Laughing at Bullies in the Third Reich

High on my list of heroes is a name that may be unfamiliar to you, as it was to me a year ago. 

Wilhelm Busch was a youth pastor, a war veteran, and student of theology. He spent three decades serving teenagers and young adults and he was, for a critical moment in time (ie 1930s and 40s), a member of the Confessing Church in Germany.

While the Reich was busy pulling young people into Hitler Youth activities, Wilhelm Busch was faithfully teaching the sort of Christianity that proves the vile falsehoods that give rise to hatred, exclusion, prejudice and extremism. When the Nazis sought to pull his students away from their Christian commitments, Busch held on and pulled back–a dangerous and consequential tug-of war for the souls of German youth. 

I first read about Busch in Dean Stroud’s compelling text, Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow: Sermons of Resistance in the Third Reich. What put Busch on my hero list and captured my imagination is this short vignette from the book:

The youth pastor had so many interrogations with the Gestapo that for his twenty-fifth interview he wore a black suit with a flower boutonniere. When one of the Gestapo asked in amazement what he thought he was doing, he said he was celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary.  

It’s Not a Large Leap from “Gallows Humor” to “Crucifix Humor”

In their 2012 book, Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly, Charles L. Campbell and Johan H. Cilliers give theological justification for the kind of protest that laughs at bullies and mocks the Empire’s pretensions of power. They root their theology in the Cross itself and set out the premise of their book this way:

Gospel foolishness so disrupts our systems and securities that it calls both preacher and church to in-between, liminal places where fools make their home and where theology is unsettled and identity is in flux. This foolishness cannot be captured or controlled, either in sermon or book or life, for it challenges our rigid ‘iron theologies’ and our desire for clear, stable identities. This foolishness challenges us especially at times when societies are unsettled, and we are tempted to guard ourselves against the flux of developing just such iron theologies and stable identities.

Cilliers and Campbell go on to demonstrate their point by discussing the Graffito Blasfemo, a second-century carving of an earnest teen worshipping before a cross where Christ–depicted with a donkey’s head–is being crucified.

After it was used as an insult against them and their Lord, early Christians turned the donkey into an emblem of the Christus Paradox. The beast is a stable, steady and hard-working creature *and* it is humble, even silly or stupid. Thus it is that Jesus mocks the Roman Empire by a “Triumphal Entry” riding the back of … an ass? They write, “In Christianity the donkey was, and still is, appreciated and applauded as being part of the foolish history that God makes with humanity.

From second century carvings to early 20th century Russian literary criticism, Cilliers and Campbell move on to Mikhail Bakhtin’s interest in trading the epic genre, with its unassailable heroes, for novels featuring quirky characters and odd circumstances that map more realistically into our lives. The novel, like a carnival or a parody, give us the opportunity to tell the truth and to laugh at bullies, which may be a way of saying the same thing twice.

In the court of a mad king, in the presence of a tyrant, we turn to the jester to tell the truth. Even if it is apparent to many, the jester is uniquely positioned to speak truth to power. You can be fairly confident that authoritarian leadership has reached its ascendancy when the most popular late night comic loses his head … or his job. Let’s pour one out for Stephen Colbert, patron saint of jesters.

Laughing at Bullies in the Present Moment

A couple weeks ago I wrote that my favorite protest sign is actually the American flag. I stand by that AND the next best protest signs are the ones that make me chuckle. Its not uproarious laughter, mind you, but the kind of chuckle that accompanies a nod of recognition, a settled sense of what is true and the relief of knowing you aren’t the only one who can see that the Emperor is nekkid. 

• “Ikea has better cabinets”
• “Trump calls hoagies subs” (you have to be from Philly to appreciate this diss)
• “It’s almost like the economy is being run by someone who bankrupted 4 casinos.”

In the comments section in an earlier post, someone drew my attention back to the way that Filipino nuns placed flowers in the barrels of guns during the People Power Revolution in that country. 

As an elementary schooler living in the Philippines at the time, I was just grateful for a few days off from school! I also remember that my dad had just bought one of those shoulder-mounted video cameras that were the cutting edge of technology in the mid-80s.  Decked out in a CNN polo shirt that he’d been gifted as the press officer at the US Embassy, he went out in the streets that day. (I have weird home videos.)  

Four decades ago, I was too young to appreciate the way that gesture by the women religious on the streets of Manila participated in the disruption that Cilliers, Campbell, Bakhtin, the anonymous carver of second-century graffiti, and Wilhelm Busch all recommend. But the greatest recommendation for calling absurdity by its name and laughing at bullies is that it is a participation of Jesus Christ’s own work, a unique twist on carrying the Cross.

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength…God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things… 

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.