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22 Dagnostaw Demski and Ildikó Sz. Kristóf 1861-1910,” investigate characters of caricature in the clash of conservatism and the rising liberalism in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They understand cartoons as vectors of collective memory, complementary to others such as, as they hold, folklore or literary texts. Selecting for study a humoristic Slovak journal printed first in Buda (and moving later to Szakolca/Skalica), they observe two main grounds of confrontation conveyed by the images. One seems to have existed between the prevailing conservatism and the rising liberalism, and the other between two historic concepts of nationalism, Hungarian and Slovak. They also discuss the appearance of the Jews as well as the so-called mad arons (Slovak born persons who later declared themselves to be of Hungarian nationality) in the visual representations of the period. Florin-Aron Padurean, in his “When Ytzig Met Shtrul: On Schmoozing and Jewish Conspiracy in Romanian Art,” has chosen to study a motif widely present in Romanian visual representations: two Jewish characters talking to each other and performing a specific gesture with the hand. According to Padurean’s analysis, this is a conventional sign of agreement for Jews, strongly connected with nationality and starting with the social context of almost two centuries ago. It became a kind of ethnic trademark of which the author provides numerous examples—what is interpreted by several researchers, not only as a sign of habitual ethnic unity, but also as an indication of an obvious propensity to chat. He suggests that contemporary Jewish jokes have preserved the memory of that gesture, but as they have become de-ethnicized, the visual element disappeared, only the story survived. The last paper of the chapter (as well as the volume), Katarina Srimpf’s “Residents of Lemberg as Other” discusses a phenomenon in Slovenian folklore tradition. According to the tradition, residents of certain communities—towns as well as villages—have been represented as foolish. As Srimpf demonstrates, this phenomenon exists in many other countries and regions. Relying on Christie Davies’s approach to humor studies, jokes on foolishness are often told about those on the edge of a country or a linguistic or economic area, with the tellers being at the center. Srimpf provides visual as well as textual material reflecting this motif of local folklore. Allowing excellent opportunities to face, beyond the Other, the Self, that is, Ourselves and our pasts, too, such thematic, geographic, and methodological variety as these studies represent constitutes a guarantee for the continuation of our project. Our research will go on, and beyond the tendency of divergence, similarities and conspicuous trends toward homogeneity in visual representations will also be identified in the processes of Othering in central and eastern Europe. As our international enterprise—the two conferences and the two books— shows, competition among countries/cultures can turn into cooperation. Expressing our gratefulness for all the participants so far, we are full of hope that the next two similar events planned for other countries will also prove to be successful. Taking up the lines of research involved in this volume as well as in the first one, we intend to continue searching for common elements of visual representations that may offer a possibility to single out characteristic features of certain areas as well as significant
