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Introduction
on one hand, that employs ethnic and political stereotypes in a serious manner.
On the other hand, however, the cartoon is also a form of comic art, and as such it
satirizes those stereotypes.
Such a staging of war is also revealed in Ágnes Tamáss "From Allies to Enemies:
The Two Balkan Wars (1912-1913) in Caricatures.” The author pinpoints the im¬
portance of the two wars, having influenced greatly the formation of nation states
in the Balkans. Ägnes Tamäs analyzes how the two wars and their participants were
represented in satirical magazines like the Hungarian Borsszem Jankó, the Austrian
Der Floh, and the Serbian Vraé Pogada¢ and Brka. She is especially interested in
how representation changed through time, that is, after Bulgaria had become an
enemy of Serbia. She has found that the most frequently used symbols in the studied
satirical weeklies would fit into the categories of symbols of territorial losses, gains
and demands (death, sickness, and injury), stereotypes of cultures about each other,
and finally, animal symbols (goat, pig, bear, etc.). The author could also point to
some long-standing symbols appearing in more than one satirical magazine (i.e.,
the Balkan nations as children, the angel of peace, the skeleton representing death,
various animals, “the sick man of Europe” representing Turkey, and the customary
representations of the great powers).
Magdalena Zakowska has also found decodable symbols in her “The Bear and
His Protégés: Life in the Balkan Kettle According to the German-Language Cari¬
catures of the Belle Epoque.” Based on her study on constructivist theory, she ana¬
lyzes the Swiss and German perception of other nations, as they are reflected in the
caricatures of three satirical weekly journals between 1876 and 1913: two German,
the Kladderadatsch and the Simplicissimus, and the Swiss Nebelspalter. The author
is especially interested in the iconographic and also narrative/textual ideas used
by those caricaturists to depict events taking place on the Balkan Peninsula from
the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) until World War I. She could follow, as she
states, three stages of press discourse: “battle,” “moral,” and “hygienic-oriented.”
The comparison of the main ideas concerning the Balkans in Germany and Swit¬
zerland shows that they were influenced both by the actual political situation and
the national ethos in those countries. The German and Swiss metaphors of Russia
and the Balkan countries (such as the “Kossack,” the “Russian bear,” the Balkan
countries as enfants terribles, the “insects,” and the “kettle”) were insulting since they
were not symbols with which either region identified themselves.
The last paper in the chapter, Petr Karliéek’s “Us and Them: Cartoons of the
Sudeten German Satirical Magazine Der Igel at the End of the First Czechoslo¬
vakian Republic (1935-1938)” leads us to the dawn of World War II. The author
analyzes the political cartoons published in the pro-totalitarian German-Bohemian
magazine Der Igel between 1935 and 1938. Karliéek shows the ways of self-pre¬
sentation and the depiction of political rivals by the cartoonists whose worldview
could be summed up as follows: “Whoever is not for us is against us.” The main
focus of Der Igel was the political struggle against the state of Czechoslovakia, and
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