Tied to a balloon or bobbing down a canal in a bottle, the little magazine slips each month into Communist East Germany from the Western zone of Berlin. The cover of the contraband Tarantel (tarantula) proclaims that it is "priceless," but for East Germans caught chuckling over the magazine's sledgehammer humor, the price can be a term in a Red prison. Despite its problems of distribution and retribution, Tarantel is a big success among East Germans. Reason: the butt of humor for Tarantel is East Germany's Communist government.
This week East Germans are snickering at the 100th issue of Tarantel since its founding in 1950. In the four-color cover cartoon, Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht is a pirate whose wooden leg, watered by vodka, has taken root in a Red army helmet. The caption: "Forward into 1959." Tarantel's description of East Germany's Defense Minister Heinz Kessler: "Third German to desert on the Russian front." Lead v. Gold. The man who puts the sting into Tarantel is a dapper, driving Berliner who goes by the name of Heinrich Baer. Baer has reason to hate the Communists. As a Wehrmacht corporal, he fought on the Russian front. After the war the Soviets tossed him into an internment camp for former Nazis, although he had never been a party member. When Baer was released after three years, he headed straight for West Berlin to raise money for a clandestine anti-Communist humor magazine. Since the first issue, the content has stayed much the same: color cartoons, short skits, jokes and bogus biographies of party leaders.
Surrounded by luxuriant potted philodendron and inspired by the framed motto "Printer's lead has changed the world more than gold," Editor-Publisher Baer cooks up his Bratwurst-heavy humor in offices just two rubble-strewn blocks from the headquarters of East Berlin's government. In addition to Tarantel, Baer puts out a daily, satiric cartoon-and-text press service for some 800 subscribers in the West.
The False Address. Each month about half of Tarantel's press run of 250,000-300,000 goes to West Berliners; the rest is slipped into East Germany. Tarantel is designed for hidden persuasion: the size of a theater program, it can be concealed in a book, fits easily into a standard German envelope. Baer's remarkable distribution system includes mailings from other countries, including Russia, and delivery by underground members, who delight in dropping copies into Stalin Alice mailboxes and onto the bookshelves of the Soviet House of Culture. Replies to a standard request for reader comment ("Don't forget to use a false return address") show that Tarantel is regularly read all over East Germany.
Financed by anonymous anti-Communist sources, Baer and his Tarantel have shown that there is more than one way to fight Communism. They are doing pretty well with a snicker and a guffaw.