Kaplan Louis At Wit’s End: The Deadly Discourse on the Jewish Joke

Abstract

The subject of Louis Kaplan’s erudite book, true to its subtitle, is the “deadly discourse on the Jewish joke” in Germany and Austria from the Weimar and Austrian Republics through Nazism. According to Kaplan, the Jewish joke and Jewish wit—the German term der jüdische Witz encompasses both—alienated many Jews, not to mention non-Jews, especially those with antisemitic tendencies. To understand their antipathy to Jewish humor, Kaplan examines the outsized role of the Jewish joke in various cultural debates. The book’s final chapter explores the Jewish joke’s discursive reemergence in West Germany in the early 1960s. What made this discourse in its various permutations “deadly” was the danger of the malicious reproduction of the putative trademarks of Jewish self-conception in Jewish humor—self-deprecation, self-criticism, and self-irony—in antisemitic rhetoric. Kaplan structures his book via individual case studies. One such example is Arthur Trebitsch, a crank Viennese Jewish antisemite, who wrote Geist und Judentum (Spirit and Judaism) in 1919. Through a series of logical contortions Trebitsch attempts to prove Aryan superiority and Jewish inferiority with an exposé of the “authentically Jewish” (echt jüdisch) joke, with its preference for rhetorical sleight of hand in degrading traditional values. Riveting is the account of Alfred Wiener’s effort, which he initiated in 1925 on behalf of the leadership of the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Central Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens). The association was German Jewry’s watchdog to monitor antisemitism. Wiener strove to censor self-mocking Jewish humor on stage, even if it also satirized antisemites; however, his initiatve received pushback from popular Jewish comedian Kurt Robitschek, who defended the right of free speech. Pivotal to Kaplan’s exposition is Nazism’s exploitation of Jewish self-critical jokes to validate antisemitism and to serve Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. Kaplan cites the example of Rasse und Humor (Race and Humor, 1936) by Siegfried Kadner. In it Kadner justifies Nazi antisemitism by claiming that the Nazis were merely repeating the negative attributes Jews readily admitted to in their own jokes. Whereas Trebitsch and Kadner identified justifications for antisemitic claims in Jewish jokes, Wiener attempted to preempt this rationale for antisemitism by nipping typical Jewish humor in the bud.