OCR Output

Representations of the Other in the Time of War: Does War Matter?

Christie Davies opens the volume with a novel perspective on Eastern and Cen¬
tral European Others using examples of Western (for example British, American)
caricaturists’ depiction of Poles, Russians, Jews and other nations. Although these
nations are not the usual subjects for Anglo-Saxon mockery, which centres more
on Western Europe, they did appear more often in the context of WWII and the
post-war period, which indicates how war changes the choice of targets for cari¬
catures in the first place. In addition to this, the war affects the way enemies are
perceived by making the image more extreme and distorted. This mechanism is the
same everywhere, regardless of the origin of the author. It is relevant to ask how
much alterity is represented in the images, because some Others have been, and
will remain, more alien than others—also outside the context of the war. This is
especially true of the visual depiction of and the underlying Jewish stereotypes (see
also Rosner, this volume). Through this, the interaction between war, images, and
the notion of the Other is introduced as the focus of the entire volume.

Dagnostaw Demski follows up by setting a theoretical and methodologi¬
cal framework to the research of war images. He uses the notion of iconoclasm
as a starting point and asks why conflict brings about not only physical destruc¬
tion but simultaneously symbolically tears down everything that is valuable to the
Other. Why does this happen, and why is the inflicted violence sometimes pho¬
tographed and/or published? Demski analyses a collection of photographic repre¬
sentations of war damage from WWII, approaching his material as an instance of
an iconoclastic gesture. While doing this, he differentiates between positive and
negative images: those that are used to establish power, and others that are offen¬
sive and work against power in order to overturn it. Demolishing former order and
establishing new is thus the core of the process described by Demski in his chapter.

The last chapter in the introductory section, by Alexander Kozintsev, addresses
the way humour changes in problematic circumstances, i.e. how war changes
humour. He asks in his chapter why and when do people ridicule the object they
actually want to destroy, and when do they use more straightforward methods
like real aggression. War humour provides a good testing ground for attempting
a clearer distinction between humour, sarcasm/irony and insult, and the central
question of whether humour can coincide with invective in the very same text or
image or not, and if yes then to what effect. Kozintsev analyses wartime graphic
humour in Russia to answer this question and through this clarifies the definition
and concept of humour in general.

The second section of the book, entitled Ideology and the Other: The Making of the
Enemy, gives a more specific overview of the ideological Other in Europe in three
different periods: pre- WWII, the war and post-WWII.

Agnes Tamds, comparing caricatures published in selected German and Hun¬
garian humorous periodicals during WWI and WWII analyses how propaganda

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