There have been enough swipes at the Germans' lack of a sense of humor to last, as the Third Reich was to have done, a thousand years, but that is set to change after a girl used her own comedic bent to conjure up some fun out of the Coronavirus, by creating a C-19 board game.
Steffi Dummkopf, 18, had the idea when she went to the supermarket to get her grandma some bread, and saw the huge queues for 'household essentials'.
She was immediately struck by the humor in the suffering she saw; so much so, that the idea for a fun game for all the family came into her head.
The game is a bit like 'Monopoly', and 'Totopoly', and has been named 'Viropoly'.
She's not the only German to have come up with an idea for a game based around tragic events, in the true sense of Schadenfreude.
Oliver Himmler, of Munich, recently came up with a thrill-a-minute action-packed terrorist game based on the murderous antics of the Red Army Faction, or Baader-Meinhof Gang. In true dramatic German style, the game is called 'The Baader-Meinhof Game'.
And Wolfgang Banger, of Essen, has conceived a new reality TV show based upon the decidedly unfunny events at Nazi-run wartime concentration camps such as Auschwitz, called 'I'm A Jew; Get Me Out Of Here'.
Only the bit about the Coronavirus game is true.
