The fall of the East German trickster: A comparative cultural analysis of East and West German jokes before and after reunification

Abstract

Building on existing German transformation research, this article critically reconstructs an aspect of the problematic power relationship that emerged between the former East and West Germany after their reunification. In this relationship, the West took on a dominant, hegemonic position and the East a subaltern one. Drawing on jokes from East and West Germany as well as from the post-reunification period, an in-depth hermeneutic analysis brings into view a dynamic that can be read as symptomatic of this power imbalance. In particular the fate of the figure of the “good-for-nothing,” a mainstay in East German jokes, becomes emblematic of the subalternization of the East. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, this good-for-nothing was associated with a subversive Trickster figure; in post-reunification Germany, and from the dominant Western perspective, the extraordinary vitality of this figure became incomprehensible, the joke was lost, and the good-for-nothing has turned stigmatic.