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“Have no fear — he's a vegetarian.”

The Rise of Hitler Humor
From Otium Chicago/ US Vol. 2, No. 4 | ISSN 1554-8228 | 13 January 2006
By Josh Schonwald

... Serdar Somuncu is rarely known by his name. Ask most Germans about him, using his name, and they’ll stare blankly, and say, “A Turk?” But ask them about “the guy who plays Hitler, the guy who read Mein Kampf” and there is near universal awareness. No response to Somuncu is mild. A bright smile. A crinkled face. A scoff. A scowl. Some Germans—mostly young, urban Germans—simply love him. To them, he is a German Lenny Bruce, the daring hero, the taboo-breaker, who allowed them to laugh at their shameful past. Other, often older Germans who lived during the war, think that what Somuncu does—getting laughs about a man that led Germany to a devastating war—is wrong, even immoral. (“It’s not something to laugh about,” an elderly Berliner told me, soberly.) And there are also those folks, say, neo-Nazis, who want to see this son of a Turkish immigrant dead. In economically depressed pockets of East Germany, Somuncu’s performances ridiculing Der Führer often provoke neo-Nazis, prompting cryptic death threats and “Heil Hitler” chanting youths, sometimes forcing the actor to wear a bullet proof vest. He has a strategy for coping with the “enraged.” Challenge them. “What’s wrong with you,” he’ll ask. “Why do you have a problem with me?” Once, an enraged skinhead screamed “Heil Hitler” in the middle of his reading, and revealed his animus. “You are ridiculing the greatest man alive.” Somuncu stopped the reading, and talked with him. That became the show. “He’s a maniac,” said Heinz Gunter-Clobes, an expert on German comedy at the German media think tank, the Adolph Grimme Institut. “No one does what he does.”...

Somuncu’s reading of Mein Kampf, the banned text, predictably sparked soul-searching in Germany in 1996. Many liberal, mostly younger Germans celebrated the occasion as an achievement, a sign that the post-war healing had begun. But for others, what Somuncu was doing was inconceivably offensive, and immoral. How did this happen? Why wasn’t this censored? How could Germans laugh at a book whose ideas led to the darkest moment in human history, the murder of six million Jews?...

The explanation for Somuncu’s success in “getting away” with exposing Germany’s most taboo moment almost invariably focuses on one thing: his identity. Comic performers groused that Somuncu, as a Turk, was the beneficiary of an “exception” to “Germany’s stifling political correctness.”...

Somuncu’s discovery of Mein Kampf in 1996 was like Chaplin’s discovery of the bowler hat or Woody Allen’s discover of his neurosis—it changed his life. The appearance of the show, prompting German soul-searching, resulted in press coverage that subsequently caused his box-office appeal to rise. The small cabaret theatres where he once played to tiny crowds were now packed. The Hitler-ified Somuncu recalls returning triumphantly to a small theatre in Aachen where earlier in his career he performed Kafka before a grand total of three people. Returning with the magic text, the venue was packed. And they were listening, he said, glowering, “to every word.”

But as Somuncu’s career soared, his readings increasingly attracted an audience, rarely interested in theatre. His Mein Kampf readings became “events” for neo-Nazis; audiences often comprised a strange mix of ordinary theatre-goers, curious to see the performance, and packs of snarling skinheads, representing the Führer, and fuming at the sight of a Turk “disrespecting” their leader. Readings were often interrupted by chants of “Heil Hitler.” Somuncu increasingly became the recipient of cryptic phone messages and threatening letters. Venues received bomb threats. Police protection was often necessary.

The death threats and the neo-Nazis didn’t scare Somuncu; it energized him. “I understood the importance of these readings. How relevant it was.” Emboldened, Somuncu would play anywhere for anyone. “Stupid people, smart people, foreigners,” he says, and he would read anytime. He performed, always wearing a bullet-proof vest, on the sacred Nazi days—the High Holy Days of Aryan Supremacy—Hitler's birthday, April 20, November 9, and June 30. He encountered hostility, especially in economically depressed pockets of East Germany, where Nazi ideas had grown in popularity in the late 90s. Perhaps the most frightening place for Somuncu to perform was the East German port town of Rostock, the site of the ugliest incident in German post-war history.

When Somuncu arrived in Rostock in the winter of 2000, he anticipated trouble. Just a year earlier, a rooming house filled with immigrant workers, largely from Turkey and Eastern Europe, caught fire. As the house blazed, as dozens of residents perished, hundreds of people gathered, cheered, and chanted “Heil Hitler.” He knew the city had a growing number of neo-Nazis. And standing in front of his small hotel, as if they expected him, were two bulky skinheads, with a pit bull. “I shouldn’t have traveled alone,” Somuncu recalls, thinking, as he passed into the hotel. But when he entered the hotel, and called repeatedly for the clerk, no one responded. No one was there. He found an envelope, on the reception desk addressed to him, with a key, and a note. “We will be watching you.” Somuncu, though, was undeterred. He vowed he would never, under any circumstances, cancel a performance.

Somuncu became famous, won a prestigious German theatre prize, toured Italy, France, and Spain, all thanks, in large part, to Adolf Hitler. But one day, after four years and more than 1400 shows, he woke up in his apartment, shaking, the voice of Mein Kampf echoing in his head. “I was Hitler,” he said. “I had to stop.” On April 20, 2000, Hitler's birthday, he gave a final public reading of Mein Kampf.