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This is What Life was Like in Communist East Germany

Tim Flight December 18, 2019 25 min

Berlin Wall - Checkpoint Charlie — A man peers over the newly-built Berlin Wall in August 1961. The Guardian

25. East Germans were famous for their satirical jokes

Strange Soviet customs, such as The Socialist Fraternal Kiss being enjoyed here by Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in 1979, were widely mocked. Blogspot

To cope with being oppressed by such a miserable dictatorship, East Germans turned to humor. ‘How can you use a banana as a compass?’, goes one common joke. ‘Place a banana on the Berlin Wall, and the bitten end will point East!’ But telling, or even laughing at, political jokes could land you in prison for 4 years. The last sentence for making jokes saw 3 engineers imprisoned for chuckling together at breakfast. West Germany’s intelligence service even launched Operation GDR Joke, which collected and analyzed East German jokes for wider implications.

Written by

Tim Flight

I am a freelance historical and literary writer based in West Yorkshire, UK. I read for a funded PhD in English at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) and graduated in 2016. I am a former lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. My publications include peer-reviewed articles in academic publications, and pieces in mainstream magazines such as History Today and Fortean Times. For more information, please see www.drflight.co.uk