Oldal 29 [29]
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Constructing Images of the Other in Peace and War much to contribute to a study of how images of the Other are constructed in Eastern and Central Europe in peace and war. Within Europe, British cartoonists have fairly clear shared conventions for depicting their larger and more immediate neighbours such as the French, the Germans and the Italians, but after that it gets a bit vague. This is true for the American authors too. The Americans even use the compound term Bohunk (which carries a derogatory meaning), combining ‘Bohemian’ and ‘Hungarian’ into one word to describe Central Europeans generally. They would have problems understanding Josef Lada’s illustrations to The Good Soldier Svejk which utterly depend on the contrasting facial appearance of Czechs and Magyars (Hasek (1973 [1921-1923]: 231, 368-369). To the Americans they are all ‘squareheads’. Only when there is a world conflict do East European countries appear in British cartoons and even then as a generic undifferentiated single entity or a mere list of names. East and Central Europeans have to be labelled with the names of their countries in writing, and are often invisible, their people and symbols not shown at all (Bryant 2005: 26, 40) since there are no familiar, conventional images or symbols that the British or American cartoonist can use—unlike, say, the unshaven, baguette-toting Frenchman in his beret and shirt with broad horizontal stripes; the German in lederhosen or military helmet with his schmissen, his facial scar from mensur duelling; or the dark, unshaven arm-waving Italian with a twirled moustache. When a Soviet caricaturist draws the gallant Russian soldier in Figure 1 with upright rifle and bayonet seizing the wrist of a Polish secret agent lurking in an alleyway with knife and bomb, the British and the Americans will have no idea of the villain’s nationality even though it is signalled by his thick upward-turning, almost handle-bar, sz/achta and officer moustache and the eagle-badge on his cap. Yet, the converse is also true. East and Central Europeans cannot make fine distinctions about Britain. They use the words English and British interchangeably, ignoring the existence of Wales and Scotland, the other two countries that make up Great Britain, let alone Ulster. Aleksander V. Golubev (2010: 213) writing about 1930s caricatures from Krokodil speaks of James Ramsay McDonald as “an English politician, one of the founders and leaders of the Labour Party of Great Britain”. McDonald was in fact a very Scottish Scotsman and the British war-leader David Lloyd George, who is quoted by the English-Polish historian Norman Davies (1981: 393) that he would no more “give Upper Silesia to Poland than he would give a clock to a monkey”, was not English either. For the creators of British caricatures, Welsh and especially Scottish figures, often in distinctive national garb (Lancaster 1978: 46-47), are as important as those of distinctive adjacent nations in Eastern and Central Europe are to the cartoonists of those countries (Demski et al 2013). Is there any cartoonist in Eastern or Central Europe who knows how to depict the strange people of Lloyd George’s distant, little country with its strange, impossible to learn, language, whose national identity is centred on singing festivals? Slovak cartoonists even have problems depicting the Scots; the 27
