Post-203: With Rommel, in Good Humor

“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” (E.B. White)

What is “German humor”? I think I can identify it, but I would not hazard to explain it, for a reason something like that “frog problem”. Examples are much better. Here is one (a true story):

Rommel called on a fat Italian major who was commanding one of the road-construction battalions. […] The rotund major…was a…vivacious fellow, and kept us smiling. Rommel asked him whether there were any complaints. The major replied excitedly: “Si, si, Signor, Generale, the food is very monotonous and the vino is not good!”

Rommel looked with a mischievous smile at the fat little figure and murmured gently: “And yet it does not seem to be doing you any harm!” [From Chapter 13]

Rommel with his aides

I read that anecdote, recently, in a famous war memoir called With Rommel in the Desert by Heinz Werner Schmidt. It’s a line I think I’ve heard before, but that exact line, oddly, produces only a single Google hit as of this writing; that google-hit is from a 1951 Australian newspaper’s “review of new books”! (The author was Rommel’s aide-de-camp in North Africa, later a battalion commander.)

For a war memoir, the book is surprisingly light in tone, peppered with that “German humor” like Rommel’s above remark to that Italian major.

Here is another example. Flies were all over North Africa. Schmidt (the author), e.g., tells a general visiting from Berlin that “the unbearable part of the life [in North Africa] is the aggression of millions of flies. They settle on the food in thousands […]” [ch.9]. The author relates a farcical scene at the headquarters of one of the Afrika Korps’ constituent divisions. Picture this, sometime in 1941 (In the serious context of a German field command center!) —

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I was made at home in the 5th Light H.Q. mess. On an inside bulkhead of [General] Streich’s Mammoth [a large armored vehicle serving as a mobile headquarters] I noticed a large Knight’s Cross made of cardboard. But instead of the usual central swastika, it carried a sketch of a large black fly. Hauser explained to me that the Knight’s Cross was awarded ceremoniously every evening to the inmate of the Mammoth who had ‘shot down’ the largest number of the pestilential Desert flies during the day. I could understand their preoccupation with this unpleasant diversion, but I also began to appreciate Rommel’s more single-minded insistence that his subordinates should display initiative, aggressiveness, and ‘hardness’ in the face of the enemy. He had no time for frivolity.

Frivolity or not, Rommel himself actually partook in these “shooting down” sessions:

[Rommel] had just one recreation — swatting flies. Daily during the lunch hours he dedicated himself to the task of systematically destroying as many of these pests as possible. [Ch.11]

Being that he is a larger-than-life figure, a legend in his own time, as they say, I find the idea of Rommel sitting around a table swatting flies particularly funny.

Here is another. Rommel was called to Rome to celebrate his 49th birthday in November 1941. The author narrates:

They [Rommel, his wife, and close confidant General Ravenstein] attended the Opera [in Rome]. General von Ravenstein told me after the war that, as they emerged from listening to glorious singing, Rommel turned to him in the foyer and discussed not opera but, at once, what had obviously been engaging his thoughts: “Von Ravenstein, we must shift those battalions in the Medawwa Sector…” [Ch. 17]

Then there was the mild farce of Rommel’s extensive correspondence. Boys and girls would send him letters, fan mail, really. They asked for photographs. Rommel’s staff actually had thousands of photos on hand, which he would sign and send back! He naturally assigned the drafting of letters to his “aide-de-camp” (the author), though. Imagine what showed up with the mail one day at Rommel’s field headquarters in 1941. A longtime correspondent, who may have been Rommel’s sister (the author didn’t know for sure who it was, but all her letters were jocular) sent a surprise:

One day a large parcel of books arrived from her. Rommel asked me to take them to the troops at Halfaya [on the Egypt-Libya border; the frontline]. I examined the books and was amused to note that they consisted entirely of “trashy literature” of the type that those who managed the Third Reich had condemned as fit only for the bonfire of the Decadent Democracies.