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82 Dagnostaw Demski on the other hand stimulated the imagination and fears of the proponents of such a social model. This combination of images shows that the scary Other could be encountered not only “outside” but within. In both serious and playful rhetoric we can see how through both types of humor the distant and close Other were objectified. An example of a funny representation of a German can be recognized in an illustration commemorating the anniversary of Schiller’s birth (ill. 23) at which, in contrast to the regular representations (ill. 26), the threat of militarism was forgotten and the cultural standards contributed by Germany were emphasized. This illustration forms a rare case in the Polish satirical periodicals. Conclusions: Revealing the Ideological Context Pictures, accounts from travels, and caricatures become a tale of the culture of the time and provide to a modern reader a source of information on the past conventions and ideas that have molded the reality into culturally marked images. The world, whether described in serious or in humorous terms, ends up forming basically the same picture—one of the same world of advancing transformations, internal trouble, economic problems, and limitations springing from the political reality. Faced with a lack of possibility to criticize Russia’s political domination and its policy of increasing Russification, the Polish press produced standardized representations—serious and playful—of the Germans and the Jews, emphasizing the fact that they were also causing a threat for Poles at that time. When analyzing, in the representations in the Polish press, the specific features of humor, images, and the manner of argumentation, it is possible to notice the beginning of an ongoing process of shifting emphasis from didacticism, aiming at reaching an ideal approaching empiricism in the sense of leaving the model behind. This phenomenon found its expression in a certain toning down of the images that diverged from the desired model. What was the sense of exclusion related with? Exclusion was represented as related to a distortion of the norm, a form of decomposition. The predominant world of internal hierarchy was coming to an end,” and the social changes, resulting from the economy and urbanization, opened up new possibilities of advancement for individuals whose mobility had been limited. This new mobility involved an increased emphasis on individual identities and abilities. The position in which one would have to choose between family ties or ones own path represented a dilemma, one that was significant for the turn-of-the-century period (nineteenth to twentieth centuries). All of these spheres produced altered Others—persons outside of both the old hierarchy and the new. Industrialization and urbanization disturbed the previous state of affairs and created new divisions: on the one hand producing the Others as 30 Porter-Szuecs (2011: 111) states that the end of the 1870s and the 1880s were characterized by a feeling that soon something significant would happen in Warsaw.
