Oldal 91 [91]
OCR
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 degradation”, 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 efficient humorous means which neither British nor Soviet artists could afford, 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 missing 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-dvumyazajcami (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
