Fighting the Nazis with humour: wartime broadcasts by the legendary Voskovec and Werich
Filip Šír from the National Museum in Prague has spent years researching into a series of remarkable wartime broadcasts made by the much-loved Czech duo Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. Their satirical sketches and songs, some of them in English, were broadcast on shortwave from the United States and formed an important part of the campaign to fight Nazi propaganda and indoctrination with humour. Until recently they had been all but forgotten.
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Voskovec and Werich’s satirical cabaret, the Liberated Theatre, was hugely popular in 1930s Prague and their sketches and songs, many composed by brilliant jazz composer Jaroslav Ježek are much loved to this day. After Hitler annexed the Czech borderlands at the end of September 1938 it became impossible to keep the theatre going and it closed down just over a month later. In January 1939 Voskovec and Werich managed to leave for the United States, just a few weeks before German tanks rolled into Prague.
In this programme Filip tells us of their beginnings in America, making broadcasts with the support of Czech and Slovak politicians in exile. The broadcasts were ostensibly aimed at Czechs and Slovaks living in the US, but through shortwave they also reached the occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Voskovec and Werich began working with the BBC through its desk in New York, making programmes that were rebroadcast to their occupied homeland to boost morale. Then in 1942 the United States set up the Office of War Information, which launched its own broadcasts in local languages to listeners in the occupied countries of Europe. The director Elmer Davis believed that these broadcasts should provide verifiable information rather than mere propaganda and, significantly for Voskovec and Werich, he also believed that they had to be entertaining in order to reach their audience. The duo became an important part of the campaign.
Filip Šír’s research in US archives, working with his colleagues from the National Museum in Prague, has brought together not only the scripts of some of these broadcasts (published in a new book Haló, Amerika volá Československo – America Calling Czechoslovakia) but also many original recordings of the broadcasts themselves.
In the course of the programme we hear extracts from some of the recordings, with Filip putting them into context. One of them is an adaptation of the popular song Deep in the Heart of Texas, to which Voskovec and Werich added Czech lyrics, encouraging people back home to sabotage the German war effort. We also hear a sketch in English, a bitter satire aimed at the puppet president of the Protectorate Emil Hácha.
Another highpoint is the folk singer Tony Kraber, singing The Foggy Foggy Dew in English, followed by Voskovec and Werich in Czech translation – a true gem, hidden for eight decades in the archives.
Filip’s quest for wartime Czechoslovak recordings from the United States continues, so if you happen to know of recordings surviving in archives or even in your attic at home, he would love to hear from you.
