A Het Onderwater Cabaret magazine cover from October 1944 features in a Berlin exhibition – Jewish Museum Berlin
A Jewish refugee who produced comics mocking the Nazis while hiding in an attic in the occupied Netherlands has had his work go on display for the first time.
Eight decades after they were produced, the satirical magazines by Curt Bloch are the subject of an exhibition, My Verses Are Like Dynamite, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
Bloch spent years secretly turning out copies of the underground title, which depicts Hitler as a dancing clown and his Nazis as blundering apes.
As Hitler’s troops ransacked the city of Enschede, where Bloch had fled to from Dortmund in Germany, he relied on a fountain pen and cutouts from newspapers to create collages which sought to explode the egos of fascist leaders.
A Het Onderwater Cabaret magazine cover from September 1945 mocks Hitler – Jewish Museum Berlin
He also wrote about 500 poems that mocked Hitler and the failing war effort and ironically dedicated one poem to his “special friend”, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief.
He then distributed postcard-sized issues of his magazine to about 30 resistance members and other fugitives from the Nazis in Enschede.
In total, he produced 95 issues of the magazine, called Het Onderwater Cabaret, or the Underwater Cabaret – a play on words as in Dutch “underwater” was a euphemism for living in hiding from the Nazis.
On the first day of the Berlin exhibition, which lays out all the magazine’s issues in glass containers beneath sombre lighting, the Jewish Museum was packed with visitors.
One page on display depicts Hitler as a gloomy-looking sphinx, while another cartoon imposes his head on a cartoonish image of a penniless, paint-smeared artist.
A third imagines the dictator dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, in an ironic twist on the comic actor’s own Great Dictator routine.
Another more surreal cartoon, possibly inspired by the Dadaist movement, mocks up an ancient Egyptian-style figure in a 1940s-era gas mask, clutching a combat knife and grenades.
‘A funny Fuhrer’
In one poem, which would have been fatal for Bloch if the Nazis had ever found it, he mocks Hitler as a false messiah who duped Germans into following him to their doom.
It reads, loosely translated in English: “They saw him as a blazing star, the world all disagreed, they saw a figure quite bizarre, a funny Fuhrer indeed.”
Curt Bloch survived the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands but his mother and sisters were murdered in death camps – Jewish Museum Berlin
Bloch’s final issue was circulated on April 3, 1945, not long after Enschede was liberated by the Allied forces, to whom it was dedicated.
While he survived the Nazi occupation, his mother and sisters were rounded up and murdered in death camps.
After the war, Bloch married an Auschwitz survivor and emigrated to New York, where he died in 1975. His trove of magazines were for several decades kept on a shelf, before the family offered them for public display.
Bloch’s defiant attitude and use of creative writing to maintain morale has drawn comparisons with the diarist Anne Frank, who lived in secret with her family in an annex behind a bookcase in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
‘Cross between Anne Frank and Tupac Shakur’
But Simone Bloch, Curt’s daughter, said his drawings were more like a “cross between Anne Frank and Tupac Shakur”, referring to the American rapper, who was also a civil rights activist.
Hetty Berg, the museum’s director, who is herself the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, said she was “totally flabbergasted” by the creativity and verve of the collection when Ms Bloch first showed it to her.
“I have never seen anything like this,” said Ms Berg. “I’m aware of a lot of diaries of people in hiding like Anne Frank. This is different – it’s targeted artistic work.”
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