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Liisi Laineste, Margus Lääne
Images of the Enemy from Both Sides of the
Front: The Case of Estonia (1942-1944)
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the negative images of the enemy as published in the Es¬
tonian-language press and wall newspapers simultaneously on both sides of the
front that swept across Estonia during and after WWII. In the years under study,
1942-1944, Estonia remained, as many Eastern European countries, in the heart
of the struggle between the two forces battling for supremacy in Europe. Although
during these three years the country was occupied by Nazi Germany and this de¬
cided the main tone of the local Estonian-language newspapers, there were also ob¬
vious influences coming from the Soviet side of the war. This was first and foremost
because of the thousands of Estonians serving in the Red Army, whose divisions
were strongly recommended or even forced to publish their own Soviet-minded
propagandist newspapers and wall newspapers.
We will analyse the portrayal of the political and ethnic Other, as these two
categories—the political and the ethnic—are closely intertwined in the caricatures
of that period. We are interested in how the two sides (the Nazi and the Soviet
powers as grounds for the corresponding different stereotyped ethnicities present
in the visual material), as active concepts in the minds and powerful forces in every¬
day lives of people in Estonia during that period, were visualised in the caricatures
that were published in the 1942-1944 period. Moreover, we will describe which
cartoons were left unpublished and why it was so.
The material for this study draws mainly on the newspapers and wall newspa¬
pers that are stored in these two archives, and also from print matrices from the
National Archives of Estonia in Tallinn filed under the archive of the newspaper
Postimees (‘Postman’). What we intend to discuss is the fact that there are more
pictures in these archives than the press actually circulated. The almost non-hu¬
morous but fairly aggressive propaganda caricatures were left unprinted even when
the matrices had already been prepared, while the depictions of simple soldier life
was accepted for print. This might be supportive of some previous studies which
claim that towards the end of WWII, the general audience was tired of evasive
propaganda (Stokker 1997; Merziger 2007, 2012; Kessel 2012b etc.) and the unre¬
liability of humorous means in achieving serious aims (Davies 2002; for aggression
in humour, see Oring 1992). The audience’s need for entertainment as an escape
from the hardships of daily life is reflected in the choice that editors made about
publishing caricatures. Decisions like this must also have been influenced by the
unstable political situation and rapid changes in society.