Oldal 23 [23]
20
Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
its cartoons expressed the policies of the newly formed Sudetendeutsche Partei
(1935-1938), inspired by the German NSDAP and taking instructions from Nazi
Germany. Karliéek has found that the propaganda of the pro-totalitarian SdP di¬
vided local society into those who sympathized with them and those who seemed
enemies of its policies. Accordingly, a group of “Us” and a group of “Them” was
created in and by the cartoons of Der Igel, especially between 1935 and 1938, as
the pair of traditional national symbols of the Germans and the Czechs (the figure
of Michael and Wenzel) had lost its significance. The former group contained the
imaginary group of the Germans’ so-called National Community, and the latter
group seemed to comprise all the enemies: the political activists of the various left¬
ist parties, “traitors,” Czechs, emigrants, Jews, inhabitants of the colonies, as well
as other sorts of Others.
The fifth chapter entitled Political Eyes: From Distant to Close Others still re¬
mains in the political sphere of competition but discusses its manifestations in the
various registers of everyday life that have been connected to images. Edina Kicsindi,
in her “Reinterpreting the Distant Other in Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Politi¬
cal Cartoons,” investigates the ways of representing African natives in humorous
newspapers such as Borsszem Jankó, Bolond Istók, and Az Üstökös published in Hun¬
gary. According to her analysis, the colonial period constructed a different kind of
Other whose form was later transformed. Kicsindi focuses on the local, Hungarian
characteristics of the process of arriving from the distant Other to the closer one,
and discovers particular visual/narrative traits that remain intact but take on new
meaning in the process. She analyzes how, according to the findings of earlier
post-colonial studies, the image of the noble savage and the native warriors’ proud
aggression have become reinterpreted to signify cruelty and bestiality, and how pu¬
rity emphasized formerly has come to form the profile of primitivism. She has found
accordingly that in the Hungarian press of the second part of the period, the figures
of politicians represented as Africans have come to depict political corruption.
Barbara Derler’s “Constructions of Otherness: The Establishment of Studio Pho¬
tography and the (Non-)Visibility of Muslim Women in Sarajevo Until World War
I” studies visual representations made for a Western, that is, foreign, and politically
dominant, audience. She develops non-visibility as a crucial concept to discuss the
ways foreign photographers have dealt with their subjects in Sarajevo. Commenting
upon Edward W. Said’s and others’ post-colonial approach, Derler argues that the
photographers’ view reveals asymmetrical power relations between them and their
clients/the portrayed people. She shows how each kind of visual representation—
postcards, souvenir cards, and studio portraits—demanded different strategies of
representation depending on the audience. Photography in Sarajevo seems to have
functioned according to a basic opposition: the overall modernization processes
initiated by the Austro-Hungarian dominant culture, on the one hand, and, on the
other, the emphasis of the photographers on the Oriental Muslim element in the