Oldal 21 [21]
OCR
Representations of the Other in the Time of War: Does War Matter? depict individuals rather than hordes of prisoners, the former leaving some room to see the human side of the Other. The self-identification of a nation is closely tied with the social and political context of the times. Ilze Boldane-Zelenkova reflects on the changes in Latvian national stereotypes of themselves and the Other (focusing on Russians, Germans and Jews) in official propaganda channels and its reception by the people, showing a definite link between these two. She observes that seeing the Germans as liberators, the Jews as aggressors and the Russians as comic figures, dangerous because of their unpredictability, was the result of successful Nazi propaganda in Latvia. Nazi propaganda is also the topic of Magdalena Zakowska’s chapter. Having analysed political satirical magazines and women’s magazines from WWII, she concludes that male and female German citizens were given different information about the Other, i.e. that Soviet Russia belonged in a way to parallel realities. This contrast is based on a more basic dichotomy of feminine/private vs. masculine/ public, which also formed the core of gender relations in Nazi Germany. Liisi Laineste and Margus Laine, writing about propaganda caricatures from two sides of the front in Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Estonia during WWII, echo Boldane’s observations about the image of Russians, finding Soviet propaganda to be equally harsh. In their analysis of caricatures, both published and unpublished, they trace the main stereotypes of the two fighting superpowers within this relatively short but politically changeable period of time (1942-1944) in propaganda caricatures published on both sides of the front. Zuzana Panczova describes not only the visual content of Slovak humorous periodicals from WWII but also the verbally expressed stereotypes of the Other and the role of the journal editors and cartoonists in shaping them. She differentiates between the enemy within, the traitor, and the outside enemy, in opposition to which the increasingly heroic Slovak stands out as a positive character. Moving further in time to the early Cold War period (1947-1953), Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska reports on the content of the Polish communist newspaper Trybuna Robotnicza (“The Worker’s Tribune’). She posits that many of the cartoons, although not very numerous in themselves, recycle motives known from before WWII: the generic figures of John Bull and Uncle Sam, the quintessence of evil embodied by symbols like the swastika etc. Simultaneously, the image of the New Man, arising from the destruction caused by WWII, is shown as the modernist hero who will build up the new peaceful post-war world. In the final chapter in this section, Oleg Riabov reflects on Soviet Cold-Warera movies that depict the West as decadent, corrupt and generally a negative influence on the communist world. The female character in these films is often the key to understanding the inner workings of covert propaganda: she is seen as a victim of the capitalist system and a cruel, non-feminine enemy of the communist world. ‘The stereotyped gender roles, with the Soviet views on gender opposed sharply to 19
