Oldal 91 [91]
War Propaganda and Humour: World War II German, British, and Soviet Cartoons
into Britains ally. Hitler and Stalin as two tricksters trying to outsmart each
other was a popular topic of British political humour from 1939 to June 22,
1941. Ihereby the age-old opposition of folkloric roles—the stupid and
the canny (Davies 1990: 10-39), from which the clownish opposition of
“dupes” (foolish victims) and “knaves” (clever offenders) had originated
(Disher 1985 [1925]: 33-37; Willeford 1969: 88)—was actualised in the
context of modern politics. While some of David Low’s cartoons feature
both dictators as accomplices, chums, lovers, etc. others show one of them
as canny, the other as stupid depending on the situation,’ but sometimes
they both play these two roles at once, trying to outsmart each other like
ambivalent mythological tricksters (Fig. 38).
(4) The fourth option is to invoke what Herbert Spencer (1860) described as
“descending incongruity” and Alexander Bain (1880: 259) as “comic deg¬
radation”, implying reference to animalistic drives and bodily functions
(mostly sexual or digestive) or clownish primitiveness. In this competition
the German cartoonists had one more edge over their opponents: apart
from racist clichés, they were free to employ sexual metaphors'’—an ef¬
ficient humorous means which neither British nor Soviet artists could af¬
ford, though for somewhat different reasons (the social restrictions of being
a gentleman, and Communist ethic, respectively). While also concerning
invective (see Fig. 31) this distinction is even more evident in humour, as
brilliantly demonstrated by Hans Lindloffs cartoon (Fig. 39).
Soviet and British propagandists had to resort to more decent means of
degrading the situation. In Boris Efimovs 1942 cartoon, for instance, the
failure of German plans to encircle Moscow and to gain access to Caucasian
oil is rendered as a clownish “grasp all, lose all” gag, whereby Hitler receives
a blow in the face, his stilts break, his cap falls off, and his trousers rip.'!
David Low degrades the same situation even more subtly: at a restaurant,
Hitler angrily orders the waiters to serve him Caucasus instead of the miss¬
ing Moscow. ?
° Stalin was more often portrayed as a knave and Hitler as a dupe, an idea hardly supported by anything
except the stereotypes of ‘Asiatic craftiness’ and “German honesty’, respectively. In one of Low’s cartoons,
Stalin and Peter the Great recline in a gondola which a humble gondolier—Hitler—is rowing across the
Baltic Sea (The Evening Standard, October 26, 1939); in another, Stalin edges Hitler out of their marriage
bed in the Balkans (Ibid., July 23, 1940).
10 This concerns not only political humour. Risqué drawings relating to everyday life are frequent in
German periodicals of the Nazi era such as Simplicissimus (the title of this periodical stems from the novel
Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimmus Teutsch by H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen (1669)).
" Efimov 1969: 130; available at http://www.liberty.ru/foto/Karikatury-Borisa-Efimova/Za-dvumya¬
zajcami (last accessed on: July 27, 2014).
1? A caricature in The Evening Standard, October 27, 1941; available at http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/print/
record/LSE3022/zoom (last accessed on: July 27, 2014).
89