Today marks eighty years since the outbreak of the Second World War. Since the war acted as a significant catalyst for the development of the BBC’s foreign language services, it is only fitting that BBC Radio 4 should mark this anniversary with an episode of ‘Archive on 4’ on the BBC German Service. ‘Beating Hitler with Humour’ focuses on the German Service’s comedy programmes and the role these played in Britain’s political warfare effort. Featuring researchers Vike Plock, Kristina Moorehead, and myself, as well as IMLR archivist Claire George and Magnus Brechtgen from the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich), the programme gives an insight into the Service’s three main satirical programmes (‘Frau Wernicke’, ‘Kurt and Willi’, and ‘The Letters of Corporal Hirnschal’). It also mentions some of the ways in which the BBC used music to transport criticism of the Nazi regime. As you may gather from listening to the programme, my favourite of the comedy programmes is Robert Lucas’s ‘The Letters of Corporal Hirnschal’, as I don’t think it’s lost any of its freshness and absurd yet endearing humour. When publishing Hirnschal’s collected letters after the war, Lucas himself reflected on just what had made them so popular with German listeners during the Second World War: ‘Like any other tyranny, national socialism was utterly devoid of humour; it was a matter of beastly seriousness. To laugh at it – in the midst of the war machine’s infernal noise and the Nazi propaganda's hysterical screaming – was, as I believe and hope, a liberating experience.’ In other news, I have recently published an article on how the BBC German Service developed its ‘East Zone Programme’ during the 1950s as part of its Cold War propaganda effort. Anyone wanting to know more about the German Service during the Second World War may also be interested in a chapter I wrote on how the Service reported news of the Munich-based resistance group known as the White Rose, which is available in an excellent volume edited by Alex Lloyd as part of the whiteroseproject.org
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Emily OliverResearcher at Warwick University. Interested in all things Anglo-German. Archives
September 2017
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