Oldal 117 [117]
OCR
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 traditional 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 Kladderadatsch. 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, August 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 pomegranate 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 115
