Oldal 19 [19]
OCR
Representations of the Other in the Time of War: Does War Matter? Christie Davies opens the volume with a novel perspective on Eastern and Central 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 caricatures 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 methodological 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 destruction but simultaneously symbolically tears down everything that is valuable to the Other. Why does this happen, and why is the inflicted violence sometimes photographed and/or published? Demski analyses a collection of photographic representations 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 offensive 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 Hungarian humorous periodicals during WWI and WWII analyses how propaganda 17
