic striptease dives for which Berlin was famous. After-dark entertainment was now confined to high-kicking legs and an occasional glimpse of a bosom.

The Kabarett der Komiker had survived the Nazi purge because it relied on verbal rather than visual effects to make its impact. The entertainment was divided between sentimental singers, an occasional dancer, some slightly risqué sketches, and the services of what the Germans call a Conferencier, a sort of master of ceremonies who tells jokes and sometimes sings between acts. The only difference between Werner Finck and his counterparts in other countries was that his jokes were almost all political, and that every time he voiced them he gambled with his life and liberty. 

Werner Finck [1] was an anti-Nazi who made no secret of his contempt for Adolf Hitler and the men who were running Germany. He did something no one else in the Reich had the courage to do publicly: he made fun of them. Bouncing onto the Kabarett der Komiker's minuscule stage in his floppy suit, outsize bow tie and floppy hat, he would lift his hand in a majestic Hitler salute. Then, after a pause, without a muscle moving in his face he would say, "That's how high my dog can jump."

Finck always knew the latest gossip about the Nazi leaders. When Field Marshal Göring's wife, Emmy, announced that she was pregnant, Finck sidled onto the stage and said in a whisper to his audience, "Psst! D'you know what she's going to call the baby if it's a boy? No? I'll tell you! Hamlet. Yes, Hamlet! Well, obviously!" And then, hand on his chin, he began pacing back and forth across the stage, reciting, "Sein oder nicht sein, das ist die Frage!" [2]

And each time he concluded his act for the evening, Finck would march to the wings, turn, give the Nazi salute, and shout in a strident voice, "Heil...er...er...Now, what is that fellow's name?"

No one knows why the Komiker was allowed to stay in business. Between 1936 and 1939 it was temporarily shut four times by Joseph Goebbels, and on five occasions Werner Finck was jailed for "insulting behavior toward the state." But each time the cabaret re-opened and Werner Finck returned, his repertoire as bitingly contemptuous.

On January 25, 1939, Captain Paul Stehlin, the assistant air attaché at the French Embassy, was sitting at a corner table with General Karl Bodenschatz, Göring's chief aide and the fourth most powerful man in the German air force. As the Frenchman turned to his companion he was relieved to see that Bodenschatz was laughing at Finck's mordant comments on the Nazi leaders. "So long as he doesn't mock the Luftwaffe!" said Bodenschatz.

[1] An indestructible who is still appearing at the Kabarett der Komiker on the Kurfürstendamm today [1969].

[2] Which in German means either "To be or not to be, that is the question" or "His or not his, that is the question."

How Nazis viewed the USA

We would not say anything if the U.S.A. were aware of its intellectual and moral defects and was trying to grow up. But it is too much when it behaves in an impudent manner toward a part of the earth with a few thousands years of glorious history behind it, attempting to teach it moral and intellectual lessons, whether out of innocence or a complete lack of genuine culture and learning. We can forgive the mistakes of youth, but this degree of arrogance gets on one’s nerves.

Joseph Goebbels, 9 August 1942 “Aus Gottes eigenem Land” ("God's Country"), Das eherne Herz (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943), pp. 421-427.

Islam and Nazism

Oriana Fallaci, The New Yorker, June 5, 2006, "The Agitator":

“Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West. […]

“I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion. But the struggle for freedom does not include the submission to a religion which, like the Muslim religion, wants to annihilate other religions. Which wants to impose its ‘Mein Kampf,’ its Koran, on the whole planet. Which has done so for one thousand and four hundred years. That is, since its birth. Which, unlike any other religion, slaughters and decapitates or enslaves all those who live differently.”

The rest of this post is from http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2008/08/fundamentalism-and-fascism

Michael Potemra tells us that in Bernard-Henri Levy’s forthcoming book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism , there is an interesting line from the journals of Paul Claudel. On May 21, 1935, Claudel wrote, “Hitler’s speech: a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe . . . ”

The Catholic poet and diplomat Claudel wasn’t alone in linking National Socialism to Islam. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian who was the principal author (with Bonhoffer) of the Barmen Declaration against the Nazis, had this to say:

Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet. 

(Church and the Political Problem of Our Day , 1939, p. 43)

Fascism in America

Jean-François Revel:

Strangely, it is always America that is described as degenerate and 'fascist,' while it is solely in Europe that actual dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up.

Jean-François Revel, Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books, 2003, p. 156:

The strange thing is that it's always in Europe that dictatorships and totalitarian regimes spring up, yet it's always America that is 'fascist'.

The Volokh Conspiracy:

I wanted to get the source for the "dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe," so I tracked it down to Tom Wolfe's "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America," republished in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976). In the process, I found a more extended discussion that struck me as worth repeating. Here's the relevant excerpt, from pp. 115-17 of the hardcover edition; it reports on a panel discussion at Princeton in 1965, in which the participants included Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist magazine, Günter Grass, and Wolfe:

The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn't make any sense out of it. . . . This was the mid-1960's. . . . [T]he folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy's body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester's book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights. . . .

Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.

"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."

Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"

He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.

Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn't you say! . . .