East German jokes, jibes popular in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, also known as East Germany), reflected the concerns of East German citizens and residents between 1949 and 1990. Jokes frequently targeted political figures, such as Socialist Party General Secretary Erich Honecker or State Security Minister Erich Mielke, who headed the Stasi secret police. Elements of daily life, such as economic scarcity, relations between the GDR and the Soviet Union, or Cold War rival, the United States, were also common. There were also ethnic jokes, highlighting differences of language or culture between Saxony and Central Germany. Political jokes as a tool of protest Hans Jörg Schmidt sees the political joke in the GDR as a tool to voice discontent and protest. East German jokes thus mostly address political, economic, and social issues, criticise important politicians such as Ulbricht or Honecker, and political institutions or decisions. For this reason, Schmidt sees them as an indicator for popular opinion or as a "political barometer" that signals the opinion trends among the population. Political jokes continued the German tradition of the whisper joke. Sentences According to Bodo Müller, an expert in East German jokes, no one was ever officially convicted due to a joke; the Stasi called it propaganda that was a threat to the state or anti-state agitation. Officially, it was seen as a violation of Paragraph 19 "State-endangering propaganda and hate speech"; however, it was taken very seriously, with friends and neighbours being interrogated. The trials were mostly public and thus the jokes were never read there. Of the 100 people in Müller's research, 64 were convicted for one or more jokes. The sentence was usually between one and three years in prison. The harshest verdict was four years. Most of the sentences were handed down in the 1950s, before the Wall was built. After that, there was a rapid decline in sentences for joke-tellers, with the last verdict in 1972 against three engineers who had told jokes in the breakfast break. The Stasi continued to arrest joke-tellers, but convictions ceased. In the 1980s, reports of popular sentiment delivered by the Stasi to SED district councils on a monthly basis revealed more and more statements about political jokes recounted in company, union, and even party rallies. Operation GDR joke In the Cold War times, the GDR was also one of the target areas of the West German Federal Intelligence Service.