Mocking Hitler: Nazi speech & humour in contemporary German culture

Mocking Hitler is by now an integral part of Germany's contemporary culture of remembrance. Germans ridicule their former leader and his fellow myrmidons in jokes, films, comics, plays, cabaret, and anti-neo-Nazi satire. Yet, instead of making fun of the historic individual, Germans generally deride Hitler's (self-)portrayal as the Führer and his mythological afterlife as the incarnation of absolute evil – a perception that is embodied by representations of Hitler the orator and Nazi speeches in general. On the basis of different examples of humour about Nazi speechmaking, this thesis identifies the reasons and functions that ridicule plays in Germans' coming to terms with the Nazi past as well as its problematic and beneficial implications. While humour, on the one hand, demythologizes and exposes Hitler, it serves Germans, on the other hand, as a medium to normalize the memory of Hitler and to distance themselves from their perpetrator past.