East German jokes, jibes popular in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, also known as East Germany), reflected the concerns of East German citizens and residents between 1949 and 1990. Jokes frequently targeted political figures, such as Socialist Party General Secretary Erich Honecker or State Security Minister Erich Mielke, who headed the Stasi secret police. Elements of daily life, such as economic scarcity, relations between the GDR and the Soviet Union, or Cold War rival, the United States, were also common. There were also ethnic jokes, highlighting differences of language or culture between Saxony and Central Germany.
Political jokes as a tool of protest
Hans Jörg Schmidt sees the political joke in the GDR as a tool to voice discontent and protest. East German jokes thus mostly address political, economic, and social issues, criticise important politicians such as Ulbricht or Honecker, and political institutions or decisions. For this reason, Schmidt sees them as an indicator for popular opinion or as a "political barometer" that signals the opinion trends among the population. Political jokes continued the German tradition of the whisper joke.
Sentences
According to Bodo Müller, an expert in East German jokes, no one was ever officially convicted due to a joke; the Stasi called it propaganda that was a threat to the state or anti-state agitation. Officially, it was seen as a violation of Paragraph 19 "State-endangering propaganda and hate speech"; however, it was taken very seriously, with friends and neighbours being interrogated. The trials were mostly public and thus the jokes were never read there. Of the 100 people in Müller's research, 64 were convicted for one or more jokes. The sentence was usually between one and three years in prison. The harshest verdict was four years.
Most of the sentences were handed down in the 1950s, before the Wall was built. After that, there was a rapid decline in sentences for joke-tellers, with the last verdict in 1972 against three engineers who had told jokes in the breakfast break. The Stasi continued to arrest joke-tellers, but convictions ceased. In the 1980s, reports of popular sentiment delivered by the Stasi to SED district councils on a monthly basis revealed more and more statements about political jokes recounted in company, union, and even party rallies.
Operation GDR joke
In the Cold War times, the GDR was also one of the target areas of the West German Federal Intelligence Service. In the mid-1970s, someone in Pullach had the startling idea of intelligence gathering and evaluating political jokes about "over there". Thus, at the end of 1977, the BND in Pullach launched the secret operation "GDR joke", whereby BND agents had to collect and evaluate political jokes in the GDR.
Among other things, the staff interviewed refugees and displaced persons from the GDR in the emergency accommodation camps of the FRG. So-called "train investigators" - mostly middle-aged women - listened to their fellow passengers in seemingly harmless chats. Additionally, West German citizens, who received visitors from the GDR or were themselves on kinship visits in the east, were asked for jokes. Overall, the BND succeeded in discovering thousands of GDR jokes within 14 years. Of these, 657 reached the office of the Federal Chancellor on secret service routes.
Examples
Country and politics
Which three great nations in the world begin with "U"? — USA, USSR, and oUr GDR. (German: Was sind die drei großen Nationen der Welt, beginnend mit "U"? USA, UdSSR, und unsere DDR. This alludes to how official discourse often used the phrase "our GDR", and also often exaggerated the GDR's world status.) The United States, the Soviet Union and the GDR want to raise the Titanic. The United States wants the jewels presumed to be in the safe, the Soviets are after the state-of-the-art technology, and the GDR – the GDR wants the band that played as it went down. A school teacher asks little Fritzie: "Fritzchen, why are you always speaking of our Soviet brothers? It's Soviet friends." – "Well, you can always choose your friends." Why is toilet paper so rough in the GDR? In order to make every last asshole red. Results for international tonsillectomy competition: USA three minutes, France two minutes, GDR five hours. Explanation: in the GDR one can't open one's mouth, so the doctor had to go in the other way. Eberhard Cohrs had a famous joke "Do you know the difference between capitalism and socialism? Capitalism makes social mistakes ..." – and the audience usually figured out the punchline themselves.