This blog post is part of the Seminar Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience, April 10, 2025, funded by the WARFUN project.
What can soldier humour tell us about international relations? To begin with, humour is a universal social practice that includes, broadly speaking, “attempts to incite, provoke or express amusement (Wedderburn 2021, 7). It is due to this ordinariness that humour has increasingly been taken serious as a conceptual needle for taking a biopsy of international relations (Brassett, Browning, and Wedderburn 2021). The surging interest in humour is not an escape from politics but grows out of a sociological understanding of international relations as an outcome of everyday practice (Wedderburn 2021, 2, 3, 5, 26-28). Since humour is such a common mode of social interaction it lends itself to examining the social and political relations that it reflects, maintains, and challenges.
The ubiquity of humour as social practice implies that it also occurs in settings and situations that are considered antithetical to fun and amusement. At first sight, the military appears to be such a humour-free, bleak and harsh social environment: soldiers relinquish civil liberties, discipline their bodies in drill exercises, subject themselves at the mercy of superiors, and accept the possibility of injury and death. In spite – or because – of these conditions, military scholars acknowledge that humour forms an integral part of soldier culture (Ben-Ari and Sion 2005; Godfrey 2016; Hockey 2006 (1986), 56–57, 72, 172-175; Sløk-Andersen 2019; Johais 2025; Tidy 2021).
This soldierly humour culture is particularly instructive for the study of international relations because soldiers are at the forefront of the everyday production of these relations during multinational operations or in other settings of transnational military cooperations. It is this assumption that motivates the following exploration of German soldiers’ international joking relationships. Empirically, it draws on a research project on soldier humour that entailed in-depth interviews and group discussions with thirty-five current or former members of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr), observations at social events of veteran associations, during visits at Bundeswehr facilities and at the Bundeswehr Day 2022 in Warendorf.
The concept of joking relationships was originally coined by the British social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown to describe a kind of ritualised banter in indigenous African societies. Joking relationships permit or require the persons involved to make fun of the other and thereby express mutual recognition of common “kinship or other types of social bonds” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, 90; Apte 1985, 30). It is the ambiguity of humour that creates the possibility to reinforce and negotiate social hierarchies in a playful “combination of friendliness and antagonism” (Radcliffe-Brown 1952, 91). By joking, soldiers acknowledge each other as members of the same – the soldier – kin. At the same time, the special configuration of the respective joking relationship reveals soldiers’ geopolitical conceptions.
The contribution will first sketch German soldiers’ conception of the ‘shameful self’, that is the concerns regarding the use of humour in multinational setting. Afterwards, it examines German soldiers’ joking relationships with their American, British, and French kin.
The shameful self
The main framework for the Federal Republic of Germany’s military collaboration is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). In the context of the NATO alliance,
humour is frequently used as an icebreaker in first encounters with new
counterparts from allied forces and to loosen up lessons during multinational
trainings (Interview 17.10.2022). And it is traditional practice that jokes lampoon national character traits. Illustrative of that, NATO appropriated as early as 1988 a cartoon about the reputed characteristics of the alliance’s members and turned it into official greeting cards sold at the NATO headquarters and a table mat for an official NATO dinner (Lambiek Comiclopedia 2025)[1] Another variant of this genre is the joke about a ‘good NATO’ in which the different nationals have tasks commensurate with their special skills – British policemen, German engineers, Italian cooks – and a ‘bad NATO’ with reversed roles (Interview 17.10.2022).
German soldiers are, however, reluctant to blend in with their foreign comrades by joining in the laughter. The reason is the feeling of grief and shame that Germans have cultivated as the dominant collective emotions in the commemoration of the Second World War (Näser-Lather 2018, 109–10). Or as a soldier put it: “We Germans think a lot more about this historical background than other nations” (Interview 17.10.2022). The historical burden puts German soldiers in delicate situations:
“It is always difficult for a German if historical jokes come up – as is common practice at NATO. For instance, a Dutch once asked me: ‘How long does it take from Berlin to Amsterdam?’ ‘No idea,‘ I replied. And he said: ‚Five days by tank.‘[1] *laughs briefly* Can be funny or not. It was funny for him but for me – wearing a German uniform – it was unacceptable to show that I find it funny. Perhaps we would have laughed together if in twos. But you never know how the third nation in the room perceives it. And then you always appear as the reluctant German who cannot laugh.”
Due to the historical responsibility, German soldiers exert a self-control that is at odds with humour (Interview 17.10.2022):
“The essence of humour is to react without thinking and laught out spontaneously or not. Even though in this case the Dutch mocked himself, it is difficult. You start thinking and that makes it technical. And I think that’s why we Germans bear the stamp ‘unfunny’.”
The self-control in jovial multinational get-together is thus a real social handicap and reinforces the stereotype of the dour Germans. An option for preventing to be left behind completely and benefit from humour’s positive social functions is to use harmless or self-deprecating humour (Interview 17.10.2022):
“Therefore, in international contexts, if I don’t know the people, I only make jokes about myself or about Germany. That is always safe.“
German reticence likewise applies to the humour culture among German soldiers and is enforced through institutional policies. However, the military’s norms of proper soldierly conduct reflect not only the German memory culture with its responsibility for past atrocities perpetrated based on a racist and nationalist ideology. In addition, soldier humour culture has changed because the armed forces have kept up with society’s norms of appropriateness. Accordingly, it has been affected by the new awareness of sensibilities and heightened respect for minorities including that homosexuality is widely accepted. The most immediate impact on soldier culture came, however, from structural reforms, namely the admission of women to all military branches in 2001 and the suspension of compulsory service in 2011. A middle-aged soldier experienced a transformation of soldier humour in three stages (Interview 17.10.2022):
„Our own humour has changed drastically. Well, I know three armed forces: I know an army with conscripts, only men. I know a draft army that included women. And a professional army with men and women.“
He stressed that the integration of women changed the conversational tone most incisively:
“On the one hand, you don’t make the jokes that men share among themselves anymore when girls are present – only if girls do that as well. But we condition our humour strongly – and I think that is really deplorable – because we always believe that somebody will come and complain. Then what might have been said gets politicized. It is going to be felt as sexually suggestive or whatever. Thus, humour has changed extremely.”
As a result, jokes about minorities and jokes about gender, respectively sexist jokes are nowadays officially tabooed (Interviews 06.04.2022; 08.07.2022, 17.10.2022; 08.07.2022). However, this does not mean that such jokes have completely disappeared as all interviews with female soldiers testified (Interviews 22.07.2022; 26.10.2022; 7.11.2022).
In multinational settings, the German military is less wary of gender discrimination but anxious to suppress anti-democratic, chauvinist, and racist jokes that glorify the German past, suggest a superiority of the German nation, or disparage other people and cultures (cf. Interviews 17.10.2022; 14.06.2022). For instance, the command of the German armed forces quickly banned a patch with the lettering “Pork Eating Crusaders” that circulated among soldiers in Afghanistan.
The English lettering is allegedly translated in Persian or Arabic. However, it only takes letters from the Persian/Arabic alphabet that resemble the Latin letters instead of transferring the meaning in another language. The lettering encircles the image of a crusader – it can be guessed that his breastplate bears a cross – who holds a haunch in his raised hand.
Another example of institutional prudence demonstrates that well-meant can be the opposite of well done and illustrates the risks of wordplays in multinational settings (Interview 15.06.2022): In face of an imminent deployment to Afghanistan, the general of the 1. armoured division wanted to boost morale and camaraderie and initiated a competition for an official patch design.[2] The competition’s objective was an inclusive design that would praise the division’s pride but not hurt anybody’s feelings and, hence, all proposals that were too martial or pretentious were rejected. In the end, the general approved of a design that was little inventive – and thereby not offensive: it displayed an abbreviation of the division’s official name “Die 1”. In German, “die” is the feminine form of the definite article. For a German, the patch thus simply says “the first”. An American soldier was, however, amazed about this open prompt – or even curse – to “die first” when he caught sight of a German officer wearing the new patch: “You Germans really have the guts!” To him, the patch must have signalled that German soldiers were steely determined to beat any adversaries in a battle of life and death. In his effort to reconcile fun with control, the general had missed the literal meaning for English-speakers. And the end of the story confirmed the national stereotype once more: While the other nations were laughing, the German command prohibited and destroyed the patch immediately.
The big brother
On this occasion, the American soldier displayed more sense of humour than the Germans – probably precisely because the patch signalled an unexpected audacity. But apart from this exception humour has never been among the characteristics attributed to American soliders. Instead, ‚the American‘ represented the all-powerful big brother bursting with an abundance of consumer goods and facilities and excelling in operational efficiency.[3] However, the tribute paid for that is poisoned by conceit toward the lack of culture and intellect. The equation of ‘American’ with consumer culture strikes, for instance, from threads of the ‘Bundeswehrforum’[4] where it is used as an established term for the supply with a multitude of services and facilities. And in one of my interlocutors triggered the memory of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan a veritable storm of enthusiasm (Interview 22.07.2022):
“The Americans had a PX[5] and a shop. They had a city! *tone of voice gets louder and increasingly excited* They had a pizzeria! They had everything! You became crazy! I thought I’m in cockaigne!”
The American dream was so attractive that the informal practice of ‘Jukuhu’ tours to American bases developed:
“‘Jukuhu‘ [pron. yookoohoo] was the codeword for ‘I don’t have a relevant order but I really want to go there because I must buy food or something else’.”
With the codeword, soldiers camouflaged their desire amidst the regular radio communication and the practice was eventually captured in a patch displaying the ‘Jukuhu’ owl.
Furthermore, German soldiers expressed respect for the Americans’ operational efficiency ensured through strict drill and discipline (Interview 22.07.2022):
„I have never experienced such an army. We Germans cannot perform like that. They have so much drill. They are like robots. Everyone knows his place, his task. Just watching them is amazing. It runs like a clockwork.”
The formula for this operational efficiency is to “Keep it stupid and simple” which would also be due to the low level of education (Interview 22.07.2022):
“They work with simple communication, a lot with colours. So, they bet less on education, let alone self-initiative.”
Her comrade adds: „What do we call that? – Cannon fodder.”
Even if the American military proofs highly efficient – under routine circumstances – German soldiers hence did not wish to swap because they recognized the downsides as well (Interview 22.07.2022):
“I have never experienced an army that treats its subordinate soldiers that contemptuous. They lead by fear and punishment. There is no team spirit, no balance, only extreme competition.”
The comparison between the American and German military amounts to a juxtaposition between quantity versus quality. Indicative of the American army’s contempt of their soldiers was a difference in equipment by which the Americans earned the nickname ‘rednecks’ (Interview 22.07.2022): Americans necks were always burned by the sun because they wore simple basecaps, whereas German necks were protected by tropical hats with brim.
In light of this comparative experience, German soldiers praised the German leadership philosophy that is oriented at the model of the responsible ‘citizen in uniform’ and therefore applies mission-type tactics[6] (Interview 22.07.2022):
“I am grateful for being in the German armed forces since we are allowed to use our brain. I am glad that we still have this intellectual standard. That is mission-type tactics: You have a framework but how you move within it is up to you. What is important is that you fulfil the task. This does not work with the Americans. They only have straight drill. This means: Everything is prescribed. They are lost once they drop out of the structure. This is not to say that they are all dumb. But it is simply unwanted that they think themselves.”
Besides command style, the contrast continues in daily routines and preferences in leisure activities (Interview 22.07.2022): The American soldiers’ everyday routine consists of “bed, work, sports”. Moreover, common-rooms are designed in a way – with rows of chairs – that discourages social interaction. German soldiers, instead, like to get together after work hours in common rooms allowing to group chairs around tables to face each other and chat.
Another difference has ultimately adverse effects on the use of humour. As mentioned, sexist jokes – and other offensive jokes – are officially banned in the German military due to the increasing sensitivity regarding the discrimination of women or minorities. However, gender relations are not as scandalized and policed as in the American military (Interview 22.07.2022):
“In regard to the topic gender – really, really bad. If you went for dinner with the same woman three days in a row, you would be called in by your superior because they assumed you have a relationship.”
Accordingly, the negative effect of prudence on humour is more drastic (Interview 17.10.2022):
“I would almost say the Americans are stiff as a poker. In my perception, there is no longer any humour because it could always be considered sexual harassment.”
Overall, German soldiers paint an ambivalent picture of ‘the American’ soldier. On the one hand, they are impressed about abundance and functionality but at the same time cannot conceal disdain for lower intellectual and quality standards. This mix of jealousy and contempt reminds of anti-Americanist resentments that have been reactivated by different political-ideological camps since the 19th century (Dückers 2024; Scholtyseck 2003). The common denominator of anti-Americanist positions is to portray the ‘new world’ as the antithesis to own identity. In this caricature, the United States appears as the epitome of unleashed modernity characterized by alienation, uprooting, and acceleration. Moreover, the anti-American perspective associates the young and prospering country across the ocean with a lack of culture, decadence, superficiality, and disdainful materialism and consumerism. The source of arrogance is an opposing self-image that traces cultural and intellectual superiority back to the tradition of German idealism.
The model soldier
Such smack of arrogance is completely absent in German soldiers’ representations of British servicemen. On the contrary, the British are admired as soldier models especially thanks to their dark, yet witty sense of humour (Interview 17.10.2022):
“For the British, humour is a national sport. They are unbeatable when it comes to black humour and it has always intellectual depth.”
The vital role of humour in British military culture has been detected for servicemen in the First World War in the humourous tone that is striking from troops’ public communications, such as trench journals (Madigan 2013). By practising a sarcastic, self-deprecating humour style, soldiers created an alternative to the public’s conception of martial heroism that envisioned soldiers as fearlessly enjoying battle and being willing to die. Staging themselves as comical figures instead, the soldiers established “a basic standard of soldierly conduct” that emphasised the power of endurance despite fear in face of the terror of enemy artillery fire (Madigan 2013, 94).
When it comes to present-day British soldiers, ethnographic fieldwork (Basham 2013, 117–19) as well as the analysis of soldier obituaries (Tidy 2021) confirms that a particular sense of ‘service humour’ lives on.
Among German soldiers, British soldiers are particularly famous and notorious for their mess culture (Interviews 08.06.2022; 20.10.2022).
“The Brits have a very strong mess culture, that is the culture of the officers’ mess and officer corps. We [the German military] are already abandoning this and turning into a workers’ and farmers’ army. And part of this culture are the so-called ‘mess dinners’: These are formal dinners attended in gala uniform that are highly structured from the first course to the final port wine. There are exact rules for proposing toasts and reasons why specific regiments remain seated, for instance because they happened to be on some ship in 1884 and couldn’t get up. Thus, insanely traditional and regulated! Until the port wine. Then these mess dinners escalate in a most brutal manner.”
With visible joy, the interlocutor recounts several mess games he witnessed (Interview 20.10.2022): Once, British and German soldiers competed in a gauntlet through a tunnel made up of a row of thick armchairs. The competitors entered the tunnel from the opposing sides and won when they muddled through the other end first. On top of the tunnel sat the commander cheering the teams with a whistle and by shouting ‘All my boys!’. As was foreseeable, the participants were marked afterwards by torn shirts and bloody scratches. Another challenge was to dance as long as possible with a burning newspaper stuck in the buttocks. Similarly risky and embarrassing was a prank played on the most drunken soldier on the last night of a joint military exercise: he was stripped naked, shackled to the bed with wire and then pulled across the parade ground by a horse. Laughlingly, the interlocutor commented: “That was hellishly dangerous! Limbs can die off. Would you call that humour?”
He thus well realized the inherent danger and transgressive nature and understood why similar rituals are about to die out in the German military:
“These things were always very rough. Nowadays, you must be extremely cautious not to cross the line to physical injury or a violation of human dignity.”
Nevertheless, he could not resist the fascination and amusement of the British mess culture. A possible explanation for this fascination is that he considered it as the model of ‘real’ soldier culture. Indicative of this, he stated several positive functions of such rituals:
“Studies show: The tougher the unit, the harder the initiation rituals. Such rituals create an elitist attidude, an esprit de corps. It was a form of team building, a form of exuberance, a form of ‚We are the greatest’. That welds the community together.”
In continuing the tradition of mess games and initiation rituals, the soldiers prove that they are willing to take risks, endure hardships, and sacrifice themselves – their physical integrity and personal integrity – for the sake of the group, even if it is ‘just for fun’. From the perspective of German soldiers, ‘the Brits’ thus embody the ideal soldier because they perform such practices that playfully support military socialisation and cultivate soldierly virtues (Johais 2025; Sløk-Andersen 2019).
The rival
The two joking relationships described so far are asymmetrical: German soldiers look both up to the American big brother’s military strength and down on his lack of wit and intellect, whereas they adore the Briton as humor idol and – concomitantly – exemplary soldier. In contrast, the Franco-German relationship is a relationship between equal opponents. Compared to other nations “we are more strongly united with the French in a negative way” (Interview NG 08.07.2022). In this diverges the soldier perspective from the official image of Franco-German friendship that was sealed with the Élysée Treaty in 1963. Within the armed forces, the concept of the French as the hereditary enemy has apparently lingered on and was ready to revive during a mission abroad in the 2010s where German troops lived in a camp under French command (Interview, 8.7.2022):
“We had a hard time in this French camp. The French commander hated us. And since we have had a history of conflict with this nation and they gave us the feeling that they reduced us to what happened in the Second World War from the beginning – of course, we hated them as well. There was a simmering conflict. Due to this World War Two effect.”
On the one hand, it was banal inconveniences that the German soldiers interpreted as signs of French animosity: German soldiers had to be content with a single croissant for breakfast, whereas soldiers from other nations could get as many as they wanted. Their clothes were washed too hot, or items disappeared in the laundry. On the other hand, some of the acts perceived as discriminating were unmistakably relics from the past such as performing the Hitler salute or suggesting the so-called Hitler beard by putting two fingers above the upper lip. The German soldiers could not stand for this and stroke back with the means of humour: they invented sayings or modified common jokes to make fun of their French adversaries. To make sure that the jokes hit their target, they were translated into French or English and written down at places frequented by all troops like toilets, watchtowers, and the dining hall. The opposing side retaliated with jokes translated into German and a veritable joke battle ensued. A tipping point was reached, however, when the French betrayed the principles of comradeship – from the German point of view – by not rushing to help when a German soldier attempted suicide. Such an affront demanded revenge: members of the German special fun forces[7] carried out a clandestine operation in the shadows of the night and hoisted a German flag on the five-meter-tall miniature Eiffel tower that the French troops had set up at the camp’s entrance. With this climax, fun was over: the offenders were caught and punished and the simmering tension escalated in a brawl.
While this is certainly an exceptionally drastic example, other German soldiers likewise described experiences with French troops rather as unpleasant than amicable (e.g. Interview 22.07.2022). This leads to the impression that the official military cooperation – within NATO and since 1989 in the Franco-German brigade – created “commanded comradeship” at best (Interview 08.07.2022): “This [cooperation in the form of joint patrols] did not come from the bottom of the hearts. It was just: You have to do it.“
The imprint of history on present-day international joking relationship applies not only to rivalries but also to alliances (Interview 08.07.2022):
“The Austrians and the Italians were our closest allies – *smiling* like back then.[8] They were our true friends. We were bound together deep from the heart. We also bantered with them. But this was funny. We had a similar sense of humour.”
The exploration of international joking relationships has revealed German soldiers’ conceptions of different armed forces in multinational settings. The status of the German self within international joking relationships is that of a reticent character who controls himself conscious of historical responsibility. He suffers from an inferiority complex towards the American who simultaneously earns respect for material abundance and operational efficiency and contempt for lack of culture, intellect and quality standards. From the German perspective, the Brit represents the model soldier since his superior sense of humour is equalled with possessing soldierly virtues. The Franco-German relationship is the closest and only equal relationship, yet marred by historical animosities. These representations reveal that German soldiers hold common national stereotypes but they enrich and enact them through experiences with members of other nation’s armed forces. In this way, soldiers perform geopolitics by everyday practice.
Endnotes
[1] The cartoon ‘The Perfect NATO Member Should Be’ can be viewed here: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/h/hughes-wilson_jn.htm .
[2] The joke alludes to the rapid invasion of German forces in the Netherlands in May 1940.
[3] The difference between the two examples is that the “Pork Eating Crusader” was a fun patch that soldiers are not openly wearing and which are often produced and sold by local nationals. In contrast, the “Die 1.” patch was the outcome of an official initiative that attempted to jump on the bandwaggon of the popular patch culture.
[4] Lair (2011) vividly demonstrates the abundance of US military facilities abroad at the example of the Vietnam War.
[5] Bundeswehrforum.de is an online discussion forum for soldiers, reservists and interested people. It is, however, not an official website of the German Armed Forces but administered by pseudonymised volunteers. The forum took its start in 2003 and has currently about 28000 members. It is organized into 13 thematic boards, boards for specific Bundeswehr locations and two community boards. Users mention ‘American’ as attribute or subject and likewise express perceptions of other nations in threads concerning deployments abroad.
[6] Base exchanges (BX) or post exchanges (PX) are retail stores that provide tax-free goods and services to authorized shoppers at United States military installations worldwide including products from well-known brands (e.g. American Eagle, Sunglass Hut, Gap) and restaurant chains (like Burger King, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Subway).
[7] In mission-type tactics, the military commander defines a clear objective and orders which forces are supposed to accomplish the objective in a given time frame. Then, subordinate leaders decide themselves how to achieve the objective. Thus, mission-type tactics require that subordinates understand the intent of the order and are trained to act independently. In the German armed forces, this is the predominant style of command in contrast to the American military’s tactics that are focused on executing a set of orders.
[8] This refers to an informal ‘fun group’ that used to test each other with playful challenges during their ordinary service at home and also propelled the joking battle with the French adversaries during the deployment abroad.
[9] This alludes to the fascist alliance between Germany and Italy during the Second World War and the annexation of Austria to the German Third Reich in 1938 that entailed the participation of many Austrians in national socialist crimes.
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