OCR
The Faces of the Enemy in the Two World Wars was more frequent during WWI. During WWII the caricatures no longer referred to those myths which needed more serious knowledge of mythology. The editors of Magyarsdg almost never used these symbols in the first place. In Kladderadatsch this change cannot be explained with a change in caricaturists. Rather, in both Hungary and Germany a new generation of readers grew up, perhaps with less of a classical education, who could not, therefore, be addressed through complicated mythological stories.? The caricaturists mocked the Other using various methods: they depicted the enemy as ugly human beings or as animals, they reinterpreted scenes from Roman, Greek and German mythologies as well as the Bible. Before I discuss these, however, I will analyse the self-representations.* Depiction of the Self One of the most important functions of the drawings in Borsszem Janké was the strengthening of a positive self-image and of faith in victory. The pictures provide an insight into the glorious life of the military by an artist, Akos Garay, who also fought in the battlefields (BJ*, August 2, 1914). However, these drawings of scenes of ordinary life, a genre which aims to represent ‘reality’, lack one aspect of wartime reality—specifically, that of suffering. Naturally, one cannot see either lost battles or dead soldiers, only hussars bearing their serious injuries heroically (BJ, September 20, 1914). The defeated enemy appears in only one context: when its depiction was to accentuate the humanity of the Hungarians, for example representing them helping the injured enemy on the eastern front. Drawings of heroes were not used to strengthen positive self-representations in Magyarsdg. On the contrary, its caricaturists gave positive meanings to the Hungarian fascist symbol, the arrow cross, which was depicted as destroying the enemy, bringing a new revival (Fig. 42) and reconstituting the Hungarian borders to those before the Peace Treaty of Trianon (1920). The arrow cross is often depicted with sunlight or fire next to it, although the swastika also occurs next to these in many caricatures (M, July 11, 1941). Surprisingly the two symbols were published more often in Magyarsdg than in Kladderadatsch. In the German comic paper during WWI, German self-image was strengthened by depicting heroic German soldiers, > In Hungary the Ancient Greek language and mythology were not compulsory subjects between 1890 and 1924, and the interest in Greek decreased drastically (Lovdsz 2010: 45-52). The hegemony of Latin had also disappeared by the 1920s: the education reform of 1924 decreased the teaching of Latin greatly (Borzsäk 1990: 74-77). In German grammar schools both Latin and Greek remained compulsory subjects, taught in a high number of classes per week (Karsen 1923: 14-15), although only 9% of the students went to this type of school and the educated elite did not vote for the Nazis (Kuhlmann 2006: 410-411) and thereby was not the target of Nazi propaganda. * I will not discuss the anti-Semitism or the traditional depiction of Jews in this chapter (see, however, Davies, this volume), although this will be a topic of another study I am planning to undertake. > In this chapter I will abbreviate the titles of comic papers in footnotes and examples as follows: Borsszem Janké (BJ), Kladderadatsch (K), Magyarsdg (M). The figures only illustrate the point, and observations are based on a higher number of caricatures. 111