More on Auschwitz Jokes

Bibliographic Data

ID8932376
AuthorsUli Linke (University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author), Alan Dundes (University of California, Berkeley)
Year1988
Volume99
Issue1
Pages3-10
Publication date1988-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFolklore (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0015-587X • E-ISSN: 1469-8315
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0015587x.1988.9716421
OpenAlexW1978484488
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited1

MOST students of sick humour cycles were probably unaware of the existence of Auschwitz jokes circulating in post-World War II Germany until the publication of 'Auschwitz Jokes' in Western Folklore in 1983.' These jokes are so repugnant and distasteful that some have questioned whether they should have been published at all.2 One letter of protest, written by a Jewish graduate student in folklore at UCLA, was sent to the editor, while another angry response from a UC Berkeley student appeared in the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, suggesting that it would be better if such 'sick' jokes were ignored by scholars.3 The answer, of course, is that censorship, be it imposed from without or be it selfimposed, is unthinkable in an academic environment of free inquiry and expression. Auschwitz jokes exist and continue to be told in contemporary West Germany, whether or not a sample of them is published in an American folklore journal. The authors of the article in question did not make up the jokes; they merely reported them. Folklorists, in our view, have an obligation to record and report folklore accurately, no matter whom it might offend. One might even go so far as to argue that if someone had observed and called attention to the degree of anti-Semitism in Germany before the holocaust, conceivably lives could have been saved. In any case, if anti-Semitism does flourish in Germany, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, one would think that Jewish scholars would be among the first to seek to document and attack such continued bigotry. Instead, the original article was rejected without review by Jewish Social Studies, and several hatemail letters were sent to the American co-author of the article. One can't help wondering when some Jews will finally learn that pretending that anti-Semitism doesn't exist provides no help in a world unfortunately filled with intolerance and discrimination. We should like to state once more than anti-Semitism is alive and well in Germany. According to a 1982 survey, less than twenty-five percent of all West Germans have abandoned the traditional pattern of prejudice, a frightening statistic if true.' Visual evidence of the seemingly endless anti-Semitic sentiments is manifested in the form of wall graffiti which consist of drawings of swastikas or gallows displaying a dangling victim bearing the Star of David.5 Such drawings are analogues of the vicious jokes which advocate mass murder and which seek to make light of the death camp reality. And 'occasionally the prejudice goes from verbal violence to physical...The violence has chilling resonance in West Germany, where small neo-Nazi groups have seized the racial issue and made it their own.'6 It is sad to think how easy it still is to document the persistence of German anti-Semitism, and it is alarming to realize that such prejudice feeds in part on a fantastic refusal to admit that the methodical murder of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany ever occured. With the construction of the death camps, the Nazis created a world so horrible that it became difficult to confront. For many years after the war, countless Germans pleaded ignorance or claimed that the atrocities never happened at all. While this hesitation to face the historical facts might be understood as an attempt to escape or resolve the problem

Art · Folklore · Judaism · Literature · Media studies · Newspaper · Obligation · Political science · Sociology · The Holocaust · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · German History and Society · History · Law

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