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The Faces of the Enemy in the Two World Wars between peace and war with Janus, the two-faced Roman god: John Bull showed his ‘peaceful face’ to Wilson and his ‘warlike face’ to the German Michel (a personification of Germans in the comic papers). During WWII Churchill demonstrated his ‘winning face’ in the direction of Europe and shouted ‘SOS’ in the direction of America (K, June 18, 1916; K; November 10, 1940). Apart from the gods of war and peace, several mythological stories found their way into the caricatures. At the time of naval battles one can see depictions of Ägir, a German sea giant of great power, in Kladderadatsch or caricatures of Neptune in Borsszem Janké (K, January 10, 1915; BJ, August 13, 1916). Agir was not only a mythological giant but also the name of a WWI German battleship. The depiction of the German giant was often similar to the representation of Neptune carrying the trident, although this did not belong among the attributes of Ägir. In these caricatures Agir was happy when English battleships sank. Important WWII battles took place at sea as well, although symbols of these were not popular. Agir did not resurface, and Neptune, whose role changed significantly, appears as a god defeating and threating Britain, for example Neptune appeared in the image of Josef Stalin. In the period of WWI the analysed papers published caricatures with figures from the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as motifs from the Trojan War, announcing the necessity of persistence—the obvious parallel is that the Trojan War also lasted for a very long time. Caricatures referring to the ancient battlefields appeared mainly in 1915, since the caricaturists connected the characters of the Trojan myths with the war in the Aegean Sea. For example, on the Dardanelles Trojan heroes greeted German soldiers with the exclamation “Zeus strafe England!” (‘Zeus, punish England!) (K, April 4, 1915).’ In another caricature Zeus looks at the modern battlefields of Troy and mentions the difference between the Ancient and modern war: “Once the battle here was fought for the beautiful Helena—but now it is for John Bull’s dirty account-book” (K, May 2, 1915), referring to the aims and methods of Britain’s war-waging negatively. During WWII, caricatures also depicted the Trojan horse or Achilles, but again, this had been more frequent before that time. For instance, in one caricature Franklin D. Roosevelt pulls a red Trojan horse full of Soviet soldiers into Europe, thereby threatening the safety of the continent (K, January 1, 1940). However, the occupation of Crete gave relevance for the surfacing of another mythological figure, the Minotaur, who appeared as a Briton in British uniform and ate the children offered to him (K, November 17, 1940), depicted in order to demonstrate the barbarism of Britain. During WWI the Colossus of Rhodes was depicted in connection with the fight for the Dardanelles. Germany’s ally, i.e. the Ottoman Empire, was shown as the Colossus of Rhodes, although this does not suggest the same massage as before, 7 The original form of the greeting originates from the German poet, Ernst Lissauer (“Gott strafe England!”—“God, punish England!”) who wrote also a hate song against England (Brockhaus 1970: 507). 113
