Naamloos verhaal

14

Āt this juncture I can hear the chorus of those Reich sceptics howling, "How can the Führer of the National Socialist movement possibly take part in a telecast featuring one Ali Gagmez?" And I can well understand these doubts if they are motivated by artistic considerations, for great art must not be sullied by politics. One would never, after all, seek to embellish the Mona Lisa, not even with a swastika. But the ramblings of an emcee – and Herr Gagmez is no more than that – could never be ranked amongst the expressions of high culture, quite the opposite, in fact. If, however, the doubts are triggered by a fear that the national cause might suffer from being presented in such an inferior milieu, I must refute this by saying that there are things which most people can neither grasp nor judge simply through the application of their reason. This is one of those matters in which the people must have faith in their Führer.

Here I must confess that I was labouring under a slight misapprehension. At the time I still assumed that Madame Bellini and I would work together to implement my programme for the greater good of the German nation. In fact, all that Madame Bellini ever spoke about was my stage programme. And this is precisely another example of how pure, innate talent – the Führer's instinct – is far and away superior to acquired knowledge. Whereas the scientist with his painstaking calculations, or the highly ambitious parliamentarian, are all too easily distracted by superficial detail, the appointed one feels the subliminal call of Destiny, even though a name like Ali Gagmez might appear to contradict this. And I do believe that Providence has intervened once more, as she did back in 1941 when the early onset of a bitterly harsh winter brought our Russian offensive to a grinding halt before we could push too far, thereby gifting us victory.

Or it would have done if my incompetent generals ...

But I'm not going to get worked up about this anymore.

Next time I shall proceed quite differently, with a faithful and devoted general staff, bred and raised within the ranks of my S.S. Then it will be child's play.

In the case of Gagmez, on the other hand, Destiny employed misapprehension to expedite my decision. For I would have appeared on his telecast – let the hucksters take note here – even if I had known the true nature of the product being peddled. But only after lengthier consideration, which may have robbed me of the opportunity. Very early on I made it quite clear to Goebbels that I was prepared to play the fool if it enabled me to capture the attention of my fellow Germans. You won't win over a single soul if nobody is listening. And that Gagmez had brought me an audience that numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

From a critical perspective, Gagmez was one of those "artists" that only a bourgeois democracy can spawn. Crossbreeding had paired a southern, even Asiatic appearance with impeccable spoken German, albeit tainted with an excruciating dialect. This combination seemed to be the very thing which made Gagmez's performance possible. It was not dissimilar to those white actors in America who blackened themselves up to win roles playing simple-minded negroes. The parallel was striking, except in this case the fare on offer was not negro jokes, but jokes about foreigners. These appeared to be in such demand that a number of racial comedians were now plying their trade. It was incomprehensible. In my eyes jokes about race or foreigners are a contradiction in themselves. A witticism related to me by a comrade in 1922 may serve to illustrate the point:

Two veterans meet.

"So where were you wounded, then?" one of them asks.

"In the Dardanelles," says the other.

"Ooh, that must be painful!" the first one replies.

A humorous misunderstanding, which any soldier can share without too much difficulty. And by substituting the characters, we can change the degree to which the joke is funny and even enlightening. It is amplified if, for example, the role of the interrogator is taken by a notorious know-all, such as Roosevelt or Bethmann-Hollweg. If, on the other hand, we assume that the brainless questioner is a silverfish, the humour vanishes at a stroke, for every listener will ask, "How can a silverfish know where the Dardanelles is?"