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The Faces of the Enemy in the Two World Wars
ary 23, 1944). The depiction was probably inspired by the Teheran Conference
(November 28 to December 1, 1943) where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met
for the first time and made decisions not only on the continuation of the war but
also about the consolidation of Europe after the war.
The depiction of Lucifer, hell and the Grim Reaper with a scythe (the tradi¬
tional representation of death) in the caricatures are linked to the horrors of war;
nevertheless, the propagandistic caricatures suggest that these negative phenomena
touched only the enemy (BJ, July 15, 1917; K, November 29, 1914). Death and its
symbols (such as bones and skulls) often appeared in caricatures in both magazines
during WWII. Mass murders, the joy of killing and cruelty in general are claimed
to be characteristic primarily of Stalin (K, July 9, 1944; Fig. 46). The German and
Hungarian caricaturists wanted to point out that the western states overlook the
crimes against humanity of the Soviet dictator. We should not leave out the fact
that these caricatures presented the brutality of the Soviet dictator very realistically,
albeit with propagandistic aims. Furthermore, other motives connected with death
such as funerals and coffins usually symbolise the end of the great colonial empire
of Britain. In the caricatures Churchill is depicted burying the coffin of the Empire,
or digging its grave (K, April 5, 1942; M, October 15, 1940).
The Devil appeared in Kladderadatsch in almost every year of both wars. The
German comic magazine shows the Foreign Secretary of Great Britain Edward
Grey as Lucifer in order to question his true intention to mediate a peace treaty.
Later Stalin, Roosevelt or Churchill are depicted as the Devil himself; Wilson also
appears in hell, furthermore, the Jewry of the Western World are identified with
the underworld (K, August 16, 1914; K, November 29, 1914; K, February 25,
1940).
The inverse of hell, i.e. paradise, also appears in the caricatures of Kladdera¬
datsch. During WWI, one caricature shows Michel, the personification of Austria,
and Eva as the personification of Austria-Hungary, arriving at paradise when the
Austro-Hungarian Monarchy has just occupied a territory from Romania (K, Au¬
gust 12, 1917). Kladderadatsch was the only paper that depicted paradise in later
numbers of the magazine as well. According to these caricatures, the British live
blindly in the British paradise; they do not know the real news about the war and
their allies. One can see also Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor with a pome¬
granate shaped like a grenade (involving a pun in German: Granatapfel meaning
the fruit, and Granat meaning the weapon). They wear clothes with dollar signs,
suggesting that they are no longer innocent. The snake luring them to temptation
appeared as a Jew (K, July 16, 1944; K, August 3, 1941).
The phrase “Soviet Paradise” —Sowjetparadies, originally the title of a German
exhibition on the Soviet Union in 1934 and later the title of a Nazi propaganda
film from 1942—had an ironic meaning. The aim of caricatures using it was to
show the ‘real’ face of communism, specifically that of death, terror, poverty and
starvation, characterised the “Soviet Paradise” most adequately. Next to the Soviet
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