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."
