Hitler In Cartoons

Few humans in history have been satirized as remorselessly as Adolf Hitler. It was easy to do. You could "Hitlerize" almost anything by adding a cow's lick hairstyle and a toothbrush mustache. While his own side, the Nazis, portrayed him as a demigod, the perfect leader, and father of the nation, his enemies took it in the other direction, drawing him as a knock-kneed simpleton, a butcher with bloodied hands, an evil ghoul spewed up by the Abyss, and even an egg that had cracked. Hitler in Cartoons is the illustrated biography of a megalomaniac and control freak. Starting with his rise in the 1920s and ending with his fall in 1945, this book gives you Hitler in the raw as seen through the eyes of some of the world's greatest cartoonists, including Herb Block, D. R. Fitzpatrick, Ding Darling, E. H. Shepard, Bernard Partridge, Leslie Illingworth, and many others. The brilliant images they produced will haunt you as well as make you laugh.

Among their many idiosyncrasies, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, remained serious cartoon aficionados throughout their lives. They adored animation and their influence on German animation after World War II continues to this day. This study explores Hitler and Goebbels' efforts to establish a German cartoon industry to rival Walt Disney's and their love-hate relationship with American producers, whose films they studied behind locked doors. Despite their ambitious dream, all that remains of their efforts are a few cartoon shorts--advertising and puppet films starring dogs, cats, birds, hedgehogs, insects, Teutonic dwarves, and other fairy-tale ensemble. While these pieces do not hold much propaganda value, they perfectly illustrate Hannah Arendt's controversial description of those who perpetrated the Holocaust: the banality of evil.

A lavishly illustrated, witty, and original look at the awesome power of the political cartoon throughout history to enrage, provoke, and amuse. As a former editor of The New York Times Magazine and the longtime editor of The Nation, Victor S. Navasky knows just how transformative—and incendiary—cartoons can be. Here Navasky guides readers through some of the greatest cartoons ever created, including those by George Grosz, David Levine, Herblock, Honoré Daumier, and Ralph Steadman. He recounts how cartoonists and caricaturists have been censored, threatened, incarcerated, and even murdered for their art, and asks what makes this art form, too often dismissed as trivial, so uniquely poised to affect our minds and our hearts. Drawing on his own encounters with would-be censors, interviews with cartoonists, and historical archives from cartoon museums across the globe, Navasky examines the political cartoon as both art and polemic over the centuries. We see afresh images most celebrated for their artistic merit (Picasso's Guernica, Goya's "Duendecitos"), images that provoked outrage (the 2008 Barry Blitt New Yorker cover, which depicted the Obamas as a Muslim and a Black Power militant fist-bumping in the Oval Office), and those that have dictated public discourse (Herblock’s defining portraits of McCarthyism, the Nazi periodical Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic caricatures). Navasky ties together these and other superlative genre examples to reveal how political cartoons have been not only capturing the zeitgeist throughout history but shaping it as well—and how the most powerful cartoons retain the ability to shock, gall, and inspire long after their creation. Here Victor S. Navasky brilliantly illuminates the true power of one of our most enduringly vital forms of artistic expression.

In peacetime cartoonists are a diverse collection of individuals with their own styles and projects, but when the trumpets of war blow it is like unleashing the dogs of war. Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Mussolini were a gift for them and, as this collection shows, one they weren't about to turn down. This book shows that humour was one of the key weapons of war, with countries using cartoons to demoralise their opponents and maintain morale. Each country had its own style: the British liked understatement, showing people drinking cups of tea while bombs fell, whilst the Germans chose Churchill serving up a cocktail of blood, sweat and tears to an emaciated and sickly British lion. Showcasing the very best cartoons from Britain, the USA, Germany, Russia plus the work of all of WWII's greatest cartoonists, including Bill Mauldin, Fougasse, Emett, David Low and Graham Laidler (Pont), this book is guaranteed to make you laugh.

Whether producing strips, social comment in magazines like Punch or Lilliput, savage caricature of allies and enemies, or a daily chronicle of events at home or abroad, little escaped the cartoonists pen during World War II and they encapsulated the great dramas in a way impossible in prose. This book is divided into chapters covering the war year-by-year, each chapter prefaced with a concise introduction that provides a historical framework for the cartoons of that year. Altogether some 300 cartoons, in color and black and white, have been skillfully blended to produce a unique record of World War II.

"Combining the forces of humor, political commentary, and artistic technique, cartoonists such as George Grosz, David Low, John Heartfield, and David Fitzpatrick influenced public opinion in their own time and left a historical record of how Hitler was perceived at different times in his career."--Jacket.

First Published in 1992. `Between the wars' was the great age of the cartoon character. The adventures of Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Donald Duck were followed avidly by millions. Even the political leaders of the grim world of the 1920s and 1930s were known to millions as cartoon characters - gawky, bespectacled Woodrow Wilson, the balloon-like Mussolini, and the moustache men Hitler, Stalin, Neville Chamberlain and Ramsay MacDonald. Comic, mordant, and irreverent, political cartoons reveal more about popular concerns in the world of the slump, of rising nationalism and aggression, than either official documents or the work of most journalists. Published in newspapers or magazines with a wide circulation, they `made sense' to the ordinary reader. More than half a century on, that sense of immediate identification has been lost, and political cartoons of the period now need detailed explanation. Roy Douglas, author of the acclaimed The World War: The Cartoonist's Vision, now applies the same skills to the interwar period. His scope is international, and he has selected his cartoons from many different countries. Douglas covers all the great political and social issues of the period as they revealed themselves through the cartoonist's eyes. His greatest gift is for concise, clear explanation, setting each cartoon into its historical context. Throughout this book it is easy to trace the decay of hope in the 1920s, through the fear of war in the 1930s, to the determination at its end that fascism `must be stopped'. These cartoons, intended for the man and woman `in the street', in Europe, North America, in the Soviet Union and in Asia mirror their changing attitudes and beliefs, as their nations shaped up for war.