Karikaturen hitler biography

Overview

Brief Narrative

Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt, a book of caricatures of Hitler that belonged to Mara Vishniac. This is a 1938 edition of a book originally published in 1933 with the phrase "approved by the Fuhrer" printed on the cover. Mara lived in Berlin with her parents, Roman and Luta, and brother, Wolf. After Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in 1933, life became very precarious for Jews in Germany. Following the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9-10, 1938, Mara, age 12, and her 16 year old brother Wolf were sent to stay with relatives in Riga, Latvia. Soon after, Mara was sent to a home for refugee children in Sweden. In 1940, Mara, her mother, and brother moved to Stockholm and obtained visas to travel to the United States. Her father was arrested as an enemy alien in German occupied Paris and imprisoned. He escaped after three months and, with the aid of the JDC, which had sponsored his photography, he obtained a visa to the US. The family reunited in Lisbon, Portugal, and left on the SS Siboney, arriving in New York on December 31, 1940.

Title

Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt : Tat gegen tinte: Ein Bildsammelwerk

Date

publication/distribution:  1938

Geography

publication: Leipzig (Germany)

Credit Line

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Mara Vishniac Kohn

Contributor

Author: Ernst Hanfstaengl
Publisher: Gustav Weise Verlag
Distributor: Braune Bu?cher : G. Weise
Subject: Mara Vishniac Kohn

Biography

Mara Vishniac was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1926 to Luta Berg, born on June 16, 1899, and Roman Vishniac, born on August 19, 1897, in Pavlovsk, Russia. Her brother, Wolf, was born on April 22, 1922. Roman was a trained biologist but was prevented from working in his field due to war and political strife. He moved to Berlin in 1920 and while working various jobs, embarked upon a career in photography. The family considered themselves em

It was indeed a “normal” election in that respect, responding not least to the outburst of “normal” politics with which Hitler had littered his program: he had, in the months beforehand, damped down his usual ranting about Jews and bankers and moneyed élites and the rest. He had recorded a widely distributed phonograph album (the era’s equivalent of a podcast) designed to make him seem, well, Chancellor-ish. He emphasized agricultural support and a return to better times, aiming, as Ryback writes, “to bridge divides of class and conscience, socialism and nationalism.” By the strange alchemy of demagoguery, a brief visit to the surface of sanity annulled years and years of crazy.

The Germans were voting, in the absent-minded way of democratic voters everywhere, for easy reassurances, for stability, with classes siding against their historical enemies. They weren’t wild-eyed nationalists voting for a millennial authoritarian regime that would rule forever and restore Germany to glory, and, certainly, they weren’t voting for an apocalyptic nightmare that would leave tens of millions of people dead and the cities of Germany destroyed. They were voting for specific programs that they thought would benefit them, and for a year’s insurance against the people they feared.

Ryback spends most of his time with two pillars of respectable conservative Germany, General Kurt von Schleicher and the right-wing media magnate Alfred Hugenberg. Utterly contemptuous of Hitler as a lazy buffoon—he didn’t wake up until eleven most mornings and spent much of his time watching and talking about movies—the two men still hated the Communists and even the center-left Social Democrats more than they did anyone on the right, and they spent most of 1932 and 1933 scheming to use Hitler as a stalking horse for their own ambitions.

Schleicher is perhaps first among Ryback’s too-clever-for-their-own-good villains, and the book presents a piercingly novelistic picture of him. Though in some ways

Title: Immunization

Caption: It occurs to me that little good comes from poison or from Jews. [Streicher was suspicious of immunization]

February 1932 (Issue #6)

Title: Away with him

The long arm of the Ministry of Education pulls a Jewish teacher from his classroom.

March 1933 (Issue #12)

This cartoon was published five months after Hitler took power. The title is "Revenge." The Nazi who shoves the Jew over the cliff says: "Go where you wanted me to go, you evil spirit."

June 1933 (Issue #22)

Title: Resue Expedition

Caption: Good God, let's try to find one corner of the earth where no one reads Der Stürmer.

May 1934 (Issue #18)

Title: Loyalty

Caption: The sword will not be sheathed.

The Stürmer stands as ever

In battle for the people and the Fatherland.

It fights the Jews becaue it loves the people.

November 1935 (Issue # 48)

Title: Unfruitful

Caption: They belong to the church, she belongs to Satan. Both are lost to the German race."

July 1936 (Issue #20)

Title: The Decent Jew

The cartoon shows a Jew politely asking for room on the bench, after which he shoves the previous inhabitant off. The poem notes that Jews behave the same way in other situations.

July 1936 (Issue #28)

This is the freedom they promise us

The freedom we see where Judah rules,

Behind prison walls and bars,

Within a dark prison sits

A humanity that longs for true freedom

And longs for rescue and release.

17 June 1943 (Issue #25)

Title: Time

Caption: Pan-Judah sees that time is running out.

What does it have to gain?

As time passes, the strength of that is growing

That will bring order out of chaos.

3 February 1944 (Issue #5)

Title: Jewish Slaves

Caption: They are enslaved and ruined by the Jews.

Their joy and very soul is taken from them.

They long fo

by Cris Whetton

Adolf Hitler is alleged to have had many secret vices, ranging from the fantastic (swastika-emblazoned black leather underwear) to the mundane (cream cakes), but one of his lesser vices was collecting cartoons of himself and by 1933 he had a collection of several hundred, even requesting originals from such well-known artists as David Low.

In 1932, Hitler showed a particularly mordant cartoon to his friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaeng1, his Foreign Press Secretary, remarking that he looked forward to the time when he could suppress such works. The Harvard-educated Hanfstaengl had a better idea: turn the cartoons back on the cartoonists; use cartoons attacking Hitler to support him by pointing out the “errors” in the cartoonists assumptions. The result was a most unusual – and very successful – book: Hitler in der Karikatur der Welt / Tat gegen Tinte (Hitler in the World’s Cartoons / Facts versus Ink). The book was published by Verlag Braune Bücher Berlin Carl Rentsch, a little-known house, suggesting a feeble attempt to make the book appear “unofficial” and therefore an “independent” analysis.

Tat gegen Tinte, as it was generally known, was a 175 page book in which seventy-one major cartoons are displayed in chronological order (1924-33) on the right-hand pages (a miscellany of smaller works is given at the end) with comments by Hanfstaengl on the left-hand pages, in which he contrasts the “Tinte” (Ink) with what he considers to be the “Tat” (Acts or Facts). Some cartoons are striking in their incongruity: one from Simplicissimus of January 16, 1928, has Hitler resembling a nineteen-sixties cartoon of Harold Macmillan. Some, notably those from Pravda, are crude in the extreme; others could stand in their own right as works of art, notably some of the works in Der Wahre Jacob and that of the unidentified artist in the miscellany whose simple caricature [Figure 1] fuses the styles of Wyndham Lewis and Modigliani to