On 22 August 1943 the first issue of a strange new magazine appeared in the Dutch city of Enschede. Het Onderwater-Cabaret (The Underwater Cabaret) took the form of a small booklet approximately 13.5 x 10.5 cm in size. Its cover was a collage of pictures cut from newspapers and magazines; its contents comprised 18 hand-stitched pages of handwritten poetry. Each poem caustically confronted a different topic relating to the Nazis, their crimes and the course of the war. One poem highlighted the wretchedness of everyday existence under German occupation. Another scorned Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda. A third employed nightmarish imagery to depict the psychological stress of life in hiding. The magazine’s sole author could attest to that stress, for he was a German Jewish refugee who, one year previously, had gone underground – or ‘underwater’ – to stay alive.

That fugitive was Curt Bloch, and over the course of 19 months, from August 1943 to April 1945, he produced 95 issues of Het Onderwater-Cabaret. Through his striking, almost surrealist illustrations and the scabrous satire and pungent wit of his poems and songs, he railed against Nazi terror, mocked the major fascist leaders and Dutch collaborators, and chronicled the decline and fall of the Third Reich. For years, his unique body of wartime work lay undiscovered, as unknown as its creator. In the last decade it gradually started to see the light of day. Now, eight decades on since their ‘publication’, all original copies of Bloch’s magazine are at the heart of a captivating exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin. ‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite’: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater-Cabaret showcases a remarkable and courageous achievement while telling the story of a singular man.

Born in Dortmund in 1908, Bloch worked as a lawyer before Hitler’s rise to power forced him to flee to the Netherlands. In 1942 he found refuge in the house of an undertaker and his wife. Concealed out of sight in the crawlspace above their attic with two other Jewish exiles, Bloch whiled away his days by writing poems about current events. He eventually decided to distribute his poetry in a weekly magazine. He called it Het Onderwater-Cabaret as a nod to the Dutch term for people like him in hiding – ‘divers’.  With help from messengers in the Dutch resistance, Bloch’s self-made, self-styled ‘periodicals’ made their way to his lover and fellow fugitive Karola Wolf, and to other divers.

Bloch’s magazine informed, entertained and boosted morale. Bloch explained his main objective in a letter to Wolf. ‘If you contribute to making the German evil spirit ridiculous – ridicule kills! – then you not only help the German people, but at the same time work in the interest of Europe and the world.’ In the same letter, he expressed the hope that ‘through my poems I might play an educational role, especially in the spiritual and intellectual construction of a new Germany’.

Bloch saw out the end of the war in the house of another couple in Borne. When the country was liberated, he finally came up for air. He moved to Amsterdam and married Ruth Kan, a concentration camp survivor. In 1948, they settled in New York where Bloch opened an antiques store. He died in 1975 at the age of 66. His writings, which he had had bound in five volumes, lay neglected on a bookshelf in his house in Queens – just more dusty old artefacts, like the other curios he had amassed to sell at the shop. It was only when his granddaughter, Lucy, delved into them that she realised they constituted a different kind of relic from the past, one that was priceless, irreplaceable and of huge historical significance.

It is hard not to react in the same way when viewing Bloch’s work on display. At first glance the exhibition seems underwhelming: rooms of stark walls, open space and display cases containing postcard-sized pictures and patches of text grouped chronologically. Look closer beneath those glass surfaces, however, and we find marvels in miniature. Bloch’s magazines are arranged under the date that they first appeared. We see their imaginative, decorative covers with their gritty greys, splashes of colour, bold headlines and cut-and-pasted drawings, clippings and photographed figures. Presented alongside them are choice excerpts from each issue on yellowing pages: writing, in both German and Dutch, consisting of typed newspaper articles and Bloch’s explosive verses.

Many of Bloch’s covers snare our attention. The second issue of Het Onderwater-Cabaret, dated 30 August 1943, shows a deep-sea diver in a comically large helmet holding his oxygen-supply hose. It looks like he is using it to speak with rather than breathe through, for written above him are the words ‘Hallo Yvonne…’ This was the name his sister Helene adopted when she and their mother Paula went into hiding in the Netherlands. (Bloch knew that both had been betrayed and arrested earlier that year. He would only learn after the war that they had been deported from Westerbork transit camp and murdered upon arrival at Sobibor on 21 May 1943.) As he dedicated this issue to Helene on the occasion of her 20^th birthday, we are left to assume that he is the diver and is holding out hope that his words will reach his sister from these hidden depths.

Another cover, from 25 September 1943, splices together two black and white photos: in the foreground, a woman and a child shelter from a bombing raid in a metro station during the Spanish Civil War; in the background, the walls of a cave or grotto. It is a simple but effective depiction of persecuted Jews in hiding. The cover of Bloch’s last issue, from 3 April 1945, completed two days after he regained his freedom, presents a smartly attired figure – another Bloch stand-in – emerging from the hatch of a submarine.

Elsewhere we find more playful artwork which packs a punch through the use of caricature. There are the covers that poke fun at the Nazis in general and Hitler in particular. Again and again Hitler is trivialised, hybridised, downsized. We see him as half an animal and as a diminutive figure that barely comes up to Chamberlain’s thigh. He is also Chaplin’s tramp, a crowd-pleasing tap-dancer, a painter without a picture and a head without a body.

It goes without saying that Bloch’s writings are not as eye-catching. His pages have not been copied and enlarged. Only the most dedicated reader will peer into the display cases and attempt to decipher Bloch’s tightly scrawled or hectically scribbled poems and songs. Fortunately, the exhibition provides neat transcriptions in German and English. Pedantic bilingual readers will take issue with some of the translations, especially renderings of slang and wordplay, but for the most part they are either faithful to Bloch’s original work or they capture the essence of his meaning.

There are poems that cover a variety of topics. Several see Bloch addressing the German Volk, singling out those who voted for Hitler and are currently suffering from buyer’s remorse and those who are fighting for him while RAF bombers destroy their homes. In his ‘updated’ ‘Horst Wessel Song’, Bloch turns the infamous Nazi Party anthem into an angry elegy about how Hitler’s misrule has transformed a once-great land into a rubble-strewn apocalypse. In ‘Nazi Tyranny’ he denounces a brutal regime and its failed objectives: freedom fighters may be killed, he writes, ‘But liberty shall never die’; and ‘Long sprees of theft and butchery / Of ghastliness and savagery’ will result in retribution. In poems about Goebbels, Bloch lambasts ‘Unholy Joseph’ or ‘The Cheater’, lays bare his ‘masquerade’ and debunks his ‘sheer unfactuality’ – including the report that British soldiers were allying with the Nazis to fight Stalin and the Red Army.

In some of the poems on display we can trace Bloch’s moods and ascertain his state of mind as battles are lost and won and circumstances drastically change. His elation is palpable in ‘Hold Out!’ after the allied forces invade France in June 1944. In ‘Arnhem’, written later that year, he tries to remain optimistic in the teeth of military failure. His tone acquires a degree of urgency in ‘Wintertime’ as he appeals to General Dwight D. Eisenhower to move fast as food supplies are running out. In ‘Dark Days’, Bloch meditates despairingly on the famine that killed thousands in the Netherlands during that winter of discontent, and vents his frustration at the allies for only advancing ‘millimetre by millimetre’. In ‘To the Allied Forces’ – the only poem Bloch wrote in English – from the final issue, he celebrates the ‘happy day’ of his liberation while imbuing the proceedings with a bittersweet note: ‘Almost five years we had to wait / For many men you came too late.’

A section of the exhibition entitled ‘Workshop’ offers insight into Bloch’s craftsmanship. We learn how he created his collages and photomontages from limited resources – first Dutch publications and later German newspapers and magazines – and how he moved away from repurposing images and focused more on typographic design. Another section shows different magazines that Bloch wrote under the pseudonym Cornelius Breedenbeek. Het boek van Piet and Coba (The Book of Piet and Coba) ‘for young people aged eight to eighty’, charts the adventures and acts of resistance of two youngsters. The more comical Irrfahrt durch den Weltraum (Odyssey Through Space) tracks the ghosts of Hitler and Mussolini as they roam the cosmos in search of a final resting place. (The enticing cover features pencil drawings of der Führer and il Duce with angel wings hovering in a starry sky – two hapless, ludicrous figures lost in space.)

The show comes to an end with a room containing audio readings and video performances by actors who bring Bloch’s verses vividly alive. These recordings are a nice touch but they should be regarded as an extra rather than an alternative. For we have to view Bloch’s work on display to see the care and effort that went into it. Only then do we fully appreciate it for what it is – not just a selection of curious little magazines, but one man’s means of creative resistance.

‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite’: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater-Cabaret is at the Jewish Museum Berlin until 26 May.