Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe: Imagery of Hatred 9783110616415, 9783110616071

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Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe Imagery of Hatred

Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe Imagery of Hatred Edited by Jakub Hauser and Eva Janáčová

The present book is the result of research undertaken as part of the project The Image of the Enemy. Visual Manifestations of Antisemitism in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, No. DG18P02OVV039, supported by the ‘NAKI II‘ program of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (2018–2021). Translations: Barbara Day – Graeme Dibble – Mark Worthington Editors: Jakub Hauser – Eva Janáčová (Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences) Peer reviews: Vladimir Levin – Daniel Polakovič Czech edition: Jakub Hauser – Eva Janáčová (edd.), Nenávist v obrazech. Vizuální projevy antisemitismu ve střední Evropě, Artefactum, Praha 2020 ISBN 978-3-11-061607-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-061641-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-061666-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945771 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 4855 Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Introduction

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Jan Dienstbier The Metamorphoses of the Judensau

1

Daniel Véri Imagining Ritual Murder: Social Knowledge in the Making Eva Janáčová Spa Antisemitism in Bohemia and Moravia

35

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Michal Frankl Jews Out of Place? Place and Space in Czech Antisemitic Caricatures

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Julia Secklehner Simple Entertainment? Die Muskete and ‘Weak’ Antisemitism in Interwar 123 Vienna Jakub Hauser Faithful to Tradition: Visual Depictions of Antisemitism in Humoristické listy in the 1920s and 1930s 145 Petr Karlíček Antisemitic Caricatures in the Protectorate Press (1939 – 1945) and their Authors 171 Daniel Uziel Polish Jews in the Visual Reporting of the Propaganda Companies Blanka Soukupová Visual Depictions of Antisemitism in the Czech Lands after World 221 War II Zbyněk Tarant Contemporary Visual Antisemitism in the Czech Republic

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Iwona Kurz Refugees ‘as Jews’. Travelling Images of Atrocities Index of Names List of Contributors

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Introduction The over-sized noses with which the people on the cover of our book are ‘endowed’ belong to the essential equipment of anti-Jewish visuality. They demonstrate the long and complicated relationship of majority society in central Europe with regard to the Jewish minority who, through virtually the entire history of co-existence, have been forced in various measures to accept ridicule and enmity. This postcard from Karlovy Vary from the early twentieth century works with a sign – here attributed to the two figures of the caricatured Jewish couple – which remains so familiar to this day that even after the passing of an entire century it is not difficult for most recipients to decipher it. The field of visual anti-Judaism – hatred of the Jews based on their religious distinctiveness – and of antisemitism – that is, spiteful content based on nationalistic definition – is very broad. It ranges from stereotypical depiction concealing its message beneath humorous content, through to clearly formulated attacks aimed at escalating hatred towards an imaginary collective enemy. Both attitudes can be described as having as their aim exclusion from a fictionally monolithic majority society, and as an effort to reinforce the dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This publication offers a number of probes into the visual history of the central European space and its often very uncomfortable (if not downright unpleasant) content: thus, from the whole variety of material presented and approaches represented, what is demonstrated above all is the intransigence and at times even immutability of many anti-Jewish stereotypes. This applies especially in the form in which they developed in connection with modern – racist – antisemitism, which spread most notably in the final third of the nineteenth century, and on whose foundations twentieth century antisemitism with its catastrophic consequences was built. Although the texts presented derive predominantly from a background of arthistorical research, the focal point of interest of most of them lies in the broader field of visual studies. The publication thus presents the visual production of a broad spectrum of media and materials including magazine illustrations, postcards, posters, photographs and original internet creation. In spite of the undoubted power of visuality, in earlier histories of antisemitism this aspect lags behind and is often presented only as a certain supplement or illustration to its textual manifestations. Thus, due to the persisting disparity in previous professional interest, a more complex view of the phenomenon of antisemitism (i. e. anti-Judaism) formulated by visual means which would take the specific media in which it was used into account, is still lacking. We are attempting in particular to enrich and expand previous research into the visual side of these manifestahttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-001

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tions and to open up this constantly postponed theme for further inter-disciplinary contacts. The studies included in this book derive from contributions to the international conference Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe, which was organised by the Institute of the History of Art of the Academy of Sciences on 17 October 2019 in the Academic Conference Centre in Prague. They map manifestations of anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the central European region from the Middle Ages to the present day.¹ The studies concern manifestations of antisemitism in Poland, Hungary, Germany and Austria as well as in the Czech lands. The first essay by Jan Dienstbier examines medieval depictions of what is known as the Jewish sow. The repugnant motif of Jews being suckled by a sow appeared for the first time in Bohemia at the end of the thirteenth century on a corbel of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Kolín. Although no further portrayals of this type after the mid-fourteenth century have survived in the Czech lands, we can still find related motifs in the margins of illuminated Kutná Hora choir books or on the carved ceiling of the chateau in Telč at the end of the fifteenth and in the mid-sixteenth century. After this Daniel Véri deals in his case study with another abundantly widespread theme, the Jewish ritual murder. Using the example of two court cases which took place in Hungary at the end of the nineteenth century he shows that this antisemitic motif, deriving from medieval superstition, penetrated into many varied fields of visuality and thus broke the imaginary barrier between what is regarded as low and high art. Eva Janáčová’s contribution is devoted to ‘spa antisemitism’ in the Czech lands which, from the end of the nineteenth century up to the 1930s, manifested itself visually above all in picture postcards and in the field of newspaper cartoons, and in the end even influenced the forms of figurines, statuettes and utilitarian objects. The image of Jewish spa visitors and here even Jews generally was deliberately caricatured, the guise of humour cloaking the popular antisemitic iconography of the time which primarily drew Jews as alien and hostile. The next three studies closely examine the medium of magazine caricature. Michal Frankl deals with antisemitic caricatures published in Czech satirical newspapers at the turn of the century from the viewpoint of the field known as spatial studies. On an analysis of the place and space portrayed he comes to the conclusion that Jews were unable to identify with any space. The inability in the caricature to locate them in a specific space corresponded with the anti The conference Visual Antisemitism in Central Europe and the subsequent collective monograph are the outcome of the grant project The Imagery of Hatred. Visual Manifestations of Antisemitism in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages to the Present, no. DG18P02OVV039, financed by the NAKI II programme of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic (2018 – 2021).

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semitic idea of the Jew as a figure standing outside the national and world order. Julia Secklehner, in her contribution, deals with the reflection of antisemitism in Viennese satirical journals. In the interwar period two levels of visual antisemitism existed in Austria: that presented in Der Kikeriki was connected with violence and aggression and was propagated by an extreme right-wing politicians; the other, circulated in Die Muskete, was far more moderate and manifested itself above all in the form of implicit symbols and references. Jakub Hauser’s essay on a series of examples follows a broad scale of antisemitic attacks in the conservative illustrated Czech-language weekly Humoristické listy [Humorist Papers]. For virtually the whole period between the wars these attacks were connected with the periodical’s own antisemitic position which reached its culmination at the end of the nineteenth century. Humoristické listy, through the intensity of its spiteful content during practically the entire interwar period, demolishes the still prevalent idea that in the environment of First Republic Czechoslovakia open antisemitism was the exclusive domain of extreme anti-state elements. Two contributions are devoted to the period of World War II. Petr Karlíček analyses the antisemitic caricatures that emerged in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and at the same time devotes considerable space to their authors, including Karel Rélink, Dobroslav Haut and František Voborský. Without exception, their creations fulfilled the requirements of the Nazi authorities; they were not too imaginative, nor did they reach the aggression and crudity of the caricatures being made in Germany itself, or on Slovak territory. Daniel Uziel on the other hand deals with the visualisation of Polish Jews from the perspective of German antisemitic propaganda. Already before the war these strove to throw doubt on the legitimacy of Poland by emphasising the connection between the state and its Jewish population. With the onset of the war there was a transformation in the broader context: anti-Jewish propaganda, in the field fuelled chiefly by newspaper caricatures, photographs and film, became a part of the Reich’s wartime propaganda. Visual manifestations of antisemitism in post-war Czechoslovakia are subsequently processed by Blanka Soukupová who, in her research into book illustrations and newspaper cartoons, finds out that the portrayal of the Jew as a German and an asocial Germaniser predominated from the beginning, but that after the February takeover the chief motif became the stereotype of a Jew in the form of a bourgeois capitalist cosmopolitan and propagator of Zionism. The antisemite edge was measured above all against the State of Israel as a vassal of the USA; the figure of Israel as a collective Jew therefore returned in the time known as ‘normalisation’. Two studies investigate the most recent period. The situation after the democratic revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia and subsequent birth of the independent Czech Republic in 1993 is mapped in detail by Zbyněk Tarant. He

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draws attention to the fact that while visual anti-Jewish stereotypes traditionally survive in popular culture and folklore, antisemitic portrayals working with political motifs prefer a non-figurative style. Moreover, it is often people who have nothing in common with Judaism who are the target of traditional visual stereotypes in a political context. Iwona Kurz‘s contribution in its theme draws on the visuality of the Holocaust and searches for pictorial analogies, above all in reaction to the European refugee crisis in 2015. On the basis of visual material collected mainly in Poland the author attempts to show how these ‘images of the past’ serve predominantly political tasks. We believe that the identification of problematic moments of central European history can be of great benefit in orienting ourselves in the present day. In fact, the power of images which – whether subliminally or quite openly – emphasise the supposed (or rather, imposed) otherness of a national minority, can be very easily traced to the abundant but in general little-known material that can be described as visual manifestations of antisemitism. In the case of the history of European Jews we know very well where manifestations of intolerance and xenophobia can lead, but we also know that visuality played an essential role in the processes of stereotypisation, exclusion and division of society. In conclusion, some editorial notes. We have left in the title of the publication just the term ‘antisemitism’ instead of the more precise expression ‘anti-Judaism and antisemitism’. This is because especially the general comprehensibility of the first term in relation to manifestations of both antisemitism and antiJudaism, and also the fact that the overwhelming majority of studies in this book deal exclusively to antisemitism. We have additionally spelt antisemitism without the hyphen on the recommendation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and other international organisations devoting themselves to antisemitism, because antisemitism is not hatred of ‘Semitism’ or ‘Semites’; antisemitism is Jew-hatred. However, where quotations from sources and expert studies are concerned, we have consistently preserved the original spelling of all words and have not edited the expressions in any way. In cases where we have not given the names of the authors of the artworks in the text, the notes or the labels, this is because they are not known. Jakub Hauser and Eva Janáčová

Jan Dienstbier

The Metamorphoses of the Judensau Summary: The article follows Bohemian depictions of the Judensau (Jewish sow), a medieval anti-Jewish depiction of Jews suckling a sow. The oldest depiction of this type in Bohemia appears in an architectural sculpture of the late 13th century, on a corbel in the church of St. Bartholomew in Kolín (probably 1280 – 1290). In Kolín, the motif follows older models of Gothic of the cathedrals, which can be traced to Saxony. Another Bohemian corbel with the Judensau appears in the chapel of the castle Lipnice (around 1350). It seems that its creator came from Styria. The only late medieval depiction of the Judensau from Bohemia or Moravia, the marginal illumination in the gradual from Litoměřice, highlights the problem of the tension between Utraquist burghers and the Jewish minority in the city. Nevertheless, there are also depictions which must have been inspired by this sort of iconography. Examples are marginal illuminations in Kutná Hora’s choral books created in the 1490s. While we cannot identify the men riding on a sow or kissing a pig’s arse which appear on their pages without doubt as Jews, the relation to anti-Jewish imagery is evident. The final example of carved reliefs from the coffered ceiling in Telč shows the survival of the Judensau theme deep into the Renaissance. One of the panels depicts a man identified as a Jew, who is riding a flying sow. The image should be probably understood as a marginal joke, like the adjacent panel possibly depicting Martin Luther tortured as a sinner by two devils. Keywords: Judensau, architectural sculpture, marginal illumination, anti-Judaism The Jewish sow, known usually by the German term Judensau, is one of the most common and vulgar anti-Jewish medieval images. The depictions of Jews suckling milk from a sow’s teats, being attracted by its anus or attempting to ride on it, were relatively widespread in medieval visual culture. However, unlike other visual forms such as the ‘Jewish’ hooked nose, these images enjoyed only a limited ‘renaissance’ within modern antisemitism.¹ Another difference

 The seminal work on the topic is Isaiah Shachar, The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and its History, London 1974. More recent approaches have been summarized by Birgit Wiedl, ‘Laughing at the Beast: The Judensau: Anti-Jewish Propaganda and Humor from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period’, in Albrecht Classen (ed), Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, Berlin and New York 2010, pp. 325 – 364. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-002

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was the fact that the spread of the Judensau was restricted mainly to Germanspeaking areas – the majority of these depictions are to be found today in Germany and Austria. This is also borne out by two French examples (in Metz and Colmar), one in Aarschot in Belgium, and one in Basel in Switzerland, which were all territories immediately linked to the Holy Roman Empire and settled by a population speaking some form of medieval German. Depictions of the Judensau occurred only sporadically elsewhere, with notable examples in Slovak Bratislava, Polish Gniezno, and Uppsala and some churches around it in Sweden.² However, the English and German literature, amongst which it is necessary to highlight the monograph by Isaiah Shachar, has continued to ignore Bohemian examples.³ Moreover, even in Czech literature, the treatment of the topic has been limited. Therefore, this contribution aims to give an overall view of the spread of the motif of the Judensau in the art of the medieval Bohemian lands and highlight some interesting aspects of this phenomenon.

The capital in St Bartholomew’s Church in Kolín nad Labem The initial spread of the motif in Bohemia is undoubtedly connected to the itinerant stonemasons’ workshops which operated within the Holy Roman Empire’s

 The examples were summarized by Shachar (note 1), see also additions by Hermann Rusam, ‘Judensau’ – Darstellungen in der Plastischen Kunst Bayerns: Ein Zeugnis christlicher Judenfeindschaft, Hannover 2007 (Begegnungen – Zeitschrift für Kirche und Judentum, Sonderheft). The identification of Judensau ‘a caricature of a Jew riding on a sow’ on one of the gargoyles of the Franciscan Church in Bratislava is only attested by earlier literature, cf. Theodor Ortvay, Die Geschichte der Stadt Pressburg, Erster Band, Pressburg 1892, pp. 351– 352. The gargoyle with Judensau has been replaced and the original lost in 1897. Rusam cites the occurrence of the Judensau motif in Chartres, see Rusam (note 2), p. 4. He bases that on personal information from Götz Ruempler, which I was unable to confirm. Rusam notes in this sense also an example in Evora, Portugal, but according to the image and description in Götz Ruempler, Tiere in der plastischen Kunst des Mittelalters, Münster 2017, p. 223, this is a man with a pig head wearing pileus cornutus, Jewish hat, i. e. in strict sense, it is a related anti-Jewish depiction, not the Judensau itself. On the other hand, as far as I am aware, the Swedish examples have not been examined together apart from in the local literature. There are probably more depictions of Judensau in the area around Uppland in late medieval mural painting. A notable example is HusbySjutolft kyrka in Uppland painted by Albertus Pictor (c. 1470 – 1480).  Shachar (note 1) does not cite any Bohemian examples. Again, on the basis of information from Götz Ruempler, Rusam (note 2), p. 4 refers to a Prague example without providing any details. I am not aware of this depiction and I have not found anything about it in Czech literature.

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territory throughout the thirteenth century. The older of two well-known cases related to this phenomenon can be found on a capital in the church of St Bartholomew in Kolín nad Labem. The largest of Kolín’s churches is related to the foundation of the city during German colonization and its development in the middle of the thirteenth century. The new settlement in Kolín was first mentioned in 1261 in a charter issued by King Ottokar of Bohemia, which granted town privileges to the town of Přelouč, following the examples of Kouřim and Kolín.⁴ It means that Kolín already existed and was governed by Magdeburg law at this time. Moreover, as has been documented in names mentioned in other sources, the first burghers whose new town replaced the older agglomeration in Old Kolín came from German-speaking territory, perhaps even from Magdeburg and its surrounding area. We have no detailed information on the foundation of St Bartholomew’s church, the only evidence being the former tympanum to the entrance of the crypt which was found in the floor of the ambulatory during reconstruction work in 1910. Written on the tympanum is the name of Gislebert, one of the first reeves of Kolín, first mentioned in a charter written in 1277.⁵ The tympanum was probably made sometime around that date, as everything indicates that the church was already under construction at this time – there are even suggestions it may have been founded at the same time as the town itself, i. e. around the middle of the thirteenth century.⁶ A stylistic analysis of the architecture and stonework elements confirms these conclusions. It seems that by the third quarter of the thirteenth century the building had reached the level of the vaults. An interesting group of capitals, corbels, and keystones, which still decorate the nave today, are thus evidently from the 1270s or 1280s. Michal Patrný and Jan Beránek, who wrote the most recent monograph about the architecture of the church, believe that the building could have been completed towards the end of the 1280s.⁷ It follows that the relief which interests us [1] – on the capital located on the north side of the eastern pillar of the southern row of the nave – must have been made no later than that date. The changes which were later carried out in the church, in particular, the construction of a new chancel by Peter Parler in 1360 and the neo-gothic reconstruction of the church by Josef Mocker and

 Regesta diplomatica nec non epistolaria Bohemiae et Moraviae II, Annorum 1253 – 1310, edited by Josef Emler, Pragae 1882, pp. 1034– 1035 (no. 2391).  Ibidem, p. 463 (no. 1097).  Michal Patrný and Jan Beránek, Arciděkanský chrám sv. Bartoloměje v Kolíně. Historický a stavební vývoj, České Budějovice and Prague 2014, pp. 84– 85.  Ibidem, p. 94. The authors date the capitals to approximately the third quarter of the 13th century.

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Fig. 1: Judensau, c. 1270 – 1280, capital, Kolín, Church of St Bartholomew, central nave. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

then by Ludvík Lábler at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, did not greatly affect the capitals in the nave. Apart from the loss of the original layers of polychromy, the sculptures have been preserved more or less in their original form. This also applies to the capital with the Judensau. Its relatively low relief, which the viewer has to look at from several sides to see what has been depicted, shows a four-legged animal with three udders surrounded by three male figures wearing typical Jewish hats (pilei cornuti). All the men are dressed in long tunics and they have long hair. One of them is twisting the pig’s tail, the second is lying under it drinking its milk, while the third one seems to be feeding it by poking his hands into its snout. The rough rendering of the relief, which is in marked contrast to the skilfully made capitals on some of the other church pillars, might appear to complicate the question regarding the model of this composition. However, the source was probably the same for all the sculptures. Everything indicates that the capital with the Judensau, as well as the more accomplished architectural pieces, were inspired by northern German models, specifically the cathedrals in Magdeburg, Meissen and Naumburg and their architectonic sculpture as it was created in the second half of the thirteenth century. The unknown sculptor of the Kolín Judensau kept to the same templates as his more capable fellow workers. This can be demonstrated on the example of the keystone with a green man located in an important place in the widest, most western section of the vault of the nave [2]. In the keystone, one can see again the roughly sculpted facial physiognomy with almond eyes that are reminiscent of those of the Jews in the relief with the

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Fig. 2: Green man, c. 1270 – 1280, keystone, Kolín, Church of St Bartholomew, western vault field of the nave. Photo: IAH CAS © Jan Dienstbier.

sow. It is highly likely, therefore, that the two works were created by the same stonemason. However, the green man is looking out through a wreath of vine leaves, which, despite the undeniable roughness of the artistic rendering, follows the same models and forms as the exceptional examples we find on other capitals in the Kolín church [3]. Despite the differences in the abilities of the individual stonemasons, they surely shared their templates. The stylistic relationship of the sculpturally adept capitals, such as those on the pillars dividing the nave from the later presbytery built by Peter Parler, confirms the close stylistic link

Fig. 3: Capital with vegetative ornament, c. 1270 – 1280, corbel, Kolín, Church of St Bartholomew, central nave. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

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to the work of the northern German stonemasons. This fact has also been noticed by other researchers.⁸ The Kolín corbels and capitals have often been compared to the architectural sculptural work in the Naumburg cathedral. The similarities not only apply to the forms of sculpted foliage and how the floral ornament ‘grows out’ from the capitals, but it also relates to the quality of the production. In some sculptures of the Kolín church, it is possible to find same features as in Naumburg: precision in the stonework and the ability to deeply sculpt out subtle, sharply defined leaves merely to emphasize their three-dimensional effect. The architectonic sculpture of both locations agrees in the depiction of foliage, where the usual vine leaves are supplemented by the leaves from the walnut tree, the corydalis and the field maple.⁹ Naturally, these relations do not apply only to Naumburg but also to other areas related to the work of the stonemasons who contributed to the construction of this cathedral. They can be traced to Reims cathedral and Coucy Castle in France, to the Chapel of the Knights Templar in Iben in the Rhineland, and to two other important building projects in Saxony besides Naumburg – the cathedrals in Magdeburg and Meissen.¹⁰ Therefore, it is probable that some stonemasons travelled from these areas to Kolín, where they may have met other craftsmen, trained in different traditions, with whom they shared their templates. The rendering of the Kolín Judensau shows some similarities to the same theme depicted on a frieze in the former atrium of Magdeburg Cathedral. The frieze was probably created in the 1270s.¹¹ In Magdeburg, similarly as in Kolín, there is a Jewish man placed behind the sow’s tail (the fact that his arm is missing prevents us from confirming whether he was touching its hindquarters) and another at the front who is trying to feed the animal (the food source would appear to be acorns from a nearby tree). However, the relief in Kolín is not a copy of the frieze in Magdeburg and it seems that the basic template could appear in sev-

 Most recently Aleš Mudra, ‘Královský patronát v sochařství 13. století’, in Kateřina Kubínová and Klára Benešovská (eds), Imago, imagines. Výtvarné dílo a proměny jeho funkcí v českých zemích od 10. do první třetiny 16. století II, Prague 2019, pp. 97– 99. Similarities had already been noticed by Jiří Kuthan, ‘Architektura v přemyslovském státě 13. století’, in Josef Janáček, Jiří Dvorský, Jiří Kuthan et al., Umění doby posledních Přemyslovců, Prague 1982, pp. 181– 351, cit. p. 241 and Pavel Kroupa, ‘Rostlinný ornament v Hradišti nad Jizerou, Kolíně a v Kouřimi ve 13. století’, Památky středních Čech, 1987, No. 2, pp. 43 – 63, cit. pp. 44– 49.  Elisabeth Harting, ‘Der Stil der Naumburger Pflanzenwelt aus Botanischer Sicht’, in Hartmut Krohm and Holger Kunde (eds), Der Naumburger Meister: Bildhauer und Architekt im Europa der Kathedralen (exh. cat.), Petersberg 2011, pp. 267– 280.  For the wider context see Krohm–Kunde (note 9), esp. pp. 261– 309, 1263 – 1274.  Shachar (note 1), pp. 19 – 20. On the similar role of other depictions of the Jews’ sow in the 14th century, cf. ibidem, pp. 31– 32.

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eral variations – e. g. the sculptor of the Magdeburg frieze added two small piglets next to the suckling Jew. Nevertheless, despite the differences, the Kolín example shows how a topic which was already established in German territory could be brought to Bohemia as part of the repertoire of the stonemasons’ workshops, perhaps even without complex ideological motivation having to play any significant role. It seems that by the end of the thirteenth century the Judensau motif had been included amongst the depictions of other ‘monsters’ which were usually located on the margins of cathedrals. It then lost other, more subtle connotations which are probably present in the cathedral sculpture – for example, Shachar highlighted the original relation of the Judensau to the personification of gluttony, which is, in fact, the case in Magdeburg.¹² A coherent iconographic programme is absent in Kolín. Apart from the capitals and corbels with floral motives, the depictions of monsters are present as well – two dragons with intertwined tails and two hybrids with human faces wearing hoods – however, there is no sign here that the figures are related to the personification of a sin.¹³ Neither can we assume that the sculpture was used to any great extent in propaganda aimed at the Christian population of the town (the Jews who were later recorded in Kolín could not be targeted as the spectators as they understandably did not go to church).¹⁴ Even today the shallow relief of the capital and its relatively high location makes it difficult to distinguish the motive in the gloom of the church. The same must also have been the case in the Middle Ages when we can assume that the interior was even darker.

The corbel in the castle chapel at Lipnice nad Sázavou The castle chapel in Lipnice nad Sázavou, a little under sixty kilometres southeast of Kolín, houses the second Bohemian example of the Judensau motive. This is also an architectural sculpture, a corbel, albeit in a more modest sacral building than in Kolín. Nevertheless, the Lipnice chapel differs from other castle chapels in its relatively grand architectural design and ornamentation, including mu-

 Ibidem, p. 20.  The monsters are described and reproduced by Patrný–Beránek (note 6), p. 41, photo 20 and p. 82, photo 38.  Cf. a similar situation in several German towns which had depictions of the Jews’ sow but sources do not indicate the existence of any important Jewish communities, Wiedl (note 1), p. 336.

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rals, which have been partially preserved. It was once a more or less separate building within the castle organism, although it also served as a part of the castle’s fortifications – the chapel nave, rebuilt during the baroque period, is a part of the massive tower.¹⁵ Several of the chaplains are known, thanks to the written sources – in 1377 there is a mention of the local chaplain and rector Peter, who at that time was in a dispute with the well-known Prague apothecary Angelus.¹⁶ A source from 1380 attests that the priest Nicholas was appointed as a dean of the local collegial chapter. On this basis, the foundation of the chapter was linked to the owner of the castle during that era, William (Vilém) of Landštejn.¹⁷ The chapter is also mentioned in later years when we learn about the dedication of the chapel to St Lawrence and about a choir of as many as six canons who operated there.¹⁸ This information testifies to the importance of the Lipnice chapel in comparison with similar institutions in other castles. On the other hand, it is quite difficult to date the foundation of the building and its corbels, as there are no written sources from the period when it was established. The older literature generally places the origin of the chapel in the period after 1319 – when the castle was acquired and then renovated by the prominent noble Henry of Leipa (Jindřich z Lipé) – or to the 1330s when Henry’s sons completed their father’s work.¹⁹ Therefore, the chapel would have been built shortly after the castle itself, which is first mentioned in 1314. Aleš Mudra recently arrived at a different conclusion on the basis of stylistic analysis of the Lipnice

 On the chapel’s appearance and a comparison with other castle chapels, cf. František Záruba, Hradní kaple II, Doba lucemburská, Prague 2015, pp. 207– 215 (Historia et historia artium XXI). Záruba also lists the older literature.  Soudní akta pražské konzistoře (Acta judiciaria consistorii pragensis) VII, edited by František Tadra, Prague 1901, p. 209.  Soudní akta pražské konzistoře (Acta iudiciaria consistorii pragensis) II, edited by František Tadra, Prague 1893, p. 14. Nevertheless, the foundation of the chapter at this time is confirmed by the sources. The appointment of Nicholas happened on 12th of April, though the previously mentioned chaplain Peter appears again in October of the same year which means they served together with Nicholas and perhaps even the chapter could have been founded earlier, Libri Erectionum archidiocesis pragensis, edited by Klement Borový, Prague 1878, p. 154.  Libri confirmationum ad beneficia ecclesiastica pragensem per archidioecesim, edited by Josef Emler, Prague 1879, pp. 186 – 187. – Registra decimarum papalium čili Registra desátků papežských z diocezí pražské, edited by Václav Vladivoj Tomek, Prague 1873, p. 54. These and other sources are summarized by Záruba (note 15), pp. 207– 210.  Záruba (note 15), p. 207. – Dobroslav Líbal, Katalog gotické architektury v České republice do husitských válek, Prague 2001, p. 234 based on the style of the chapel presbytery he dates it ‘to around 1330 at the earliest’. However, Dobroslava Menclová, České hrady I, Prague 1976, p. 386 dated the chapel to around 1310.

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corbels and their connection to contemporaneous sculpture in Styria.²⁰ Mudra believes that the chapel was built around the mid-fourteenth century by Henry’s youngest son, Vincent III of Leipa (Čeněk III z Lipé). This member of the nobility initially held the castle jointly with his relatives (from 1336), then later on his own (between 1352 and 1363). Vincent was connected directly to Styria through his first wife, Adalheid of Wallsee († 1358/1359), and he visited Styria at least once in 1355 during his return from Charles IV’s coronation journey.²¹

Fig. 4: Judensau, c. 1350, corbel, Lipnice nad Sázavou, Castle Chapel of St. Lawrence, end of the presbytery. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

The corbel with the Judensau [4] is located at the very end of the former presbytery, next to today’s entrance. However, this entrance, made in the Modern Age, completely inverted the original layout of the sacral area as the original high altar located here must have been removed. The relatively skilfully sculpted  Aleš Mudra, ‘Architektonická skulptura ve východních Čechách’, in Helena Dáňová – Ivo Hlobil – Klára Mezihoráková – Dalibor Prix (eds), Uprostřed Koruny české. Gotické a raně renesanční umění východních Čech. Katalog výstavy, díl I. Studie, Prague 2020 (in print). – Aleš Mudra, ‘Lipnice, figurální konzoly v hradní kapli’, in Helena Dáňová – Ivo Hlobil – Klára Mezihoráková – Dalibor Prix (eds), Uprostřed Koruny české. Gotické a raně renesanční umění východních Čech. Katalog výstavy, díl II. Katalog, Prague 2020 (in print).  Mudra, ‘Lipnice’ (note 20).

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relief depicts three naked figures with characteristic pointed Jewish hats, clinging on to a sow’s large teats. Despite having lost the peaks of the Jews’ hats, the corbel has been preserved in good condition. In its present state, it is impossible upon visual inspection to say whether there had been any polychromy or what it may have been like. Based on the other corbels in the presbytery – a man with a hat and a green woman or man whose hair is still covered by a layer of brown pigment – one can conclude that the Judensau relief must have been polychromed as well. Moreover, in light of the reconstruction work to the original building, one has to accept that the Judensau corbel could have been mishandled. The chapel was reconstructed in the 1930s when its vaults were dismantled and then rebuilt using the original components.²² As in Kolín, it is difficult to say if the corbels were meant to communicate a coherent, distinctive programme. It seems that they rather cover a mixture of various themes. At the very end of the chancel, the sow is accompanied by a corbel with the grimacing head of the devil with his tongue sticking out and four tusks protruding from his mouth [5]. Another corbel shows a figure in a tunic, and finally, the third one presents a bird which is unidentifiable due to its missing head. The corbels supporting the vaults in the direction to the nave are decorated with the heads of a green woman (or a green man with feminine features) and a man wearing a hat with two other heads looking out from under the rim [6].²³ The two remaining corbels adjacent to the triumphal arch are decorated with tracery, while the morphology of one of them has been enhanced by a small grimacing face. Therefore, this set of sculptures includes both malign creatures (in addition to the Judensau, the devil and, judging by its expression, the figure in a tunic), as well as ambivalent ones (the green woman or man, perhaps even the head of the man wearing the hat). As in Kolín, the sow is accompanied by a collection of other hybrid figures and monsters. The stylistic classification proposed by Aleš Mudra seems accurate. One of the convincing comparisons suggested by Mudra is the architectural sculpture of the Church of St Paul in Lavanttal from the late 1360s.²⁴ These reliefs are markedly similar to corbels from Lipnice – for example, the hair shaped by parallel grooves, whose schematic rendering is markedly in contrast to the otherwise sur-

 Záruba (note 15), p. 214.  Jakub Vítovský, ‘Gotické nástěnné malby v Dolním Městě, Lipnici, Řečici a Loukově’, in Jan Sommer (ed), Tři gotické kostely pod hradem Lipnicí, Prague 1999, pp. 48 – 61, cit. pp. 55 – 56 identifies the head with the hat as the Slavic pagan god Triglav, though without providing any persuasive analogies.  Karl Ginhart, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Benediktinerstiftes St. Paul im Lavanttal und seiner Filialkirchen, Vienna 1969, pp. 87– 91 (Österreichische Kunsttopographie XXXVII).

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Fig. 5: Devil’s head, c. 1350, corbel, Lipnice nad Sázavou, Castle Chapel of St. Lawrence, end of the presbytery. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

Fig. 6: Man in a hat, c. 1350, corbel, Lipnice nad Sázavou, Castle Chapel of St. Lawrence, presbytery. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

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prisingly realistic forms of the faces. The shapes of the almond eyes and the mouths carved deeply in the face are also similar. In Lavanttal, on one of the corbels, there is a devil’s head [7] with a large, widely spread and deformed nose, which is very similar to the devil’s head in Lipnice (the only difference between the two monsters is that the one from Lavanttal lacks a stuck-out tongue and tusks).

Fig. 7: Devil’s head, c. 1365 – 1370, corbel, Lavanttal, Church of St Paul, northern section of the transept. Photo: Aleš Mudra.

Therefore, the genesis of the Lipnice corbel is similar to Kolín. Again, it was probably the work of itinerant stonemasons who brought complete templates to Bohemia from the areas where they were trained and only the source of artistic inspiration is different. Unlike to Kolín, the sculptures in Lipnice are inspired by the artistic output of the Danube region, most likely Styria, to which the owner of the castle, Vincent III of Leipa, was linked through various ties. It is not surprising that the appearance of the Lipnice corbel is similar to other depictions of the Judensau from southern Germany, in particular, the corbels from Nuremberg, Bayreuth and Heilsbronn.²⁵ Although these cases are not quite as old as the ar-

 Shachar (note 1), p. 36. – Rusam (note 2), pp. 11– 13 and 18 – 21.

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chitectural sculpture from Lipnice, they share with it a general form of an animal with a curved back, beneath which a scrum of figures is attached to the teats [8]. Just as in Kolín, the Judensau in Lipnice has not been placed in any particularly significant position of the church. It seems that no carefully planned propaganda against Jews was intended. Even though the Lipnice corbel was slightly more accessible to possible viewers than its Kolín counterpart, the fact that it was situated at the very back of the presbytery, behind the former main altar of the chapel, necessarily meant it could not be the centre of mass attention. As there are remnants of wall paintings of the Passion Cycle from the middle of the fourteenth century in the chancel, one can speculate whether the Judensau corbel could have been intended to be a part of them.²⁶ However, the appearance of the other corbels suggests that the connection between the paintings and the architectural sculpture was probably a loose one.²⁷ The Judensau is thus rather a part of the catalogue of monsters shown on the corbels.

Fig. 8: Judensau, prior to 1433, corbel holding a statue, Heilsbronn, Münster, side nave, Photo: IAH CAS © Jan Dienstbier.

 A summary of the paintings by Jarmila Krčálová, ‘Lipnice – hradní kaple sv. Vavřince’, in Jaroslav Pešina (ed), Gotická nástěnná malba v zemích českých I, Prague 1958, pp. 335 – 339. A slightly later dating in the second half of the century is possible but not the date suggested by the author (the first half of the century).  Nevertheless, even this is difficult to confirm as we know only a part of the painted cycle.

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The Utraquist choir books from Kutná Hora and Litoměřice Although, unlike in Germany, we do not know about any other stonemasons’ work with the Judensau in Bohemia, the subject did not die out as theme midway through the fourteenth century. This is demonstrated by a marginal illumination in the Smíšek Gradual created between 1492 and 1495 for the Church of the Holy Trinity in Kutná Hora and now kept in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. The gradual’s illuminations make it one of the finest manuscripts created in Bohemia during the Late Middle Ages.²⁸ It was commissioned by Jan of Vrchoviště, also known as Smíšek, who used the Holy Trinity Church as the burial ground for his family. Jan Smíšek had the gradual decorated in Prague, in the workshop of the illuminator Matthew (Mattheus, Matouš). Although his career was relatively short, Matthew’s workshop, or perhaps a loose collaboration of several Prague illuminators under Matthew’s management, stand behind several fine manuscripts created at the very end of the fifteenth century. Although Matthew and his collaborators used contemporaneous prints as models of their work, in particular the work of Master E. S. and Israhel van Meckenem, they transformed them in a very creative and distinctive manner. An illumination on page 269 connected to the initial D(ominus) is one of the creations which cannot be linked directly to any known printed templates. Beneath the calligraphic initial and a floral ornament is the figure of a sow being ridden by a man wearing a blue tunic and a blue hat [9]. He is leaning backwards, holding the animal’s tail in his left hand. Even though the man’s hat cannot be immediately identified as a pointed pileus cornutus, nor are there any figures of Jews suckling, the source of inspiration for the illustration was undoubtedly the Judensau. Several indirect clues lead to this conclusion, the most important being the sex of the animal, which is clearly shown by the teats. This is further supported by the man’s attire and his tight grip on the animal’s tail. In terms of iconographic variations, the illumination can be compared to the figure of a Jewish man riding backwards on an animal resembling a goat in the misericordia from Aarschot in Belgium from the beginning of the sixteenth century,²⁹ or to the no longer ex-

 Österreischische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 15492. Most recently on the manuscript and the workshops behind the creation of the manuscript see Maria Theisen, ‘Ein Meisterwerk für Kuttenberg – das Graduale der Familie Smíšek’, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Maria Theisen (eds), Unter Druck. Mitteleuropäische Buchmalerei im 15. Jahrhundert, Petersberg 2018, pp. 61– 76, with references to older Czech and international literature.  Shachar (note 1), pp. 40 – 42.

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Fig. 9: Man riding a sow, 1492/1495, illumination, Smíšek Gradual, ÖNB, Mus.Hs. 15492, p. 269. Photo: © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

tant painting from the tower of the old bridge in Frankfurt, which is relatively well known from several prints, the oldest one dating back to the end of the sixteenth century [10].³⁰ The Frankfurt painting showed a Jewish man sitting on a sow, with another man kissing the animal’s behind and the third one sucking on its teats. Although sow-riding is also one of the characteristic forms of mockery used in so-called Schandbilder images – depictions created to mock and offend criminals, in particular debtors – even these were probably directly related to the iconography of the Judensau. ³¹ Within the genre of Schandbilder, the illumination from Kutná Hora could be readily compared with a charter issued  Ibidem, pp. 36 – 37, where the author has published various reproductions of the lost Frankfurt paintings: Pl. 41– 45.  Ibidem, pp. 40 – 41. – Malcolm Jones, The Secret Middle Ages, Thrupp 2002, pp. 81– 86. – Wiedl (note 1), pp. 351– 352.

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Fig. 10: Reproduction of a painting of the Jews’ sow from the tower bridge in Frankfurt, 1678, broadsheet ‘Zu Ehren dem Gemäld so erst renovirer unter dem Franckfurter Brücken-Thurn’, Frankfurt. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

against Dietrich von Klitzing, written and illustrated in Brandenburg in 1550.³² Although Klitzing is riding the sow backwards, as in the gradual, there is a spe-

 Johann von Opperhausens Mahnschrift und Gemälde gegen Dietrich von Klitzing wegen der

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cific detail placing the image within Schandbilder context – Klitzing is raising the pig’s tail to imprint his seal on its anus, thereby ridiculing the value of his promises. The fact that the Prague illuminator drew on ideas for his compositions from some anti-Jewish imagery can be seen in another illumination decorating the letter A(ve) on page 214. It presents a strange kind of jousting duel between two men [11]. The man wearing a blue tunic and a hat with a curved point, vaguely reminiscent of a typical Jewish hat, is riding a goat. The man’s rival is only half visible in the illumination and is sitting on a pig (it is impossible to say whether

Fig. 11: Tournament between men riding a goat and a pig, 1492/1495, illumination, Smíšek Gradual, ÖNB, Mus.Hs. 15492, p. 214. Photo: © Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

geleisteten Bürgschaft für den Kurfürsten Joachim II. Hector zu Brandenburg wegen einer geliehenen Summe Gulden, Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, Celle Br. 20 Nr. 50.

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it is a boar or a sow as the animal has been depicted from the front). This picture can also be compared to the aforementioned wall painting from Frankfurt, where there was an image of a Jewish woman on a goat in addition to the Jewish man on a pig.³³ However, the image mocking the Jewish man riding a pig is of even older origin. One example, dating back to around 1355 – 1360, can be found on a carved choral bench in Erfurt.³⁴ The relief shows a tournament duel between a knight on a horse and a Jewish man, readily identified by his pointed hat, on a sow. Therefore it appears that the Prague illuminator transformed the anti-Jewish depictions linking Jews with riding pigs or goats. He must have known these and integrated them into his templates. One can only tentatively link these lost models to what we know from Frankfurt and Erfurt. This suspicion is again indirectly confirmed by an illumination in another manuscript which also came from the workshop of the illuminator Matthew – the Kutná Hora Hymn Book – which is now, like the Smíšek Gradual, kept in the Austrian National Library.³⁵ In terms of the wealth of decoration, the manuscript is almost comparable to the Smíšek Gradual. The hymnbook dates back to the 1490s, certainly before the death of the illustrator Matthew in 1496, and it was commissioned for use in St James’ Church, the most important church in the town after St Barbara’s. The commissioner of the work, depicted with his family on fol. 116v, has not yet been identified. We find two figures with the initial S(anctus) on folio 38r of the Kutná Hora Hymn Book – a man wearing a blue hat is kissing a goat’s bottom, while another hatless man is pressing his mouth against a pig’s rear quarters [12]. Although we can find a large number of comic scenes with obscene, rectal humour in the Smíšek Gradual and the Kutná Hora Hymn Book, the choice of animals here – the goat and the pig – was not accidental. This relates them generally to the Schandbilder genre of mockery, which is closely linked to anti-Jewish iconography.³⁶

 Shachar (note 1), Pl. 41. See also Wiedl (note 1), pp. 353 – 354, on other pictures of Jews riding a goat.  Frank Matthias Kammel, Kunst in Erfurt 1300 – 1360, Berlin 2000, pp. 115 – 159, esp. pp. 129 and 132. Cf. Shachar (note 1), p. 33, who gave the bench a later dating. Unlike Kammel, Shachar doubted the simple identification of the fighters with the Ecclesia and the Synagogue.  Österreischische Nationalbibliothek, Mus. Hs. 15501. The literature was most recently summarized by Theisen (note 28).  More widely on the issue of kissing animals’ behinds in connection with anti-Jewish themes see Wiedl (note 1), p. 331, and Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: the Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1999, pp. 88 – 90. In one manuscript of the bible moralisée written and illustrated for the French king in the 1220s there is a picture of a Jew kissing a goat’s bottom, cf. ibidem, pp. 42– 43, fig. 26.

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Fig. 12: Man kissing the anus of a goat and pig, prior to 1496, illumination, Kutná Hora Prayer Book, ÖNB, Mus.Hs. 15501, fol. 38r. Photo: © Österreischisches Nationalbibliothek.

None of the illuminations from Matthew’s workshop unambiguously identify the figures as Jews – any identification is indirect and dependent on the wider context, which is also the case for the man on page 214 of the Smíšek Gradual, where the shape of the hat leaves open the possibility that it is not a pileus cornutus. Besides, during this period the typical hat no longer appeared as an identifying feature of Jews, and the prints by Israhel van Meckenem, which the illuminators often used as his templates, mostly did not present Jews with pointed hats. It would, therefore, appear that the pictures were perhaps even less likely to have been part of open anti-Jewish propaganda than in Lipnice or Kolín, even though, unlike other manuscripts, the two choir books were intended to be viewed by the public. The gradual and the hymn book were used by lay fraternities which sang the hymns in Utraquist churches, similarly as choirs of priests or monks did in Catholic churches. The antisemitic nature of the representations remained hidden rather than openly attacking the Jewish minority. This is evident by comparison with some public anti-Jewish depiction appearing around

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the turn of the sixteenth century in Germany (one case might be a panel with the Judensau which was publicly displayed on the facade of the apothecary in Kelheim until the end of World War II, and which openly referred to the expulsion of the Jews from Regensburg in 1519).³⁷ Nevertheless, the illuminations of the gradual and hymn book used and further developed anti-Jewish themes. Recurring elements appearing in them (the sow, grasping the tail, riding on a pig and a goat, a crooked hat) indicates that such imagery was well known in the Bohemian lands. On the other hand, there are important details missing which would give the images their original, openly anti-Jewish stance – most importantly, the images of Jews suckling from the animal’s teats. According to several surviving inscriptions,³⁸ this was understood to symbolize the connection of Jews with unclean animals, something that Judaism, at least in the view of medieval Christians, could not get rid of. By referring to the terminology of Aby Warburg, one can speak about the survival of the image form of the Judensau within latemedieval visuality.³⁹ Here the metamorphosis of the original theme masked and transformed the original meaning of the image, as had been the case for the much longer survival of visual forms of Greek and Roman antiquity – the Florentine ‘nymphs’, images of the constellations and the classical iconography of the Olympic gods. All of these survived in the medieval and renaissance periods in barely recognisable forms and transformations.⁴⁰ It seems that the image of the Judensau had survived in a similar way taking on different shapes and forms. While we can consider the depictions in choir books of Kutná Hora to be quite harmless, as they have lost all their exactness and close relations to Jews, a slightly later depiction in another Utraquist choir book is much more aggressive. One can find it in the Latin gradual of Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), an important Utraquist town in the Northern Bohemia. The Gradual commissioned for the lay, literati brotherhood of Leitmeritz in 1517 is notable for its rich decoration including the famous depiction of Jan Hus’ martyrdom on fol. 245v.⁴¹ As in the case

 Shachar (note 1), pp. 39 – 40. – Rusam (note 2), pp. 22– 23.  This is shown by woodcuts from the mid-15th century, cf. Shachar (note 1), pp. 34– 35. – Petra Schöner, Judenbilder im Deutschen Einblattdruck der Renaissance: Ein Beitrag zur Imagologie, Baden-Baden 2002, pp. 193 – 203.  On this terminology, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, Pennsylvania 2017, pp. 197– 221.  Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles 1999, pp. 563 – 591, esp. pp. 563 – 565. – Idem, ‘A Lecture on Serpent Ritual’, Journal of the Warburg Institute II, 1939, No. 4, pp. 277– 292.  Barry Frederic Hunter Graham, The Litoměřice Gradual of 1517, Prague 1999. For more recent views and literature see catalogue entry by Viktor Kubík in Jan Klípa and Michaela Ottová (eds), Bez hranic. Umění v Krušnohoří mezi gotikou a renesancí, pp. 206 – 209, cat. no. II – 22.

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of the choir books of Kutná Hora, the gradual of the Leitmeritz too was illuminated in Prague workshops. The work finished around 1517 or perhaps even slightly later, in the early twenties, was probably led by the anonymous illuminator trained in the tradition of the Danube School (Donauschule) whose work counts among the best available in Bohemia during that era. However, this anonymous master cooperated with other illuminators on this commission, most notably with Janíček Zmilelý of Písek, another significant but at that time older master with important commissions who was himself probably trained by the above-mentioned illuminator Matthew. The image of the Judensau is hidden on fol. 176v containing the beginning of the chants sung during the Pentecost. The main initial S(piritus) shows the depiction of the Pentecost itself; the typological parallels from the Old Testament are depicted at the margins: God giving Moses tables of law and the sacrifice of Elijah – the prophet competing with the priests of Baal asked God to accept his sacrifice, which was miraculously burned by the fire falling from the sky. The rest of the border is filled by rich vegetation consisting of pease plants adorned by husks and flowers. Among the sprouts, naked babies are playing. Moreover, there are also images of a man accompanied by a woman and of a sow surrounded by small piglets [13]. A close observation of this motif reveals that there is a little human figure hidden among the piglets. The figure is raising its hands towards sow’s belly and sucking its teats. Undoubtedly, this is a depiction of a Jew demonstrating close ties between pigs and the Jewish minority; in other words, it is another overlooked derivation of the Judensau iconography.⁴² The anti-Jewish theme is seemingly linked to typological parallels of the central scene, images of Jewish prophets Moses and Elihaj, and the border decoration with the playing children – these can naturally be understood as numerous offspring of a man and a woman in the upper part of the border, children of men, so they form a natural parallel of the piglets around the sow. The Jew hiding under its teats represents, therefore, the opposite of the righteous of the Old Testament – Moses and Elijah. The picture shows that the descendants of Jews who have not accepted the Christian teaching that fulfilled the Old Testament are closer to pigs than to humans.

 Cf. Heinrich Ankert, ‘Die Judensau in Letmeritz‘, Beiträge zur Heimatkunde des Elbetales 1, 1939, pp. 76 – 77. The article published by the nationalist press during World War II is not widely known in the international literature and, as far as I know, not even in Czech literature concerning the gradual although it is quoted in Oldřich Kotyza, Jan Smetana and Jindřich Tomas (eds), Dějiny města Litoměřic, Litoměřice 1997, pp. 163 – 164. I would like to thank to Daniel Polakovič for pointing me to Ankert’s article and thus the depiction itself.

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Fig. 13: Judensau, around 1517, illumination, Latin Gradual of Leitmeritz literati, State Regional Archives Litoměřice, IV C 1, fol. 176v. Photo: State Regional Archives Litoměřice.

In Leitmeritz, the relation between Jews and Christians was a hot issue, as there was a considerable Jewish minority living in the city. In 1496 a Jewish school is mentioned and we also know that the Jews enjoyed some form of self-government while being only obliged to pay special taxes used to fund wars against the Turks.⁴³ Moreover, it seems that there were already tensions between the Jewish minority and the Christian, mostly Utraquist, majority of the  Kotyza, Smetana and Tomas (note 42).

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city. In 1529 the officers of the kingdom warned the city burgomaster and the city council not to tolerate any oppression and persecution of the local Jews. This, unfortunately, did not reduce the tensions. In 1541 the city gained the support of the autumn diet of the kingdom for its plan to evict Jews from Leitmeritz and already on the 11th of November the Jewish community was ‘beaten out’, which denotes nothing other than a pogrom.⁴⁴ The Jews disappeared from Leitmeritz’s sources and in 1546 the city gained from the king a ‘privilege’ that it was no longer obliged to tolerate the Jews to dwell in it. Therefore, the image of the Judensau is testimony to the problematic relationship of the Leitmeritz Utraquists and their Jewish neighbours. In this case, the image hidden in the book clearly disseminated and stimulated popular anti-Jewish sentiment among the elites of the city, who participated in the religious singing of the literati brotherhood.⁴⁵ Learned members of the brotherhood knew probably very well, whom the small figure hidden among the piglets should signify. The image vilified the problematic Jewish ‘enemy’ and supported the anti-Jewish cause shared by the important burghers. The image helped to incite the emotions, which culminated in the pogrom and the eviction of the Jews from the city. While the form of Leitmeritz Judensau is quite uncommon – there is just a single Jew lying under the sow, who is accompanied by numerous piglets, and this differs from other depictions of this time collected by Shachar or Rusam – it still contains all the main elements of the original concept, namely the act of sucking sow’s teats. The undisputed creativity in rendering the anti-Jewish motive is in some aspects reminiscent of the choir books of Kutná Hora. Moreover, there exists even a direct connection between these works of art. The overall design of the margins with pease plants and naked babies appears already in the Gradual of Jungbunzlau (Mladá Boleslav) decorated before 1505 by Prague illuminator Janíček Zmilelý of Písek.⁴⁶ Even the style of the decoration of the page with Pentecost is quite similar to the best works of Janíček Zmilelý and he is indeed probably the person standing behind the images on this page. This must have been late work of Janíček, whose major works appeared in the

 Ibidem, p. 164.  The social status of the literati is demonstrated by the full-page depiction of the martyrdom of Jan Hus on fol. 244v, which was commissioned by the important politician Wenceslaus (Václav) of Řepnice. He was the leading representative of towns in the diet of Bohemia as well as in negotiations with the king residing in Hungarian Buda. In 1515 – 1517 he held the office of the Leitmeritz burgomaster, see also Josef Krása, ‘Knižní malířství’, in Pozdně gotické umění v Čechách 1471 – 1526, Prague 1978, pp. 387– 457, esp. pp. 442– 445.  Mladá Boleslav, Muzeum Mladoboleslavska, inv. č. 21691, fol. 207r.

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first decade of the sixteenth century.⁴⁷ However, Janíček was already active in the nineties when he collaborated with the illuminator Matthew on the decoration of the above-mentioned choir books of Kutná Hora. Janíček often used prints and illustrations from printed books for his designs. Some of these were already used in the decoration of the choir books from Kutná Hora. This is another indication that among models circulating in Matthew’s workshop, some treatment of the Judensau theme might have been available. It seems that late medieval artists in Bohemia used the original concept in a quite creative way to serve different purposes bringing an undisputable anti-Jewish position back and forth as was suitable for the given task. This is also demonstrated by my final example from the Bohemian lands dating from the later renaissance.

Telč Chateau’s dance-hall ceiling The Golden Hall in Telč was built during extensive reconstruction work carried out by Zacharias of Hradec. Starting in 1550, these adaptations gradually transformed the former medieval castle into a lavishly furnished renaissance residence.⁴⁸ The hall, evidently designed for large social gatherings, was the largest representative room of the chateau. The original coffered ceiling has been preserved in this room and is dated by an inscription on one of the coffers to 1561. Its decoration represents one of the most outstanding examples of renaissance carving in the Bohemian lands.⁴⁹ It is adorned by thirty reliefs with various motifs, some of them based on models from the contemporary prints, others probably distinctive and inventive work of the unknown sculptors. The wood-

 On his person and works see most recently Milada Studničková, ‘Illuminators and system of illuminating of Codex of Jena’, in Marta Vaculínová (ed), The Jena Codex. Commentary, Prague 2009, pp. 57– 68, particularly in connection with the choir books of Kutná Hora cf. Milada Studničková, ‘Obrazová složka staročeského zpracování Tabulí‘, in Milada Homolková – Michal Dragoun (eds), Tabule staré a nové barvy Mikuláše z Drážďan ve staročeském překladu, Prague 2016, pp. 59 – 84. These article points to extensive earlier literature.  The most recent basic overview is provided by Zdeňka Míchalová, ‘Telč’, in Michal Konečný (ed), Na věčnou paměť, pro slávu a vážnost, Kroměříž 2017, pp. 553 – 581. See also Vlasta Kratinová, Bohumil Samek and Miloš Stehlík, Telč: Historické město jižní Moravy, Prague 1992.  On its condition and restoration, cf. Michal Tomek, Průzkum renesančního kasetového stropu ve Zlatém sále st. zámku v Telči (unpublished typescript available in the library of the National Heritage Institute in Telč), Prague 1978. – Miroslava Nováková Skalická, ‘Oprava stropu ve Zlatém sále Státního zámku v Telči’, Zprávy památkové péče XLV, 1985, pp. 460 – 464. Previous reconstructions, in particular the one from 1904, affected the character of the ceiling but, apart from some minor alterations, the basic framework is original.

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carvings contain mythological subjects (i. e. Ganymede, Daphne, Apollo and Bacchus), scenes of an emblematic and allegorical character inspired by the literature and prints of the time (in particular Emblemata Libellus by Andrea Alciato⁵⁰ but also by separate sheets such as Maerten van Heemskerck’s depiction of Charity),⁵¹ and finally exotic and fanciful figures (e. g. Moors and various hybrid creatures).⁵² The relief related to our topic counts among these whose templates are not known and it could be classified in the category of ‘exotic’ and ‘contemporary’. There is a figure of a bearded man wearing a hat, black coat and golden stockings, sitting on some sort of flying sow [14] – the body of the animal extends at the back into a long tail with peacock feathers at the place, where the hind legs should have been. Nevertheless, the sex of the animal is clear from its four teats and the rider is identified by a golden ring on his coat, a discriminatory mark that the Jewish minority was often required to wear in the sixteenth century. As in other similar depictions, the rider is holding the pig’s tail in his right hand (given the fact that there is another tail with the feathers, the sow’s original tail recognizable by golden hair sticks out rather illogically from the central part of the animal’s body). The Jew is holding a broken jug in his left hand. Unlike the other reliefs in the hall, this one is surrounded by an explanatory German inscription: ‘Veitl, a Jew, an assayer of precious stones. Here he is riding on a sow. He is sixty years old.’ ⁵³ The Telč relief is another transformation to the Judensau motif. Again, it combines the usual elements: the Jew, the sow, and a rider clutching the animal’s tail. On the other hand, other characteristics emerge from the context of the representation, in particular, the peculiar shape of the sow with its hind legs transformed into the aforementioned tail adorned by peacock feathers, and the pair of wings which are slightly reminiscent of the second pair of ears. Several more figures on the reliefs of the coffered ceiling are in some way linked to the idea of flying – e. g. Moors are sitting on and simultaneously  Andrea Alciato, Emblemata, Lugdunum 1550 (Macé Bonhomme and Guillaume Rouille), accessible at https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/books.php?id=A50a, 28. 3. 2020.  Ilja M. Veldman (ed), New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450 – 1700 II, Maarten van Heemskerck, Amsterdam 1993 – 1994, pp. 118 and 121, cat. no. 428.  The iconography of the reliefs was most recently studied by Šárka Brychtová, Ikonografický program kazetového stropu ve Zlatém sále Státního zámku v Telči (MA thesis), Ústav pro dějiny umění FFUK, Prague 2016, where she helpfully provides a number of print templates for these reliefs. However, her work contains mistakes and statements which are difficult to prove. I have tried to correct this here.  ‘Veitl · iud · ein · probirer · der · edelgestein · Da · reidt · er · auf · eine · saw · herein · Seines · Alters 60 · Jar · ’ I am indebted to Jan Salava for pointing me to this depiction.

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Fig. 14: The Jew Veitl riding a sow, 1561, wooden relief, Telč, Golden Hall. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

fighting with a flying fish, an eagle is carrying Ganymede, while Charity is sitting on a bird, as in Heemskerck’s engraving. Even Death and Cupid are shooting their arrows from a base made of clouds [15]. The blue background is also in keeping with the overall representation of the sky. The masquerade dance of a variety of ‘celestial’ beings was meant to be an entertaining parallel to the dances in the hall. We can see the hall was used for dancing by the presence of the rostrum for the musicians. Although the rostrum was decorated later and could have been of later origin, the original carved half-figure trumpeters peering out from the ceiling on the west wing of the hall, opposite the rostrum, confirm that the room was designed as a dance-hall from the beginning.

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Fig. 15: Love and Death, 1561, wooden relief, Telč, Golden Hall. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

But what place does a Jewish man have amongst this odd assortment? At first sight, the depictions do not form any system of critical, hate-filled anti-Jewish propaganda, which in any case would not have suited the iconography of a dance-hall. Instead, the allegorical scenes were there to entertain visitors and ball-goers. The woodcarvers mainly used emblems from Alciato’s popular handbook, which they took from a Lyon edition published 1550 by Guillaume Rouille and Macé Bonhomme. However, there is a question mark over how much of Alciato’s scholarly speculation would have been comprehensible to visitors. For example, the figure of Triton beside the trumpeters, copied more or less faithfully from the Lyon edition, was by Alciato’s overly complicated interpretation meant

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to symbolize how the acts of outstanding men are followed by glory and worldwide appreciation.⁵⁴ On the other hand, the meanings of some other images are not so difficult to decipher. For example, Alciato’s allegorical story of Cupid and Death, and the arrows they exchanged by mistake must have been to some extent comprehensible even for those unfamiliar with the story. The similarity of chance and destiny in love and death, which was depicted allegorically with the firing of arrows, was a common cultural image.⁵⁵ An important part of the general theme consists of subtle erotic undertones and thus the reliefs are mostly arranged alternately between male and female figures (the males are slightly in the majority). Some of the reliefs even relate directly to forms of love – Apollo and Daphne, as well as Boreas who kidnapped Orithyia, both represent favourite renaissance theme of strong men overpowering women, although the second example appeared in visual art much less frequently (in Telč, it may have been specifically chosen because of its celestial character).⁵⁶ It would seem that a Jewish man on a sow did not belong amongst this group, but there is at least one other character carved on the ceiling who refers to contemporary times rather than mythology: a man in a golden cloak with a kind of tiara on his head. He is tortured by two devils and appears to have come straight from a scene of the Last Judgment and the subsequent hellish punishments [16]. The key to understanding what this scene is meant to represent is the open book with the inscription: ‘Man, give an account of how you spent your life.’ ⁵⁷ This probably refers to Luther’s teachings on the nature of Christ, which gave his Catholic polemicists sleepless nights. In his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, Martin Luther wrote: ‘Therefore, if Christ would appear to you in the likeness of an angry judge or lawgiver, and he would require an account of how you spent your life, then be sure that this is not Christ, but a raging fiend.’ ⁵⁸ As

 Alciato (note 50), cit. p. 144: ‘Neptuni tubicen, cuius pars ultima cetum, / Aequoreum facies indicat esse Deum: / Serpentis medio Triton comprenditur orbe, /Qui caudam inserto mordicus ore tenet. / Fama viros animo insignes, praeclaraque gesta / Prosequitur: toto mandat & orbe legi.’  The idea must have emerged from medieval roots, cf. Harald Wolter von dem Knesebeck, Bilder für wirt, wirtin und gast. Studien zur profanen Wandmalerei von 1200 bis 1500 (habilitation thesis), Universität Kassel, Kassel 2005, pp. 137– 139.  Svetlana L. Alpers, ‘Manner and Meaning in some Rubens Mythologies’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XXX, 1967, pp. 272– 295, cit. p. 289.  ‘Me(n)sch gib/ rechenschaft/ wie du dein/ leben hast zü/ bracht.’  Martin Luther, Der Erste Teil der Buecher uber etliche Epistel der Aposteln, Wittemberg 1551 (Hans Lufft), f. 271r: ‘Was Christus rechtes Bilde sey: Darumb wen dir einfelt Christus sey ein Richter oder Gesetzlerer der mit der zuerne von dir rechenschaff fordern werder wie du dein leben zugebracht habest, So halts fur gewis und war das er nicht Christus sondern der leidige wuetende Teufel sey.’

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Fig. 16: Man tormented by devils (Martin Luther?), 1561, wooden relief, Telč, Golden Hall. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

a result of this statement, Roman Catholics accused Luther of refuting the existence of the Last Judgment as described in the Bible, which was to prove that all of the Wittenberg reformer’s ideas were nothing else than dangerous heresy.⁵⁹

 There was a large number of anti-Lutheran polemicists referring to this interpretation at the end of the 16th century, e. g. the Jesuit Sigmund Ernhofer in a polemic with the Protestant theologian Jakob Heerbrand, cf. Sigmund Ernhofer, Danck und Abdanck Welchen Jacob Heerebrandt durch dreyerley Schreiben …, Gräz 1589 (Georg Widmanstetter), fol. 124r and the Counter-Reformation publicist Caspar Schoppe, working in the service of Emperor Ferdinand II, cf. Caspar Schoppe, Herren Christoffen von Ungerßdorff Christliche Gratulation, s.l. 1610, p. 46.

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However, the scene on the coffer of the Golden Hall is clearly not presenting the temptation of the devil as Luther described (sacrilegiously in the eyes of the Catholics). It is more about punishment in the afterlife – the man is literally imprisoned, stuck in the ground, up to his waist and entirely at the mercy of the two devils. While one of them is showing him the book with the text, the other is trying to blow into his ear with large bellows, symbolizing the man’s unwillingness to listen to right arguments. Although earlier literature identified the figure with the tiara as a pope or an ecclesiastical dignitary, the shape of the tiara does not correspond in its details to the usual symbol of the papal power – instead of crowns, there are two ribbons decorated with precious stones wrapped around the tiara. Moreover, the man’s clothes are also unlike those of a pope – the jerkin fastened by a row of golden loops. The man looks more like a charlatan than a pope. Therefore, he is more likely to represent a pagan or heresiarch, who was sometimes depicted with a false tiara. Although the man’s physiognomy does not particularly resemble Luther’s,⁶⁰ it is sarcastically alluding to him – he who denies retribution for earthly sins will be subjected to posthumous punishments. At least, this was in accordance with Catholic teachings, to which Zacharias of Hradec, the owner of the chateau, himself adhered.⁶¹ Therefore, it is also possible to read the scene of the Jewish man on the sow within the context of the time when the dance-hall was built. The seemingly nonJewish, rather German name of Veitl is probably a corruption of the more common Yiddish name Feit or Fajt, which appears as Feidel or Fedel in non-Jewish sources and anti-Jewish depictions of Jews, for example, in the anonymous broadsheet Der Juden zukünfftiger Messias groẞ from 1563, showing a procession of Jewish crooks going to hell.⁶² The Jewish profession of ‘assayer of precious

 Cf. Anna Pawlak, ‘Effigies Lutheri, Martin Luther im Bilderstreit der Konfessionen’, in Zaal Andronikashvili, Giorgi Maisuradze, Matthias Schwartz et al., Kulturheros. Genealogien, Konstellationen, Praktiken, Berlin 2017, pp. 411– 443.  Just a few years later, Zacharias of Hradec had the burial chapel in Telč furnished at great cost, which included an altarpiece, the central picture of which was none other than the Last Judgment including the Holy Trinity and the angel Michael with scales weighing sins, cf. Ondřej Jakubec and Pavel Waisser, ‘Mauzoleum Zachariáše z Hradce na zámku v Telči a jeho výzdoba v kontextu renesančních zámeckých kaplí’, Opuscula Historiae Artium LXIV, 2015, pp. 2– 31. On the spread of Lutheranism on Zacharias’ estate, cf. Zdeňka Míchalová, ‘Odraz reformace v obrazových pramenech vrchnostenských měst Zachariáše z Hradce’, in Olga Fejtová, Václav Ledvinka and Jiří Pešek (eds), Město v převratech konfesionalizace v 15. až 18. století, Prague 2014, pp. 573 – 589 (Documenta Pragensia XXXIII).  Shachar (note 1), pp. 55 – 56. – Schöner (note 38), pp. 251– 256. The central figure is the ‘Messiah’ or the devil riding a sow, which is being followed by Jews, amongst whom we find the frau-

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stones’ also refers more to the local and historical context, as it is not connected with the original theme of the Judensau. We do know that assaying was one of the professions in which Jews were involved – for example, it appears in the list of occupations of Prague Jews which was ascertained from Ferdinand I’s census of 1545.⁶³ The practice of assaying in the true meaning of the word was also associated with another more dubious skill – alchemy.⁶⁴ These activities were generally linked to various types of fraud, which understandably fitted in well with the generally negative view of Jews. This is probably indicated by the broken jug in the man’s left hand, the meaning of which is to show that Jewish ‘assaying’ is of no value, that the man is just a swindler. Since the inscription has the exact age of the Jewish man, it might be an allusion to a specific person or event. For example, there was a Jew named Feytl living in the town of Telč itself. He was running a shop in a house ‘under the meat stalls’ (no. 112) and in 1565 he sold this house for 112 threescore groschen to buy a new, better house in the city (no. 26) for 205 threescore groschen.⁶⁵ He died in 1571 leaving two adult sons, Solomon and Isaac, which means that in 1561 when the ceiling of the dance-hall was created, he could have been around sixty years old. Moreover, the sale and purchase of the new house indicate that Feytl must have been economically successful, which could incite hatred or various gossip. On the other hand, as far as I am aware of, we do not know anything about Feytl’s possible ‘assaying’ business. All we know about him is that he was a merchant and even his house did not count among the most expensive Telč houses, although it belonged among the better houses. It is thus difficult to identify him unequivocally with the rider on the sow. Considering the fact that the dance-hall was mostly used to host balls for nobles more or less equal to the

dulent physician ‘Josef’ and another, ‘Rabbi Feydel’, who speaks of the falsification of charters and seals. Feydel’s speech is further confirmed by another two Jews ‘Juncker Siegeldieb’ and ‘Mannus Jud’.  Tobias Jakobovits, ‘Die jüdischen Zünfte in Prag’, Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der Čechoslovakischen Republik VIII, 1936, pp. 57– 146, cit. p. 126. Assayers here appear under the Czech term ‘probyr’.  The alchemist David Herman, working in the Saxon court in the 1660s, was described as ‘der geheime Probierer’, cf. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Court Culture in Dresden: From Renaissance to Baroque, Houndmills and New York 2002, p. 117.  Josef Rampula, Domy v Telči, Telč 1999, p. 119. – Miloš Drdácký, André Loits, Josef Rampula et al. (2013), Proměny telčských domů, Telč 2013, p. 131. On the earliest Jews of Telč see Iva Steinová and Daniel Polakovič, ‘Nejstarší náhrobky na starém hřbitově v Telči‘, in Židé a Morava XVIII: kniha statí ze stejnojmenné konference konané v Muzeu Kroměřížska dne 9. 11. 2011, Kroměříž 2012, pp. 7– 29. I would like to thank to Daniel Polakovič for pointing me to the sources refering to Feytl’s live.

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owner of the castle it would seem strange that Zacharias would have chosen his own successful subject to make an anti-Jewish joke. One needs to accept that there are other possibilities – there might have been some other Jewish ‘assayer’ named ‘Veitl’ operating in Bohemia or Moravia in the mid-sixteenth century, or the panel could have been a reference to some story popular at the time relating to Jewish swindlers, as in the broadsheet Der Juden zukünfftiger Messias groẞ. Although the exact meaning of the Telč relief with the Jew riding a sow remains open, it is probable that as in the case of the man with the devils holding him to account for how he spent his life, it was meant as a contemporary sarcastic joke.⁶⁶ On the other hand, that does not mean that the depiction was devoid of anti-Jewish stance. Quite the contrary. The stance of Zacharias of Hradec towards Jews was probably not without shadows – it seems that after the death of merchant Feytl, he forced the sons to sell their father’s property to a Christian effectively forcing them out of the town.⁶⁷ Nevertheless, within a year of the death of Zacharias in 1589 there is mentioned another Jewish family living in Telč. It is difficult to find when they settled there and it could have already happened during the life of Zacharias.⁶⁸ We simply do not know how aggressively Zacharias positioned himself against Jews. Without knowing the full background, it is difficult to justify his motivations to include an image of a Jew riding on a sow in the ceiling. Nevertheless, it must be noted that the scenes of the man burning in hell (Luther) and the Jew on the sow are seemingly not in contradiction to the playful ballroom nature of the other reliefs. The game of deciphering them must have had humorous albeit moralistic overtones as elsewhere in the hall. This applies to some of Alciato’s parables, such as the aforementioned story relating to the image of Death and Cupid, where Love and Death mistakenly confuse their arrows, with the result that an old man with one foot in the grave falls head over heels in love, while a young man destined for love suddenly perishes.⁶⁹ A

 On the link to humour and the development of the Judensau iconography in connection with the ‘secularization’ of the motif, cf. Wiedl (note 1), pp. 341– 343.  Feytl’s son Solomon ‘sold the house on the order of his majesty, the lord’. The brothers moved to Bechyně and even in 1582 they still did not receive all the money for the property they had sold, see Rampula (note 65), p. 119 – Drdácký, Loits, Rampula (note 65), p. 131.  Rampula (note 65), p. 143. – Drdácký, Loits, Rampula (note 65), p. 155. – Steinová, Polakovič (note 65), pp. 7– 9.  The story typically ends with the wish that the narrator will fall in love and the old man will die, Alciato (note 50), cit. p. 169: ‘Errabat socio Mors iuncta Cupidine. secum / Mors pharetras, parvus tela gerebat Amor. / Divertêre simul, simul una & nocte cubarunt, / Caecus Amor, Mors hoc tempore caeca fuit. / Alter enim alterius malè provida spicula sumpsit: / Mors aurata, tenet ossea tela puer. / Debuit inde senex qui nunc / Acheronticus esse: / Ecce amat, & capiti florea

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similar game combining two opposites can be seen in another of Alciato’s emblems appearing in Telč. It shows a man borne aloft by small wings on one of his hands, while a boulder hanging from his other hand drags him down to earth. This parable on poverty, which prevents many talented people from reaching the heights to which they were born, was very popular in early-modern-age society, as is for example attested by various Alba amicorum. Originally, in Alciato, the stone symbolized poverty but in some renditions the image underwent several inventive reinterpretations which changed its meaning. As a result, one text says that the man is drawn to the earth by envy, while elsewhere the man is supposedly hindered by the pleasures of the world.⁷⁰ Similar humorous ambiguity can be seen in the example of the horned satyr with large front teeth situated in the centre of the hall. The creature displays in his costume several heraldic figures of the lords of Hradec – a rose, an anchor and a crowned ‘M’. The relief thus connects the symbols representing the owner of the chateau with a monster known for its carefree playful sexuality.

The transformations and survival of one motif The Telč relief of the Jewish man shows how the image of the Judensau gradually became a natural part of the visual culture of the period. It underwent further transformations within this framework which somehow diluted its original meaning. While the first images constructed an anti-Jewish narrative in a complex manner, closely linking Jews with pigs, which immediately demonstrated disgust for Judaism on several levels – feeding pigs, suckling on pigs, interest in their faeces – later images have gradually lost this focus. Already during its earliest period, the image type broke free from a narrowly focused message probably meant to link Jews with the cardinal sins. It became part of the usual catalogue of monsters and hybrids, the depiction of which concentrated mostly on the marginal and liminal zones of medieval buildings. The two oldest Bohemian examples from Kolín and Lipnice demonstrate this process. In the next development, we encounter different metamorphoses and transformations of the basic subject. Although the image of the sow remained, the

serta parat. / Ast ego mutato quia Amor me perculit arcu. / Deficio: iniiciunt & mihi fata manum. / Parce puer, Mors signa tenens victricia parce. /Fac ego amem: subeat fac Acheronta senex.’  The figure is drawn down by envy in Stammbuch of Daniel Schelling, Weimar, Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, shelfmark Stb. 122, f. 128v (entry dated to 1621), and by pleasures in Jakob van der Heyden, Speculum Cornelianum, Strassburg 1618, s.p. (first published in Strasbourg as Pugillus Facctiarum Iconographicarum in 1608).

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suckling Jews disappear and the immediate link to Jews as such became, at least in some depictions, even more distant. A representative example consists of the Kutná Hora choir books, where the traces of a link between pigs and Jews can still be seen in the tournament scenes, analogous to medieval German anti-Jewish images, where the connection between the images and Jews is detectable although rather obscure. At the time when these illuminations were painted, the image of riding on a sow (as well as riding backwards on other animals) became part of the Schandbilder known mainly from German-speaking areas. In addition to the aforementioned charter against Dietrich Klitzing, in Lutheran anti-papal propaganda there is an image printed in 1545 of the pope riding a sow, holding smoking excrement in his right hand to reward the pig for its services.⁷¹ However, the connection between sows and Jews was not forgotten. Somewhere, the old topic was reproduced with all its drastic content and it was openly connected to contemporary affairs of the era – this is the case of the Kelheim relief which was related to the evictions of Jews from Regensburg or the case of the lost Frankfurt painting associated with the blood libel legend about Simon of Trent. In Bohemia, an example is the depiction in the Latin gradual of the Leitmeritz Utraquist from 1517. The image is in close relation to the political stance of the city representatives oriented towards the eviction of Jews from Leitmeritz. In the same period, different derivations of the Judensau existed that presented Jews riding on sows. Unconventional variations also appeared, such as those in Aarschot in Belgium, where a Jewish man is riding backwards on a kind of hybrid animal, grasping its tail, as is the case with those riding sows. The depiction of the ‘assayer Veitl’ on a flying pig from the chateau in Telč certainly belongs among these examples. Together with the Kutná Hora choir books, this image confirms the striking vitality in the theme of the Judensau, which also had consequences for the visuality of the Early Modern Age. This is evidenced by the depictions presented by Isaiah Shachar at the end of his work. These again show Jews riding on sows, often identified by stereotypical physiognomy, which on the other hand did not play such an important role in medieval images – perhaps because clothing itself could be used to identify Jews. The link to suckling has been lost and even the characteristic teats of the sow disappeared in some of the images.⁷² Only the association with an unclean animal has remained the most vital element of the surviving cultural stereotype.  Shachar (note 1), pp. 56 – 57. It is a double page, the pope on a pig accompanied by an image of the famous monster with a donkey’s head, ‘Papst-Esel’, cf. Eugen Holländer, Wunder, Wundergeburt und Wundergestalt in Einblattdrucken des fünfzehnten bis achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1921, pp. 322– 323.  Shachar (note 1), pp. 62– 64.

Daniel Véri

Imagining Ritual Murder: Social Knowledge in the Making Summary: This study aims to show the eminent role of the imagination and its materialized forms in the creation of long lasting ‘knowledge’ of ‘Jewish ritual murder’. The two examples examined here belong to the cultural history of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel (1882– 1883), which has had a long-lasting effect in Hungary. Both case studies, albeit different regarding their genre and their primary audience, attest to the significance of cultural products in the creation, dissemination and survival of antisemitic prejudices. Paintings depicting the imagined ritual murder were primarily intended for the politically active urban bourgeoisie, whereas the genre of folk songs appeared as a predominantly rural phenomenon; yet on many occasions both the actors involved and the cultural products created transcended social boundaries. The songs and the images created a tangible materiality for the alleged ritual murder; this perceived reality was crucial for the embedding of the blood libel legend into the common consciousness and the creation of a ‘solid’ knowledge of it; this largely passive knowledge was activated decades later, in the case of the blood libel accusations, against survivors of the Holocaust. Keywords: antisemitism, blood libel, ritual murder accusation, knowledge production, Tiszaeszlár This study aims to show the eminent role of imagination and its materialized forms in the creation of long lasting ‘knowledge’ of ‘Jewish ritual murder’. The two examples examined here – paintings and folk songs – belong to the rich cultural history of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel, an accusation and trial that occurred in Hungary in 1882– 1883, which is having a long-lasting political, social and cultural effect. Both case studies, albeit different regarding their genre and their primary audience, attest to the significance of cultural products in the creation, dissemination and survival of antisemitic prejudices. Paintings depicting the imagined ritual murder were primarily intended for the politically active urban bourgeoisie, whereas the genre of folk songs appeared as a predominantly rural phenomenon. Nonetheless, the separation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in this respect is of limited validity, as on many occasions both the actors involved and the cultural products created transcended social boundaries. The two case studies should therefore be viewed as two facets of the same phenomenon: antisemitic cultural production. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-003

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Not only the images but the imagery of the songs was also highly visual. Although products of imagination, the songs as well as the images created a tangible materiality for the alleged ritual murder. It was this perceived reality that was crucial for the embedding of the blood libel legend into common consciousness and the creation of a ‘solid’ knowledge of it. Moreover, it was this largely passive knowledge that was activated decades later, in the case of blood libel accusations against survivors of the Holocaust.

The Tiszaeszlár blood libel: a cultural history The end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the renaissance of blood libel accusations, many of which even reached the judicial system.¹ The Tiszaeszlár case occurred in the multi-ethnic setting of the AustroHungarian monarchy, yet the trial itself received an even wider – and extremely vivid – international press coverage. Furthermore, the case coincided with the birth of political antisemitism as well as the establishment of its international networks, which alleviated the quick dissemination of news about the affair and ‘knowledge’ about ‘Jewish ritual murder’ in general. Already in 1882 – only months after the emergence of the case – an antisemitic Hungarian MP gave his speech in front of the alleged victim’s imaginary portrait at the first Internationaler Antijüdischer Kongress [International Anti-Jewish Congress] in Dresden. Subsequently, the painting was toured in Berlin, Hamburg and finally Budapest.² Following the disappearance of Eszter Solymosi, a young peasant girl from the village of Tiszaeszlár, Eastern Hungary in 1882, local Jews were accused of

 Russia/Georgia: Kutaisi, 1878 – 79; Hungary: Tiszaeszlár, 1882– 83; Germany: Xanten, 1891– 92; Austria/Czechia: Polná, 1899 – 1900; Germany/Poland: Konitz, 1900 – 01; Russia/Ukraine: Kiev, 1911– 13.). Cf. Hillel J. Kieval, ‘Blood Libels and Host Desecration Accusations’, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Blood_Li bels_and_Host_Desecration_Accusations, 10.12. 2019. I would like to thank Ágnes Fazakas for her valuable input in reviewing the manuscript of this study. For a more detailed examination of the antisemitic visual reception history of the case see Daniel Véri, ‘The Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel: Image and Propaganda’, in Mareike König and Oliver Schulz (eds), Antisemitismus im 19. Jahrhundert aus internationaler Perspektive / Nineteenth Century Anti-Semitism in International Perspective, Göttingen 2019, pp. 263 – 290. For a lengthier analysis of the folk songs in Hungarian see Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától az Egészséges Fejbőrig: a tiszaeszlári vérvád zenei szubkultúrái’, Múlt és Jövő XXVII, 2016, No. 1, pp. 81– 103.  For the detailed history of the painting see Véri, ‘The Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel’ (note 1), esp. pp. 265 – 272.

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ritual murder. At the end of the trial held in 1883 the defendants were cleared of the charges. From 1882 to this day the Tiszaeszlár affair has a two-fold – and remarkably rich – reception history.³ Those involved in the creation of cultural products relating to the case belong almost exclusively to two distinct groups: they were either Jews or antisemites. The case appears to be a key issue of identity for both groups. For Hungarian antisemites, Tiszaeszlár is a founding myth that developed through a number of stages into a complex phenomenon which could be interpreted as a pseudo-religious cult.⁴ On the other hand, for Hungarian artists of Jewish descent the case became a symbol of Jewish suffering and a historical example of antisemitism, through which the trauma of the Holocaust could be articulated.⁵ Interestingly enough, the antisemitic artistic reception history of the case is not by any means restricted to Hungary geographically: instead, it forms a transnational phenomenon, involving cultural products and further sources from a myriad of countries ranging from Russia to the United States. The same is true for the Jewish and philo-Semitic interpretations, with an apparent rise in the number of cultural products after the Holocaust.

Marketing the blood libel for the bourgeoisie The initial step in the establishment of an antisemitic visual tradition for the Tiszaeszlár blood libel case was the creation of an imaginary portrait, depicting the alleged victim, Eszter Solymosi. Although the painting is lost by now, the composition is well-known as it was immediately copied and popularized via  It includes multiple genres: literary works (poems, dramas, novels, an essay), artworks (paintings, drawings, caricatures, prints, a relief), music (polka, folk songs, rock songs, operas) and films as well as popular myths and folklore. See the author’s earlier publications, exploring the different genres. Antisemitic visual reception: Véri, ‘The Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel’ (note 1). Fine arts: Idem, ‘The Holocaust and the Arts: Paths and Crossroads’, in Edit Sasvári, Hedvig Turai and Sándor Hornyik (eds), Art in Hungary 1956 – 1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, London 2018, pp. 219 – 220. – Idem, ‘A halottak élén’ – Major János világa, Budapest 2013, pp. 14– 29. Antisemitic poetry: Idem, ‘Vérvád és zene: Erdélyi József versének kontextusa és recepciója, in Ádám Ignácz (ed), Populáris zene és államhatalom, Budapest 2017, pp. 268 – 291. Musical adaptations: Idem, ‘A tiszaeszlári vérvád zenei feldolgozásai: hagyományok, interpretációk, narratívák. Németh Hajnal: Hamis vallomás; Fischer Iván: A Vörös Tehén’, Múlt és Jövő XXV, 2014, No. 2, pp. 23 – 36.  The formation and development of the cult entailed the following elements: doctrine of the blood libel, existence of believers, true image of the ‘martyr’, depictions of her suffering and a lieu de mémoire: a location with a memorial day and related rituals. See Véri, ‘The Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel’ (note 1).  Véri, ‘The Holocaust and the Arts’ (note 3), pp. 219 – 220.

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an array of graphic derivatives [1]. The alleged authenticity of the portrait – which was in fact an amalgam of her sister’s facial features and the description in the missing person’s report – helped to establish the material reality of Eszter’s figure as the victim of a ritual murder. The portrait, providing a recognizable figure for the allegations to fall back on, had been of crucial importance, as it enabled emotional identification with the supposed victim. Two monumental paintings were created in connection with the case, both depicting the imagined murder scene. The first one – painted by Ernest Novak in Zagreb in 1882 – is directly related to the affair. The second painting – created a decade later – is merely based on the Tiszaeszlár case; it has been falsely attributed to Mihály Munkácsy, a celebrated Hungarian painter living in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. The two works share several common characteristics regarding their composition, function, usage and audience.⁶

From Zagreb to Hungary and Romania: the career of Novak’s blood libel painting The first painting – representing explicitly the ritual murder of Eszter Solymosi – was created before October 1882 in Zagreb, Croatia, at the time part of the Hungarian Kingdom. Croatian, Hungarian and Austrian press equally covered the affair; according to their reports, the Trieste-born painter was called – reflecting the multi-ethnic background of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy – either Ernest (Ernő in Hungarian) or Josip or Giuseppe Novak. He not only created a canvas, but as a capable businessman, sensing the public interest invested in the case, also started selling photographic reproductions of the painting. Local police however reacted quickly: they arrested him, and destroyed the photos found during a house search. Citizens who owned copies were also summoned by the police, but in the end the painter was released from preventive custody.⁷ There is no indication as to whether the painting survived the police investigation; therefore one can only hypothesise regarding the painter’s further in Véri, ‘The Tiszaeszlár Blood Libel’ (note 1), pp. 272– 282.  Pozor, 1882, No. 232, 9. 10., p. 3. – Das Vaterland XXIII, 1882, No. 279, 9. 10., p. 3 – 4. – Neuigkeits Welt Blatt IX, 1882, No. 233, 11. 10., p. 4. – Agramer Zeitung LVII, 1882, No. 235, 12. 10., p. 3. – Függetlenség III, 1882, 12. 10., pp. 1, 3. – Fővárosi Lapok XIX, 1882, No. 235, 13. 10., p. 1459. – Das Vaterland XXIII, 1882, No. 284, 14. 10., p. 5 (quotes the report of Agramer Zeitung). – Borsszem Jankó XV, 1882, No. 42 (770), 15. 10., p. 9. – Borsszem Jankó XV, 1882, No. 43 (771), 22. 10., p. 3. I would like to express my gratitude to Krunoslav Kamenov for sending me relevant sources (Pozor, Agramer Zeitung) and for helping my research in Zagreb in 2013.

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Fig. 1: Zoltán Csörgey, Eszter Solymosi, drawing made after Lajos Ábrányi’s painting (1882), in: Géza Ónody, Tißa-Eßlár in der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Budapest 1883. Photo: Daniel Véri.

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tentions with the work. Similar cases, however – such as the imaginary portrait of Eszter Solymosi as well as the pseudo-Munkácsy painting, which will shortly be examined – suggest that he might have intended to exhibit it for the benefit of an antisemitic – or simply scandal-hungry – audience, gaining a profit from the entrance fee. Unfortunately, to this day, neither the painting nor any of the photos has surfaced, while the archive of the Police Directorate of Zagreb does not hold the files of the affair.⁸ The painter himself is barely known; only a little information is available about him in the Fine Arts Archive of the Croatian Academy.⁹ He participated in exhibitions in Zagreb in 1881 and 1882, but after the affair there is no trace of him; according to a short biographic note his disappearance might be due to serving time in the Lepoglava prison – the accuracy of this information and its connection to the affair remains uncertain. The afterlife of the composition however is much better documented. On October 11, an MP showed a copy of the photo around at the Hungarian Parliament, while the next day an antisemitic daily newspaper published an article which included a detailed description of the work, mentioning the painter’s address and the possibility to order the photo by mail.¹⁰ The immediate influence of the photograph is attested by a drawing that appeared in two antisemitic satirical magazines, the Hungarian Füstölő and its German counterpart, the Rebach [2].¹¹ The draughtsman was the one who reproduced Eszter Solymosi’s imaginary

 According to the list of files from the period held at the Croatian State Archives: 1.1. 2020. Redarstveno ravnatelstvjo u Zagrebu. Vodič [Police Directorate in Zagreb. Guide] 1850/1890, 1915/ 1916.  Zagreb, Arhiv za likovne umjetnosti. Novak should not be confused with an Austrian painter from the period, Ernest Nowak. Thanks to the article published in Függetlenség, which calls the painter ‘Novák Ernő’ (Hungarian equivalent of Ernest) it is evident that Ernest Novak (usually mentioned as E. Novak in the archive) and Josip or Giuseppe Novak are the same person.  According to the article, the scene is set in the anteroom of the synagogue, with candles lit in the chandelier and the tablets of the Ten Commandments on the wall. Eszter lies naked on the table, with her face downwards, her legs are bound, her neck is cut and her blood is flowing into a bowl below. The ritual butcher is holding her head by the hair with his right hand, with the left one he pushes her back down, holding the bloody knife in between his teeth. An old Jew holds her legs straight, another one presses her waist onto the table. A Jewish woman is bringing an empty bowl in order to change it for the filled one. Around the table an old Jew in a ‘praying cloak’ and a rabbi in religious attire are praying, looking up with hands folded. Függetlenség (note 7).  Füstölő II, 1882, No. 12, 1. 11., pp. 4– 5. – Rebach I, 1882, No. 2, 1. 12., pp. 6 – 7. Reproduced without commentary by János Gyurgyák, A zsidókérdés Magyarországon, Budapest 2001, p. 341.

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Fig. 2: Zoltán Csörgey, The Ritual Murder of Eszter Solymosi (1882), Füstölő II, 1882, No. 1, 1. 11., p. 5. – Rebach I, 1882, No. 2, 1. 12., p. 7. Photo: Daniel Véri.

portrait as well: Zoltán Csörgey.¹² It is not a direct reproduction of Novak’s work or its photograph, which the artist might not even have seen; rather it is inspired by descriptions of the composition. Significantly, before the news about the Zagreb painting, no visualization was published about the imagined murder scene; merely the news about such a painting must have triggered the people’s – or in this case: the artist’s – imagination. The photographs ensured the long-time survival of the composition, especially in neighbouring Romania. The complete reception history cannot be explored here; it suffices to say that after a detailed lithographic version of rather good quality (1886) – intended presumably for the antisemitic bourgeoisie – a cruder, most probably woodcut version was also disseminated [3].¹³ The distribution of the latter can be envisioned within the context of local country fairs,

 The image on the right representing the blood libel is only signed with a monogram (Cs. Z.), the full name is written on the left drawing.  Thomas Gergely, ‘L’affaire de Tiszaeszlár: un procès de meurtre rituel dans la Hongrie dite libérale de 1882’, in Michèle Mat-Hasquin (ed), Proble`mes d’histoire du Christianisme XI, Bruxelles 1982, pp. 27– 61, fig. IV (I would like to thank Thomas Gergely for providing a scan of the illustration).

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Fig. 3: The Ritual Murder of Eszter Solymosi, Romanian woodcut, in: Thomas Gergely, ‘L’affaire de Tiszaeszlár: un procès de meurtre rituel dans la Hongrie dite libérale de 1882’, in Michèle Mat-Hasquin (ed), Proble`mes d’histoire du Christianisme XI, Brussels 1982, pp. 27 – 61, fig. IV.

where rural folk could acquire similar, cheap printed material, such as devotional prints as well as popular literature (pulp fiction and penny dreadfuls). Novak’s painting and its reception shows that the visualisation of a contemporary sensation, namely, a ritual murder accusation, could be potentially lucrative, yet in the context of the end of the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the distribution of such antisemitic representations had its legal limits.

The pseudo-Munkácsy blood libel painting on a European tour The second painting, the work of the anonymous ‘pseudo-Munkácsy’, was painted before 1896, most probably in 1893 – 1894 [4].¹⁴ Although the monumental  Although I was able to identify the probable author of the painting, due to lack of space and the complexity of the attribution, I can only address this issue in a separate, forthcoming paper.

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canvas (225 by 392 centimetres large), representing life-size figures, evidently depicts an imagined ritual murder scene, it is uncertain which libel it alludes to. The composition of the painting, however, as well as the history of the work, point towards the Tiszaeszlár affair.¹⁵ From the well-known blood libel trials of the period the high number of alleged perpetrators could suggest – besides Tiszaeszlár – Kutaisi (1878), but it is a rather unlikely candidate as the supposed victim was only a child. Furthermore, the gender of the victim depicted in the painting – a young, blond woman – excludes Xanten (1891), Konitz (1900), and Kiev (1911).¹⁶ The age of Anežka Hrůzová (1899, Polná, Hilsner affair, nineteen years old) could best suit the painting, were it not that the work predated the affair. All this leaves us with Tiszaeszlár, even if the female figure seems somewhat older than Eszter Solymosi (fourteen years old). In the end, the depicted scene is the result of antisemitic imagination;

Fig. 4: [Pseudo-Munkácsy], Ritual murder, before 1896, most probably 1893 – 1894, oil on canvas, 225 × 392 cm. Private collection. Photo: the owner.

 I would like to thank Zsófia Végvári’s help, who brought my attention to the painting in 2012 and generously shared the information she had about the work. In 2012 she had the opportunity to see the work in London together with Jeffrey Taylor and to perform a pigment analysis. According to her, the material would date the painting approximately to the 1880 – 1886 time period, sources however suggest a later execution. The current size of the canvas is given above, yet according to Végvári it is folded over the stretcher: originally it might have been ca. 8 centimetres larger.  For general information about the following affairs, see Kieval (note 1).

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one should not therefore expect any sort of ‘historical’ accuracy in the visualization of the alleged details of the case. In conclusion, the date of the painting supports its connection to Tiszaeszlár, while the composition – the plural number of perpetrators and the figure of the victim – also bears a close resemblance to the Hungarian blood libel case. There is a further aspect that ties the painting to Tiszaeszlár: its alleged attribution. When exhibited in Paris in 1896 it was claimed to be the work of a great Hungarian master – whose name was veiled in anonymity – and accordingly, the title was defined as Scène de meurtre rituel en Hongrie [Ritual murder scene in Hungary]. With a painting close to his style, this was a marketing scheme aimed to hint at the authorship of Mihály Munkácsy (1844 – 1900), a celebrated Hungarian-born painter living in Paris. In fact, the news of the exhibition reached him and following a visit he even protested against it.¹⁷ In 1898 the painting was exhibited in Brussels, hinting again at Munkácsy’s authorship, naming a minor Hungarian blood libel case as its theme – no doubt to reassure its supposed authorship – until the painter – or, due to his illness, more likely his wife – intervened.¹⁸ At some point the work might have also been exhibited in Vienna.¹⁹ Before the Western European tour, it had also been on display in Warsaw, its probable birthplace, with an attribution to Munkácsy, but the exhibition was banned by the authorities.²⁰ The painting was in Warsaw again before 1908, the year it was shown in St. Petersburg. Following a scandal, the work has been removed; on this occasion the owner attributed it to the famous Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki.²¹ Later it belonged to a Polish club, but after the club went bankrupt the painting was sold at auction and changed owners subsequently on a number of occasions. The painting surfaced in 1914 in St. Petersburg, attributed again to Munkácsy and causing great waves in the international press reaching even Munkácsy’s widow, who firmly denied the painter’s authorship again.²² Finally, after a century of silence, the work surfaced anew in 2013 in London, with the same dubious attribution.²³  Neue Freie Presse XXXIII, 1896, No. 11333, 12. 3., p. 1.  Le Vingtième Siècle IV, 1898, 18. 6., p. 1. The exhibition’s advertisement in L’Indépendance Belge did not name the author, only the title: Meurtre ritual. See L’Indépendance Belge LXIX, 1898, No. 168, 17. 6., p. 3. – Neue Freie Presse LI, 1914, No. 17819, 4. 4., pp. 7– 8.  La Croix XXXV, 1914, No. 9530, 9. 4., p. 1.  Az Est V, 1914, No. 92, 18. 4., p. 8.  L. Zlotnikov, ’Ritual’naya kartina’, Zemshchina, 1914, 18. 4., p. 2  A[leksandr] Stolypin, ‘Triumpf Mendelja Beilica’, Novoye Vremya XLVII, 1914, No. 13626, 17. 2., p. 4. I would like to thank Edit Berger for the transliteration of the article. Zlotnikov (note 21). I received the article and its translation, provided by the owner from Zsófia Végvári. The following newspapers quote Mrs Munkácsy’s letter in full: Pester Lloyd LXI, 1914, No. 80, 3. 4.,

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What can we learn from the history of the pseudo-Munkácsy painting? First and foremost, that the creation and circulation of antisemitic cultural products was a business venture, and potentially a lucrative one. The painting was not created out of the painter’s passion or for the personal amusement of a private collector. On the contrary, it was painted as an antisemitic attraction, to be toured all over Europe, and most probably to be sold in the end. The major marketing tool implemented to raise public interest in the work was false attribution. The theme of the painting was already scandalous, but the alleged authorship of a well-known painter such as Munkácsy must have attracted even more viewers. Yet the attribution could easily be adjusted according to local circumstances: when bringing the work from Warsaw to St. Petersburg, it was attributed to the great Polish painter, Siemiradzki. A time window was always available from the opening of the exhibition until the regular intervention of the authorities due to the depicted theme or the false attribution. The target audience was primarily the politically and culturally active urban bourgeoisie. Viewers could have included not only committed antisemites, but also – given the exotic yet scandalous topic, the almost pornographic nature of the depiction and the alleged attribution – an even larger audience. The choice of locations for the exhibitions is telling: in Paris, the painting was exhibited in an art gallery, while in St. Petersburg and in Brussels in the Passazh and in the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert respectively.²⁴ These two were prestigious, glass covered shopping arcades, having thus the potential to reach the main target audience – which could have included prospective buyers – the well-off bourgeoisie. Currently we do not know whether the owners attempted to reach broader social strata: photographs, postcards or graphic works reproducing the painting have not yet surfaced, but – based on the afterlife of similar paintings, such as Novak’s ritual murder scene and Eszter Solymosi’s portrait – it would not be surprising to find such material in the future. As was demonstrated in the case of Novak’s painting, works first marketed for the bourgeoisie could very well find their way to the rural population via easily reproducible cultural products based on the original work.

p. 10. – Világ V, 1914, No. 81, 4. 4., p. 8. – Neue Freie Presse (note 18). Since I was not able to locate the original article: Kievskaya Mysl, after February 17, before April 18, 1914, I am referring to a Hungarian article, which quotes it: Az Est (note 20).  András Földes, ‘Munkácsy Mihály meztelen nőt ölő zsidókat festett?’, index, http://index.hu/ kultur/2013/03/04/antiszemita_pornot_festett_munkacsy_mihaly/, 10.12. 2019. – Julia Michalska, ‘Was Hungarian Star Artist an Anti-Semite?’, The Art Newspaper XXII, 2013, No. 245 – April, p. 9.  Cabaret Artistique, Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert. See L’Indépendance Belge (note 18).

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Antisemitic traditions: image as evidence Upon their creation, these paintings and further derivative cultural products all became part of an antisemitic cultural tradition. Built upon rumours stemming from long-standing prejudices, aided in some cases by undeniable artistic skills, these materialized forms of imagination conveyed – at least for the believers, for committed antisemites – a narrative of reality. These cultural products were not locked into their own time: they lived on and provided supposedly ‘authentic’ proofs from the past, readily accessible in order to shape the present. Novak’s painting was already long gone when graphic works based on his composition were republished by a new generation of antisemites, who were keen on keeping their own subculture’s traditions alive. The lithograph was republished in 1923 in a nationalist Romanian newspaper, the Cuvântul Studenţesc [The Students’ Voice], while the drawing from 1882 was reprinted in a 1944 issue of Harc [The Fight], a Hungarian antisemitic newspaper.²⁵ These publications no longer belong to the immediate reception of the Tiszaeszlár blood libel case, but rather to the context of inter-war nationalism, anti-Jewish legislation and the Holocaust in general.

From folk songs to pogroms: rural antisemitism At first sight, folk songs occupy a radically different position from that of the paintings and graphic works examined above. First of all, their authors are assumed to be anonymous, as folk songs are believed to be born, not written. Instead of the urban bourgeoisie, their audience is supposed to be the rural population, and thought to be limited to them. Unlike visual works, folk songs are not usually thought to be tools of antisemitic propaganda, or to be pertaining to a business endeavour. The history of folk songs relating to the Tiszaeszlár blood libel questions the veracity of these assumptions. Some of the songs were in fact written by identifiable individuals, and circulated as antisemitic propaganda material. Moreover, not only the authors, but also members of the audience penetrate these perceived social boundaries.

 Vestul României. Ziar independent Românesc în Oradea-Mare I, 1923, No. 23, 24. 8., p. 3. – Radu Stern, ‘The Judapest Paradox’, in Marlies Enklaar, Zsófia Farkas and Beverly Jackson (eds), From Fauvism to Surrealism. Jewish Avant-Garde Artists from Hungary, Amsterdam 2017, pp. 38 – 51, esp. p. 43.

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Folk songs constitute a verbal genre, therefore their reception appears to be less manifest and thus more difficult to assess than that of the visual examples. Yet due to their resilience and adaptiveness, their natural ability to be handed down easily from generation to generation, they constitute an important source and basis of social knowledge. Consequently, these songs have a long standing connection to not only interpersonal but also collective violence. In fact, they constitute a crucial factor in shaping post-World War II anti-Jewish pogroms into the form of blood libels and hence proceeding according to certain violent patterns. To understand how these folk songs – as well as the antisemitic prejudices they carried – could survive for an extremely long period of time, one should look into the characteristics of the songs as well as the way they were bequeathed from generation to generation. Blood-libel related folk songs were an inseparable part of folk culture; as such, they were taught and learnt in a specific, ritualized way, in the informal setting of families and communities. They were repeated over and over again by a multitude of performers. Since they were not written down but rather memorized, changes appeared in the texts over time, resulting in different versions.

‘This Jew has got a big belly’: typology and characteristics of folk songs The textual versions to be examined here all follow the same melody and were collected by folklorists from the 1920s to the 1970s.²⁶ According to my philological reconstruction they are based upon an earlier Jew-mocking song, which featured a stereotypical, rural, economical portrayal of the Jews, without any allusion to ritual murder.²⁷ However, no examples of this version survived, because by the time folklorists started to collect folk songs, the original Jew-mocking song had already been modified and layered with references to the Tiszaeszlár case.

 Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 87– 95. The text and musical score of songs quoted henceforth are held at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, at the Folk Music Archive, dossier no. 2132– 23/0. All of the translations are by the author; the earlier study cited here and in the following contains the original, Hungarian texts. The songs are referenced in the footnotes by their individual inventory number.  Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 84– 88.

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Folk songs feature two major characteristics which set them apart from other blood libel related cultural products. On the one hand, in these folk songs the classical ritual murder accusation – the usage of a Christian person’s blood to make the Passover Matzo – was simplified to blood drinking and cannibalism. On the other hand, the blood libel story is contaminated with trivial, familiar elements such as religious motifs and well-known fables. The simplification, as well as these further details, substantially helped to embed the story, thereby making it part of a shared social knowledge. In the following, different types of these folk songs and the motifs they feature will be examined. ‘This Jew has got a big belly Eszter Solymosi is probably inside Zikcini-zakcini, you stinky Jew, You shall drink Christian blood no more!’²⁸

The ‘Jew’s big belly’, a highly visual motif, is the most frequent element of these songs, together with the refrain: ‘zikcene-zakcene’. The latter survived from the earlier Jew-mocking song, and – with the words sounding like German numbers (siebzehn, sechzehn) – originally alluded to Jews counting money. As their original meaning was lost, these words became more or less deformed, turned into a rhyming, and merely gibberish line. The other omnipresent element, the motif of the victim being in the Jew’s belly shows a close affinity with the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. ‘This Jew has got a big belly Eszter Solymosi’s blood is inside Hold on, Jew, I will diminish it, When I stick my sword into it.’²⁹ * ‘This Jew has got a big belly Eszter Solymosi is probably inside The Jew’s belly shall be cut open That brunette shall be taken out.’³⁰

Some of the songs – such as the two examples above – do not stop at lamenting on Eszter Solymosi’s fate. Instead, they offer a solution: to cut the girl out. This violent attack on the figure of the Jew already foreshadows the collective vio-

 AP 6818/g, see ibidem, p. 89.  6856, see ibidem, p. 90.  62108, see ibidem.

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lence these songs can be associated with. The motif of cutting up the Jew’s stomach attests again to a contamination of the blood libel legend with the story of Little Red Riding Hood, where the woodcutter or the hunter performs the same role. ‘This Jew has got a big belly Eszter Solymosi’s blood is inside, If the Jew would give birth, Eszter Solymosi would be reborn.’³¹

In another type, a less violent yet even more peculiar solution offers remedy: the Jew gives birth to the cannibalized victim. This version is influenced by elements of popular religion, namely the New Testament: the girl is reborn, thus Eszter Solymosi becomes a parallel to Christ. There might also be a connection to the Little Red Riding Hood, where – at least according to Bruno Bettelheim’s interpretation – the girl is reborn.³² ‘This Jew has got a big belly Eszter Solymosi’s blood is inside Mrs Solymosi fainted seven times, Because Jews killed her daughter.’³³

Similarly, this version features an allusion to the New Testament. The seven faints experienced by Mrs Solymosi are apparent parallels to the seven sorrows of the Virgin Mary. These references to Christian symbolism provide a religious interpretation of the blood libel accusation, defining Eszter Solymosi’s role – through imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) – as a martyr or a saint. ‘They tear down, they tear down the church of Moses The Solymosi girl was found inside. Ipcini-apcini, you dirty [literally: dog] Jew, Inside this you will pray no more.’³⁴

In the variation above the girl is built into the wall of the synagogue: the blood accusation is apparently contaminated with the popular myth of Coloman the

 6860, see ibidem.  Bruno Bettelheim, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, in idem, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, New York 1976, pp. 166 – 183.  AP 3025/c, see Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), p. 90.  62099, see ibidem, p. 89.

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mason (Kőmíves Kelemen), who built his own wife into the castle wall in order to fortify it. ‘It is the season of harvest in Egypt, Jew Nájlon is the first reaper, Solomon is the collector of fallen wheat, Alexander Grünsberger ties the sheaves.’³⁵ * ‘The rosemary opens towards the high sky, The Jews are going towards Egypt. Zikcene-zakcene, you dirty Jew! You shall drink Christian blood no more!’³⁶

A peculiar motif, Egypt appears in a number of songs: the Jews are either going to, or chased towards Egypt. Notwithstanding the deviations from the original story of the Exodus, these motifs are indeed related to the Old Testament, thus creating a connection between Passover and Easter. Historically, the close succession of the two religious feasts triggered plenty of blood libel accusations. All the songs examined above are characterized by a linguistic trait: the ‘offender’ is always generalized, as ‘the Jew’, while the supposed victim is always personalized as Eszter Solymosi. This feature brings forth a double-faceted result: on the one hand, the personalization enables the emotional identification with the ‘victim’, while on the other hand the generalization facilitates the contemporary actualization of the blood libel accusation.

Folk songs in the making: authors and propagators Although the majority of the folk songs can be considered authentic, in two instances we can identify the authors. Moreover, we can also observe the process during which a song published in the press became a folk song. A version of the previous, authentic Jew-mocking folk song was created by the learned composer, Zoltán Gáthy, referencing the blood libel accusation. The text was published – along with the score – in 1883 in satirical antisemitic magazines, in Hungarian Üstökös [Comet], as well as in Füstölő [Smoker] and in German translation in Re-

 62099, see ibidem, p. 90.  62102, see ibidem.

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bach [5].³⁷ The text features thematic inconsistency, while in its motifs it is rather distant from ‘real’ folk songs. The author inserted forcibly – and thus rather inconsistently – references to the blood libel case into a text featuring rural, stereotypical – but not per se malevolent – portrayal of Jews. Thus it is hardly surprising that its reception was extremely limited and fragmented. All this attests to the fact that it was an artificial attempt to diffuse antisemitic propaganda, and it could not have been collected ‘from the lips of the people’ as the author stated in order to reassure its authenticity.³⁸ The second example, entitled ‘Folk Ballad from Tiszaeszlár’ was published anonymously, without its musical score, at the end of June 1882 in the local press, and later in the national press.³⁹ Despite the reappearance of the claim to be ‘from the lips of the people’, its author can be identified as Júlia Farkas, a local resident of Tiszaeszlár, most probably a relative of the village judge.⁴⁰ The text, with its elaborate lines, multiple verses and detailed everyday (today historical) references, shares virtually no common characteristics with real folk songs. Nonetheless, in two instances, fragments of the verses were collected at the beginning of the 1930s from near Tiszaeszlár.⁴¹ This closeness of both sources to Tiszaeszlár is of great significance, as it highlights the difference from real folk songs, which were recorded all over the country without any distinctive geographic pattern. The antisemitic press – especially satirical magazines – played a crucial role in the dissemination of these anti-Jewish propaganda pieces. Ironically, two drawings published in these magazines illustrate exquisitely how they functioned and the outcome they aimed to achieve. The first image accompanies a call for subscriptions written in the shape of a poem, published in the satirical magazine Üstökös [Comet] in 1883 [6]. The poem’s refrain features the ‘zikczene-zakczene’ line, while the image shows an anthropomorphized figure of a rooster, the magazine’s mascot, with a baton in

 Hungarian version: Üstökös XXVI, 1883, No. 37, 16. 9., p. 9. – Üstökös XXVI, 1883, No. 40, 7. 10., p. 10. – Füstölő III, 1883, No. 1, 1. 11., p. 7. – German version: Rebach II, 1883, 1. 11., p. 1. – Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 84– 87.  Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), p. 86.  Szabolcsmegyei Közlöny X, 1882, 29. 6. [unavailable], reprinted in: Szabolcsmegyei Közlöny XI, 1883, No. 82, 16. 8., p. 1. Abbreviated version: Függetlenség III, 1882, 19. 8., p. 2. – Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 92– 93.  György Kövér, A tiszaeszlári dráma. Társadalomtörténeti látószögek, Budapest 2011, pp. 416 – 417. – Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 92– 93.  Gyula Ortutay, Mondotta: Vince András béreslegény, Máté János gazdalegény. Nyíri, rétközi balladák, betyár- és juhásznóták, Szeged 1933, pp. 40 – 41, 79. – Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 91– 92.

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Fig. 5: ‘Zikcene-Zakcene’, Rebach II, 1883, 1. 11., p. 1. Photo: Daniel Véri.

his hand, conducting two figures, a peasant and a Jew, who are both holding a score and singing together – most probably the blood libel-song, published earlier in the same magazine. Given the nature of the song, the motif of a Jew sing-

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Fig. 6: Call for subscriptions of Üstökös [Comet], Üstökös XXVI, 1883, No. 40, 7. 10., p. 11 (first published on 23. 9., p. 11). Photo: Daniel Véri.

ing along is rather unrealistic. The image shows nonetheless most profoundly and in an allegorical way how the antisemitic press, especially satirical maga-

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zines, intended and were indeed able to shape public opinion – in this case by inciting the public against the Jewish population. The second image, which alludes to the question of folk song-related violence, was published as the journal heading of the satirical magazine Herkó Páter [Priest Herkó], in the provincial city of Szombathely [7]. The illustration

Fig. 7: Heading of Herkó Páter [Priest Herkó], a short-lived satirical magazine in Szombathely, four issues between October and November 1882. Photo: Daniel Véri.

shows the figure of a priest grabbing the ear of a Jewish man who is holding the Talmud, and simultaneously kicking a figure dressed in Hungarian attire. Below the Jewish figure the inscription reads ‘Hep-Hepp’, while below the Hungarian: ‘Hop-Hopp!’. This symmetrical arrangement implies a political stance in equal measures; however, only the inscription below the Jew has a deeper meaning, revealing the true antisemitic nature of the magazine. In fact, what the inscription refers to is an antisemitic song, called the ‘HepHep song’, which is attested in Hungarian sources, certainly between 1871 and 1884.⁴² Only the short title – most probably part of the refrain – surfaced in

 Herkó Páter was published in Szombathely; only four editions exist, dating back to October– November 1882. The hep-hep song is attested in: Borsszem Jankó IV, 1871, No. 206, 10. 12., p. 5. – Borsszem Jankó XIV, 1881, No. 41 (717), 9. 10., p. 8. – Zalai Közlöny XXIII, 1884, No. 18, 2. 3., p. 3. In this period, another music piece, the 1872 parody of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg equally borrowed its title from ‘hep-hep’: Hepp, Hepp! oder Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Spremberg 1872. – Barry Millington, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, his Work and his World, Oxford 2012, p. 178 (in the Hungarian edition of 2013). I would like to thank Gergely Loch for bringing Millington’s book to my attention. Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 83, 94.

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the press, without the complete text or the melody. Nonetheless, the name suggests that its origin goes back to the German, antisemitic Hep-Hep riots of 1819. With this historical background in mind, it is hardly surprising that references to the ‘hep-hep’ song were antisemitic in content in a similar way as the allusions to the ‘zickcene-zakcene’ song. Thus it can be assumed, that the ‘hep-hep’ song functioned as an accompanying element to violent antisemitic episodes, similarly to the blood libel related songs, which will be examined next. These songs have a similarly significant reception in extreme right subcultures as the blood libel related images. The underlying logic had always been their assumed authenticity: since they were collected as folk songs; for antisemites they represented the untainted truth offered by ‘the people’, verifications for the ritual murder accusation. The most successful reincarnation of the folk songs was brought about by a well-known poet, József Erdélyi, who joined the antisemitic far right during the 1930s. He came across the songs in an ethnographic publication and subsequently published his infamous poem, titled Solymosi Eszter vére [Eszter Solymosi’s blood] in an extremist newspaper in 1937. The poem was reprinted repeatedly, even during the Holocaust.⁴³ Far right circles preserved this tradition: based on Erdélyi’s memoirs, possibly its 2001 reprint; the speaker at the annually recurring antisemitic rally at Tiszaeszlár again in 2013 quoted the folk songs as material evidence, confirming the ritual murder accusation.⁴⁴

From interpersonal conflicts to collective violence The Tiszaeszlár trial in the summer of 1883 brought about the acquittal of the defendants, which was followed by antisemitic riots all over the country.⁴⁵ For its part, the blood libel song is attested to have sparked off conflicts on a number of occasions during the 1880s and 1890s.⁴⁶ For example, in December 1882 a fight took place between local Jews, and travellers who were singing the song and smashing the Jews’ windows in the village of Uraiújfalu, Vas county. According to an article in an antisemitic political daily, the Jews were the ones who attacked the travellers upon hearing the song; the latter merely responded to this by smashing the windows. Naturally, this appears to be a rather biased interpre-

 Virradat II, 1937, No. 31, 2. 8., p. 5. – József Erdélyi, Emlék, Budapest 1940, pp. 304– 306. Cf. Véri, ‘Vérvád és zene’ (note 3).  László Tompó Jr., ‘Solymosi Eszterre emlékeztek Tiszaeszláron Tompó testvérrel’, Hunhír.info, http://hunhir.info/index.php?pid=hirek&id=63534, 15.1. 2016.  Kövér (note 40), pp. 561– 564.  Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), pp. 93 – 94.

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tation. Regardless of the real circumstances, it is more relevant here to note, that the article stated that the ‘song from [Tisza] Eszlár’ has been sung all over the country.⁴⁷ Due to the violent episodes some of the local authorities even attempted to ban the song.⁴⁸ By the end of 1883 the song, widely known as ‘zikcene-zakcene’, was established as commonplace and a metaphor in political parlance. It had a double meaning: it alluded to antisemites when used by the liberals; while for antisemites it was a metaphor for the Jews.⁴⁹ The song still evoked strong emotions as late as 1897, when a duel took place in Budapest between an antisemite, who had the song played by musicians, and a Jew who took offence.⁵⁰ Yet social knowledge about the blood libel, transmitted through the tradition of folk songs, lasted even longer, evoking further, lethal consequences. Although it was a largely passive knowledge, when triggered by additional accommodating circumstances it was easily activated, thus leading to social, exclusionary violence. After World War II violence had erupted on numerous occasions against survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary. In a number of cases – for instance in Budapest (1946), Kunmadaras (1946), and Szegvár (1948) – the violence was connected to ritual murder accusations.⁵¹ Notwithstanding further possible causes – such as antisemitism in general, the personal motivations of people benefiting from the deportations, etc. – in my opinion social knowledge of ritual murder had a major impact on these cases. Importantly, as these ritual murder accusations featured cannibalism, they were much closer to the versions present in the folk songs than to the classical formulation of the blood libel myth. This trait confirms that these new accusations were based on social knowledge, which originated from folk songs. The charge usually entailed making sausage from Christian children – a motif no doubt influenced by post-war shortages. Consequently, the social knowledge about ‘Jewish ritual murder’, constituted by folk songs, had a trifold effect. Firstly, it facilitated the emergence of individual accusations, as the mental shortcut from the missing children to ritual murder was made easily. Secondly, due to the wide permeation of the songs, the alleged, rather unlikely deed could seem imaginable, even believable for a wider public. Thirdly, this knowledge provided a familiar model for anti-Jewish senti-

 Függetlenség III, 1882, 21. 12., p. 3.  12 röpirat V, 1885, No. 4, 15. 1., p. 123.  Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), p. 94.  Országos Hírlap III, 1899, No. 8, 8. 1., p. 11. – Egyenlőség XVI, 1897, No. 41, 10. 10., p. 10. – Véri, ‘A Sakterpolkától’ (note 1), p. 94.  János Pelle, Az utolsó vérvádak, Budapest 1995, pp. 151– 168, 252– 262.

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ments and channelled the violence along certain patterns. Violent solutions already emerged within the songs, as we have seen earlier. The public response could have been potentially much more emotional, and consequently the results more violent or even lethal, since the accusation was no ordinary crime, but a murder, especially that of a child.⁵²

Conclusion The two case studies examined here attest to the eminent role that cultural products played in the creation, diffusion and transmission of social knowledge about ‘Jewish ritual murder’. The images, as well as the songs were all products of imagination, but importantly, they were embodied in easily reproducible and transmittable forms. They offered highly visual, thus instantly available narratives about the blood libel accusation. On the one hand, they enabled emotional identification with the supposed victim; on the other hand they painted a dark, unambiguously negative, inhuman portrait of the generalized Other, namely the Jews. The paintings were initially intended for, and flourished amongst, the politically and culturally engaged urban bourgeoisie; however the photographic and especially the graphic derivatives reached a substantially larger and much more diverse audience, which included the rural population. For its part, this rural setting was the birthplace of the folk songs, albeit urban; politically motivated actors were also involved already from the onset of the affair – mainly by modifying and marketing folk songs. They were using authored works in the disguise of authentic folk songs as tools of antisemitic propaganda. Moreover, subsequent antisemitic subcultures consciously built upon the tradition constituted by earlier cultural products, images and folk songs alike. For these subcultures, they served as historical references, affirming the veracity of the ritual murder accusation. As a result, not only cultural products related to the Tiszaeszlár affair, but also their subsequent reception history transcended social boundaries. Embodied in these cultural products, blood libel narratives were transmitted from generation to generation either consciously – as with the dissemination and repeated printing of graphic derivatives – or – in the case of the folk songs – unconsciously, as part of a shared cultural heritage. On the one hand, images

 Naturally, the police investigations that followed did not focus on folklore as the source of social knowledge about the blood libel myth, yet for example in the case of Szegvár, local knowledge of these songs and myths is attested decades later. Pelle (note 51), pp. 258 – 259.

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became part of an ever-expanding antisemitic tradition, which currently takes the form of a pseudo-religious cult. On the other hand, the deviation of folk songs from the classical formulation of the blood libel myth – their contamination with familiar elements borrowed from religion and tales – alleviated the embedding of the ritual murder accusation into folk culture. The semantical construction of the songs made the generalized perpetrator (‘the Jew’) localizable in every rural community, thus enabling the actualization of the blood accusation. This largely passive social knowledge was activated not only at the level of interpersonal conflicts at the time of the affair, but also later, in the case of collective violence against survivors of the Holocaust, channelling antisemitic emotions and shaping violent episodes according to certain patterns. Whether the latter is a specific Hungarian phenomenon, or a regional one, the result of the reception of turn-of-the century blood libel cases, is the task of future research. However, it can already be pointed out that the similarity of post-World War II antisemitic violence in Central Europe and, for instance, the existence of Czech songs related to the Hilsner blood libel affair (1899), suggest a regional phenomenon.⁵³

 I would like to thank Michal Frankl for bringing my attention to the existence of the Czech songs.

Eva Janáčová

Spa Antisemitism in Bohemia and Moravia Summary: This study is devoted to the phenomenon of ‘spa antisemitism’ in Bohemia and Moravia from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s. This developed most intensively in the West Bohemian spas, specifically in Karlsbad and Marienbad, although it also appeared in Luhačovice in Moravia. The latent spa antisemitism manifested itself visually above all in picture postcards, but also in the field of newspaper cartons, and eventually even influenced the form of small figurines, sculptural groups and practical items. Most of the creators of these artefacts remained anonymous, with a couple of exceptions dating from later times. In the case of all the Jewish figures portrayed, the typical feature was a stereotypically conceived physiognomy and a striking gesture tinged with emotion. Their iconographical repertoire was deliberately limited to two basic types: the poor East European Jew and the fat assimilated Jew. The diversity of Jewish spa visitors was deliberately suppressed and replaced by a simplified dual lens. The picture of Jewish visitors to the spa and of Jews generally was deliberately caricatured. The popular iconographic antisemitism of the time, portraying Jews as something totally different, alien and above all hostile, was concealed under the guise of humour. Keywords: antisemitism, stereotype, spa, caricature, postcard ‘Spa antisemitism’ is a phenomenon¹ that appeared in Bohemian and Moravian spa resorts around the end of the nineteenth century and endured until the 1930s. Its main centres were the West Bohemian spa towns, particularly Karlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad (in Czech: Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně

 This theme has been studied by Salo Aizenberg, Hatemail. Anti-Semitism on Picture Postcards, Philadelphia 2013, pp. 200 – 205. – Frank Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist judenfrei.’ Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt am Main 2003. – Rachel Dipper, ‘‘Einmal muss der Mensch ins Bad!’ Grüsse aus Karlsbad und Marienbad’, in Helmut Gold and Georg Heuberger (eds), Abgestempelt. JudenfeindlichePostkarten. Auf der Grundlage der Sammlung Wolfgang Haney, Heidelberg 1999, pp. 194– 204. – Jill Steward, ‘The Spa Towns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Growth of Tourist Culture 1860 – 1914’, in Peter Borsay, Gunther Hirschfelder and Ruth E. Mohrmann (eds), New Directions in Urban History. Aspects of European Art, Health, Tourism and Leisure since the Enlightenment, Münster 2000, pp. 87– 125. – Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, ‘‘L’Schonnoh Habbo! Nach dem schönen Marienbad…’ On the Ambivalence of a Modern Sanctuary’, Bohemia XXXXVI, 2005, No. 1, pp. 87– 101. – Eadem, Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne, Göttingen 2007. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-004

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and Františkovy Lázně), which, due to their central location and good railway infrastructure, attracted Jewish visitors from all over Europe. The principal manifestations of spa antisemitism were picture postcards caricaturing Jewish guests. Antisemitic newspaper caricatures, small figurines and sculptural groups of stereotypically depicted Jews began to appear later. The West Bohemian spa resorts were the birthplace of so-called ‘winter antisemitism’,² which manifested itself in the form of open attacks against local Jews mainly during the winter months. A case in point is, for example, the seditious campaign against the Jews of Karlsbad in November 1897, when, because of political disagreements, they were accused of disloyalty and subsequently expelled from the local gymnastics association.³ On the other hand, in summer, during the high season for visitors, local hoteliers, restaurateurs, regional politicians and journalists held themselves back, refraining from antisemitic diatribes against Jews, who made up almost ten percent of Karlsbad’s population at the turn of the century⁴ and accounted for half of all visitors. This was principally due to the town’s economic interests, which induced the majority of the population, who were heavily dependent on the resort’s trade, to curb any public displays of antisemitic expression in the summer season. This fact was commonly known among Jewish visitors, who at that time could avail themselves of lists of hotels and spa houses whose owners had in previous seasons shown themselves to be antisemites. Thus, at the beginning of a summer season, warnings related to places best avoided regularly appeared in Jewish newspapers.⁵ Nevertheless, antisemitic incidents occurred even during the summer. Although there were far fewer of them than in the winter months, they were clear proof of the

 Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr (note 1), pp. 156 – 158.  Local Jews were expelled from Der Karlsbader Turnverein at the end of 1897. The ‘Aryan paragraph’ appeared in some gymnastic association sports regulations in the 1880s, but was later adopted by the majority of gymnastic associations. Cf. Chronik des Karlsbader Turnvereines. 1860 – 1900, Falkenau and D. Eger 1901, p. 91. – Roman Šinkovský, ‘Turnerské hnutí v českých zemích od svých počátků do roku 1918’, in Marek Waic (ed), Německé tělovýchovné a sportovní spolky v českých zemích a Československu. Deutsche Turn- und Sportvereine in den tschechischen Ländernund in der Tschechoslowakei, Prague 2008, pp. 18 – 29.  In 1900, a total of 1405 Jews lived in Karlsbad, accounting for 9.6 percent of the city’s population. Karlsbad was a city with one of the largest proportions of Jewish population in Bohemia behind only Prague and Teplice. Cf. ‘Geschichte der Juden in Karlsbad’, in Hugo Gold (ed), Die Juden und Judengemeinden Böhmens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Brno 1934, pp. 255 – 260, esp. p. 259. – Rudolf Mathias Wlaschek, Juden in Böhmen. Beiträge zur Geschichte des europäischen Judentums im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 1990, p. 19.  For example, in 1902, there were 21 places on the list of antisemitic hotels and spa houses in Karlsbad. Cf. Mitteilungen aus dem Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus XII, 1902, No. 34, p. 259.

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anti-Jewish mood present in most of society. For example, in June 1904, a Karlsbad pub owner put up a sign on his premises that read ‘No Jews allowed’. After the intervention of the local authorities, he replaced the sign with a new one that read: ‘Jews are tolerated here only because of pressure from the authorities’. ⁶ In general, it can be claimed that from the turn of the century onwards, winter antisemitism in West Bohemian spa resorts worsened, while the summer months more or less remained unchanged, with the exception of a few antisemitic incidents.⁷ All this changed, however, with the assassination of the Jewish philosopher and columnist Theodor Lessing (1872– 1933), who had continued to inveigh against National Socialism in Germany from exile in Marienbad.⁸ His assassination in August 1933 definitively ended the era of more or less tolerated spa antisemitism and paved the way for racial violence. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, postcards were a popular visual medium, printed in vast quantities.⁹ They were on sale at local newsagents, bookshops, and stationers, in hotels and cafés, and at stands on the colonnades, and depicted views of the town, local historical monuments, the medicinal springs, colonnades, hotels and cafés. Picture postcards depicting both the rich national diversity of spa society, and particularly its Jewish guests, were very popular. Almost all the characters became, to a greater or lesser extent, the subject of ridicule, exaggeration or simplification. More than half the preserved postcards explicitly depicted only Jews. The vast majority used antiJewish contents and connotations, and therefore these pictorial postcards became clear proof of the latent form of spa antisemitism in West Bohemia. Several thousand such postcards have been preserved to this day featuring around two hundred caricature motifs. They can be found in many private and public collections around the world, the largest selection of which are in the collections of Wolfgang Haney (German Historical Museum in Berlin), Arthur Langerman (Technical University Berlin) and Martin Schlaff (Jewish Museum Vienna).

 ‘Juden haben keinen Zutritt’ and ‘Nur infolge behördlichen Zwangs warden hier Juden geduldet.’ See Bajohr (note 1), cit. p. 47.  Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr (note 1), p. 158.  See Richard Švandrlík, Historie Židů v Mariánských Lázních, Marienbad 2005, pp. 26 – 29.  See Iris Hax, ‘‘Gut getroffen, wie der Isaac schmunzelt, nichtwahr?’ Zur Medien- und Rezeptionsgeschichte antisemitischer Bildposkarten’, in Gold–Heuberger (note 1), pp. 97– 123, esp. pp. 100 – 101.

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Stereotypical Jewish physiognomy Nearly every Jewish character depicted on West Bohemian spa resort postcards has a stereotypically portrayed physiognomy. Although each character differs in the detail, there are certain common features that can be observed on many picture postcards from the late 1880s onwards, though these caricatures had been appearing in humorous newspapers printed in Bohemia since the 1860s.¹⁰ In the case of male characters, their faces are depicted with bulging eyes, distinctive circles under the eyes, a large nose, hooked or in the shape of a cucumber or a bobble, and fleshy lips. East European Jews, so-called Ostjuden,¹¹ are specifically portrayed as relatively slim, sometimes scrawny men in shabby crumpled kaftans and shapeless hats, signifying their alleged poverty and backwardness. Another necessary attribute was also the beard and the side locks, which are an external feature of religious Judaism. Sometimes the caricaturist would also deliberately emphasize red hair, as, for example, can be seen in the holiday postcard from Marienbad from the turn of the century [1].¹² It is worth noting that an identical postcard scene, only with a different inscription – Karlsbad, rendered on a cup for drinking the spa waters¹³ – has also been preserved. In contrast, wealthy assimilated Jews in nicely-fitting clothes were always depicted with full plump faces, big bellies and bony, crooked legs. An example of this is the well-to-do visitor to the spa at Karlsbad, dressed in a modern Western-European-style suit, with perfectly cut side whiskers, wearing an expensive top hat [2]. His face is depicted with the classical stereotypical features of a hooked nose and fleshy lips. It is clear at first sight that this is a caricature postcard, as the man’s suit is now loosely fitting and he is indicating with his hand how large his belly once was. There is a text in verse by his feet which comments disparagingly on the change: ‘Everything’s smaller now. The belly and the chest, that’s fine. Only the nose has remained big. And unfortunately the legs are crooked as well.’ ¹⁴

 Václav Fronk, Sebereflexe české společnosti. Přelom 19. a 20. století v perspektivě humoristických časopisů, Prague 2011, p. 74.  See Ludger Heid, ‘Achtzehntes Bild: ‘Der Ostjude’’, in Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör (eds), Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, Frankfurt am Main 1996, pp. 241– 251.  In Czech, this type of holiday postcard is known as a ‘grussovka’ from the German ‘Gruss aus…’, meaning ‘Greetings from…’.  Cf. Richard Švandrlík, Die Geschichte der Juden in Marienbad, CD-ROM, 2009, p. X/41.  ‘Alles ist nun kleiner worden. Bauch und Brust, das ist ja fein. Blos die Nas ist gross geblieben. Und auch leider krumm die Bein.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2247.

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Fig. 1: Holiday postcard from Marienbad, c. 1900. Private collection of Richard Švandrlík, Nuremberg. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

We also encounter many negative features in the portrayal of Jewish women, although, in general, they were not as frequently depicted as their male counterparts. With rare exceptions, only one iconographic type is depicted, that of the so-called ‘Jewish matron’. She is usually a wealthy, assimilated lady of corpulent proportions in an exaggeratedly grandiose dress with fur collar. She wears a hat with feathers on it and is usually bedecked in jewellery. This lady has black curly hair, bulging eyes, a hooked nose and fleshy lips. Her face sometimes features a distinctive birthmark that wavers between a sign of beauty and the devil’s mark of a witch. All spa resort postcards depicting Jewish visitors feature negative stereotypical elements. These are sometimes so exaggerated that they are even elevated to the position of the main motif of the postcard. Most commonly, it is the size of the nose, enlarged out of all proportion, accompanied by a text commenting ironically on the feature. This can be seen, for example, on a postcard from Karlsbad featuring a Jewish couple whose noses are rubbing up against each other [3].

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Fig. 2: ‘Everything’s smaller now. The belly and the chest, that’s fine. Only the nose has remained big. And unfortunately the legs are crooked as well!’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2247. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

In this case, the accompanying verse reads: ‘It’s annoying when, instead of a kiss, you have to rub noses’. ¹⁵ Spa resort postcards were rather limited in their repertoire of Jewish figures. In essence, they portrayed only two extremes: on the one hand, there were the

 ‘Es ist fatal, wenn statt′nem Kuss, Man sich die Nois′n reiben muss.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 4855.

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Fig. 3: ‘It’s annoying when, instead of a kiss, you have to rub noses.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 4855. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

poor East European Jews¹⁶ and, on the other, there were the wealthy assimilated Jews. This, of course, was a flagrant simplification of Jewish spa society. Although West Bohemian spas were visited by Jews of almost all religious, social, economic and political persuasions, the caricaturists would focus their interest on only these two distinct groups, thereby completely ignoring the diversity of the Jewish visitors to the resorts. The photographic postcards that began to appear more widely in West Bohemian spas towards the end of the 1880s form one exception.

 Charitable associations supporting poor Jews began to emerge in West Bohemian spas at the same time as Jewish communities were officially established (Karlsbad – 1869, Marienbad – 1875). However, ‘Israeli hospitals for the poor’ already operated here before, and the traditional system of Jewish charity, when rich Jews supported the less wealthy. Rabbi Samuel Rappaport (1871– 1943) noted that for a poor Eastern European Jew, the most important thing was to get money for a ticket to a West Bohemian spa, and then the committee for the Jewish poor, which consisted of the so-called gabaim, took care of everything; that means accommodation, kosher food and appropriate spa treatment. Cf. Samuel Rappaport, Aus dem religiösen Leben der Ostjuden. IV. Krankheit, Der Juda V, 1920, No. 3, pp. 153 – 156.

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Groups of diverse visitors to the spa resorts The most common theme was the coming together of different types of visitors to the spa resorts. The picture postcards humorously depict long lines or random groups of visitors of various nationalities, simply standing around or casually conversing near the colonnades and medicinal thermal springs. Standing together, in the same place at the same time, we see an Austrian officer, a Russian country lad, an English gentleman, a Turkish pasha, a Bavarian in lederhosen, a Japanese with fan in hand and a laughing African.¹⁷ Of course, this gallery of simplified archetypes of visitors to the spa would not be complete without the presence of the dishevelled Jew from East Europe and his rich assimilated counterpart. This depiction of the social life of the spas, where there was limited contact between different national and social groups, was completely unreflective of the reality.¹⁸ The first postcards of this type appeared in West Bohemian spa resorts in the 1880s.¹⁹ The prototypes were prints depicting life in Karlsbad and Marienbad from the beginning of the nineteenth century. One example is a coloured engraving by Ludwig Ernst Buquoy (1783 – 1834) from 1814, depicting the international society of Karlsbad spa gathered around the New Spring in front of what was then still the wooden colonnade by Giessel.²⁰ Along with various European nationalities, there are also Chinese, Japanese and Africans drinking the medicinal waters from cups and, in the foreground of the colonnade, a Jew selling cups and a wealthy Jew wearing a three-cornered hat. This print records in detail the diverse visitors to the resort and, unlike the postcards, does not set out to caricature or ridicule. However, by the 1880s the situation was changing radically. Humorous drawings of spa visitors gradually started appearing in illustrated

 Lone figures of these distinctive ethnic types rarely appear on West Bohemian spa postcards; the exceptions are mainly the African and the Bavarian. Cf. Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/26, 29.  Cf. David Blackbourn, ‘‘Taking the Waters.’ Meeting Places of the Fashionable World’, in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds), The Mechanics of Internationalism. Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War, Oxford 2001, pp. 435 – 457, esp. p. 452.  Cf., for example, a colour postcard from Karlsbad from 1885 from Hans Feller’s souvenir album, a black and white postcard sent on 23 June 1889 from Marienbad with a small drawing depicting spa society and the inscription above, ‘Meyer Wechsel Bank’, and also a black and white postcard of the ‘Zum Brunnen’ type from Marienbad from 1891. Cf., for example, Švandrlík (note 13), pp. IX/15, 22 and X/51.  Karlsbad Museum, sig. Ug 1641.

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newspapers and caricature began to enter the realm of book illustration.²¹ Eugen Miroslav Rutte’s Průvodce po Karlových Varech a okolí [Guide to Karlsbad and its Surroundings], published in 1888, features a drawing by the Prague artist Karel Štapfer (1863 – 1930) which, along with the customary exaggeration and stylization, depicts the spa town’s assorted visitors.²² Standing in a long line of visitors is an East European Jew in a kaftan. His simplified portrait, featured with yarmulke and side locks, also appears at the end of the chapter on spa life. The verse printed above the drawing demonstrates that its appearance is no coincidence: ‘The wafers will soon have been eaten, dust will settle on the petrified bouquet – but the blissful memories will remain! And those are better than this reminder of some Polish Jew!’ ²³ This guide to places of interest in Karlsbad is exceptional in that it records the presence of East European Jews in the spa resort not only textually but also pictorially. The two components communicate with and complement each other, resulting in a portrayal of Jews based on stereotypical simplification. From the 1880s, Jewish visitors to the resorts became an increasingly popular theme, attracting the attention of those around them, who felt compelled to react and find a certain strategy to come to terms with their presence. The picture postcards depicting Jewish visitors to the spa resorts became one of the most visible manifestations of such strategies. In some way, they testified to the existence of these ‘exotic’ visitors. This is most evident in the case of poor East European Jews, who, in their appearance and manner, bore no resemblance to the upper class cosmopolitan society of the West Bohemian spa resorts at the turn of the century. At the same time, they functioned as an undisguised advertisement for these resorts, which wanted to present themselves to the world as tolerant places that welcomed all visitors, which, of course, was a constructed myth for utilitarian purposes. On the other hand, they constituted a form of ridicule and humiliation directed against all Jewish visitors. Non-Jewish spa visitors and the majority populations of the resorts liked to entertain themselves at the expense of the Jewish guests, who, in the end, had no choice but to put up with the faux-humorous postcards, later with the newspaper caricatures and the mocking Jewish figurines, and quietly suffer the spa antisemitism of these resorts. In the picture postcards depicting gatherings of various kinds of visitors to the spa resorts, we see that all the characters behave like actors in colourful  Cf., for example, the full-page tableau ‘V lázních‘ [In the spa] by the well-known Czech illustrator and caricaturist Karel Krejčík in Humoristické listy XXII, 1880, No. 19, 8. 5., p. 149.  Eugen Miroslav Rutte, Průvodce po Karlových Varech a okolí, Prague 1888, p. 81.  Ibidem, p. 91.

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eye-catching costumes, their faces bearing the mask of their national or social role.²⁴ The distinctive gestures and caricatured appearances of the characters are typical features. In the 1880s, Jews were still portrayed as an integral part of such gatherings, but over time they moved to the forefront of these groups and increasingly became the focus of attention [4].

Fig. 4: Holiday postcard from Marienbad, sent 1911. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2237. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

The group-themed spa resort postcards display certain features. The particular motif of laughing guests dancing in a polonaise circle is worthy of note.²⁵ All the participants, including the Turk and the African, are obese; only the East European Jew with his hat, kaftan, and flowing side locks is gaunt. A German officer, dancing beside the Jew, is gawking at him and ostentatiously holding his nose, thereby signalling to everyone around that his neighbour smells bad. On his other side, a wealthy corpulent lady resembling a Jewish matron is dancing.

 On a number of surviving postcards, the depiction of ‘masks’ is quite clear. The characters have very theatrical gestures and their costumes are remarkably imaginative and colourful, especially the African man, the Scot and even the yeti. Cf., for example, Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/ 6.  See Dipper (note 1), p. 195, fig. 3.

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The skinny Jew is eyeing her with interest, even though her equally obese husband is standing right next to her.

Toilets, poor hygiene, odour and obesity Another specific type of group-themed postcard is the motif of the mass flight, or, if need be, queuing for the toilets. The spring waters of the West Bohemian spa resorts were well known for their laxative properties and the urgent need to visit the lavatory is caricatured here quite convincingly. Representatives of individual nationalities are knocking or banging on the doors of the latrines. At the very front of the group stands a shabby old East European Jew, who is writhing in agony, holding his belly. His face, like those of the others, is twisted in simultaneous despair and anger [5]. The very same picture was used on a postcard from the Caucasian spa town of Yessentuki, whereby Cross Spring Pavillion in Karls-

Fig. 5: ‘The weight-loss cure is fine / I really have to say / only what follows undermines / the pleasure of the day’ Holiday postcard from Marienbad, c. 1900. Private collection of Richard Švandrlík, Nuremberg. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

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bad was replaced with a view of a park and the text was modified in Russian.²⁶ There are several other cases where almost identical postcards were sold in different spa resorts around Europe with minor modifications as to the name of the resort and the text on the postcard.²⁷ The topic of an urgent visit to the toilet appeared very often on West Bohemian spa postcards. Alongside postcards featuring a range of ethnic groups, there are also postcards intentionally depicting only Jewish visitors rushing to or sitting on the lavatory. A typical example is the encounter of two East European Jews near the toilets, where one is depicted relaxed, holding a cup for drinking the spa waters, and the other is rushing for relief.²⁸ The scene is accompanied by a text purporting to be witty commenting on the urgency of the situation and the unpleasant smell. Another is the solitary figure of a Jew desperate to relieve himself, thereby emphasizing the primitive comedy of this urgent need.²⁹ One clearly antisemitic postcard depicts a wealthy overweight Jewish businessman sitting on the toilet taking an urgent phone call [6]. There are financial newspapers on the floor around him and at the bottom of the picture is the inscription ‘Der Börsianer’ [The Stockbroker]. Of course, nowhere is it explicitly written that he is a Jew, but the negative Jewish physiognomy with the hooked nose leaves no one in any doubt. There is also a clear antisemitic reference to unholy, dirty Jewish business being conducted on the toilet. Here, the toilet is not only a symbol of physical uncleanliness, but also moral filth and alleged corruption. Closely related to this is the theme of odour, which is also accentuated on some postcards from West Bohemian spa resorts. In addition to images of people standing around them holding their noses, there is also the motif of garlic,³⁰

 Cf. Annegret Laabs, ‘‘Der Weltparasit’. Bildstereotype des Antisemitismus im zaristischen Russland und in der Sowjetunion’, in Gold–Heuberger (note 1), p. 307, fig. 11.  Cf., for example, a group postcard of different nationalities waiting in front of the toilets. Identical postcards have survived that differ only in the inscriptions: Marienbad and Bad Kissingen. Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/46 and Hax (note 9), p. 115, fig. 11. Another example is a photographic postcard depicting three East European Jews with the inscription ‘Firma: Wolf, Hirsch et Schlamasel’, which was published in both Karlsbad and Krakow. Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/16. – Andreas Hornemann and Annegret Laabs, ‘‘Bär aus Galizien’ – Die Angst vor dem Fremdem: ‘Der Ostjude’’, in Gold–Heuberger (note 1), p. 179, fig. 8.  Cf., for example, the holiday postcards from Marienbad published by Ottmar Zieher in Munich in 1901 and 1907. See Švandrlík (note 13), p. X/18.  Cf. Jewish Museum in Vienna, inv. no. 11888.  Cf., for example, the holiday postcard from Karlsbad with the inscription ‘Familie ‘Löw’ beim Frühstück’, which depicts lions with negative Jewish physiognomy greedily devouring garlic. Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/33.

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Fig. 6: Holiday postcard from Marienbad ‘Der Börsianer’ [The Stockbroker], c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 4817. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

which has a clear anti-Jewish connotation. Far more common, however, is the reference to dirt, both explicitly and implicitly. Most of the poor East European Jews are depicted on the picture postcards in dirty, shabby, and sometimes torn clothing. Sometimes these characters are even discussing the topic of dirt together, as can be seen, for example, on a postcard which was well-known in several

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Fig. 7: ‘Moritz! Moritz! So, it seems you have not washed!!’ – ‘Good God! – Why would one wash when all the dirt here is so expensive?’ Holiday postcard, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2211. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

versions and sold in both Karlsbad and Marienbad [7]. The inscription, which attempts to be humorous, illuminates the scene for us: “‘Moritz! Moritz! So, it

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seems to me that you are not washed!!’ ‘Good God! – Why would one wash when all the dirt here is so expensive.’”³¹ A similar conversation features on a postcard by the successful Austrian caricaturist Fritz Schönpflug (1873 – 1951), depicting a whole family of grubby East European Jews. The father, drawn in side locks and a kaftan, is gesturing in disapproval, while the mother and son are in stunned silence. Below the scene is a caption in German: ‘A person must go to the baths once!’ ³² This is a simplistic depiction of Jews who have not washed for a long time and who are dirty and smell. The word for baths/spa [in German] appears here as a symbol of cleansing and, at the same time, a symbol of the highly regarded spa resort, which a person must visit at least once in their life. Another of Schönpflug’s postcards features an East European Jew drinking mineral spring water from a cup through a straw [8]. The bottom of the picture carries the ironic inscription ‘Zahnpflege’ [Dental Hygiene]. Another simple but even more forceful caricature alludes to the allegedly poor oral hygiene of Jews from the East, which, at that time, was often considered backward, primitive and dirty. At the turn of the century, postcards depicting spa guests soaking or covered in medicinal clay or mud were extremely popular. An antisemitic notion of that time was that, for Jewish characters, the mud referred to both physical and moral filth. Hirsch and Rebekka [9], as the caricaturist dubbed them, are naked in a bath full of black mud and a black substance is dripping from their upper bodies, especially their hands, which looks very much like blood. This can be associated with the motif of ritual murder (blood libel), which is something Jews had been accused of for centuries.³³ A spa attendant who washes them is usually standing near the bath, drawn in deliberate contrast to the guests as white and clean. Cleansing them takes on a symbolic significance and even evokes the idea of baptism. In some of these postcards, only one of the characters is featured. For example, the figure of Rebekka, with her corpulent body, curly black hair, bulging eyes, wide cheekbones, hooked nose and full sensual lips, clearly refers to the Jewish matron, who in her nudity is deprived of all the attributes of wealth, thus revealing her true, ‘dirty’ self.³⁴ In comparison with the non-Jewish women depicted on other spa resort postcards, Rebekka clearly represents the

 ‘Moritz! Moritz! Da scheinst mer nix zu sein gewaschen!!’ ‘Gott über der Welt! – Warum soll a Mensch auch sein gewaschen, wo is hier doch Dreck su teier.’ Holiday postcard, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2211.  ‘Einmal muss der Mensch ins Bad!’ Cf. Švandrlík (note 13), p. X/1.  See, for comparison, Dobroslav Haut, ‘Magický kruh kolem věčného Žida: v čem všem měl a dosud má své špinavé prsty!‘, Árijský boj II, 1941, No. 10, 15. 3., p. 8. In the middle of the scene is the figure of a Jew, from whose crooked hands large drops of blood are dripping.  Cf., for example, Švandrlík (note 13), p. X/22.

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Fig. 8: Fritz Schönpflug, Holiday postcard from Marienbad ‘Zahnpflege’ [Dental Hygiene], c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2880. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

type of ugly woman who is the antithesis of the beautiful ‘Venuses’ that serve as erotic symbols of West Bohemian spas.³⁵

 Ibidem, pp. X/20, 23.

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Fig. 9: Holiday postcard from Marienbad ‘Hirsch u. Rebekka in Moor’ [Hirsch & Rebekka in the mud], c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2330. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

Another popular subject was obesity, which, along with diabetes and other diseases, was a condition that was treated in West Bohemian spas. Jews however were not in this case the only objects of ridicule, but any visitor to the spa who happened to be overweight. The heaviest of them were even immortalized on postcards, such as the Swiss woman Jenny Letto, who weighed 212 kilograms, and the 240-kilogram Englishman William Campbell,³⁶ who underwent medical treatment in Marienbad. Picture postcards depicting guests before and after treatment were also common. In the case of Jewish patients, the caricaturists tended to focus on rich assimilated Jews who were overweight. A well-known example is the various depictions of the businessman with stereotyped Jewish physiognomy named Meyer ‘on arrival’, ‘after 14 days’, and ‘on departure’.³⁷ After medical treatment in Karlsbad, the portly fellow unable to fasten his coat is transformed into a skinny person in loosely hanging clothes. In general, obese religious Jews from the East hardly feature in spa resort postcards and, in the rare cases they do, they usually only appear in staged photographs. One such example is the photographic collage that was published by

 Ibidem, p. X/50.  Ibidem, p. X/38.

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Leopold Weil, a Jewish bookseller and publisher from Karlsbad, who was also involved in this business. The postcard depicts an assistant weighing an overweight Jew who is wearing a kaftan [10]. Above him is a sign in German referring

Fig. 10: ‘This is the cheapest place to get weighed! / Lost 5 % – the first loss to make me happy!’ Holiday postcard from Marienbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2260. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

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to the price of the service ‘This is the cheapest place to get weighed!’ ³⁸ The ironic caption below is: ‘Lost 5 % – the first loss that has made me happy!’,³⁹ referring to the supposed Jewish negative characteristic associated with saving and the craving for constant gains.

Conversation On many of these spa resort postcards, Jews are depicted in conversation, usually in pairs or groups of three, but also in larger groups, standing or sitting on park benches. They are almost always poor East European Jews in tattered hats and shapeless kaftans, carrying umbrellas, not the walking canes of the assimilated Jews. A distinct feature of these scenes is the hand gestures: The hands of the caricatured participants are always two or even three times their normal proportion and indicate the long and intense conversations being held, thereby working with the widespread stereotype of Jewish eloquence and excessive loquaciousness. These conspicuous hand gestures convey greetings, affirmation, disapproval, hesitation, embarrassment, horror, fear and anger. On occasion, we also see a raised index finger [7]. The generally, long, thin, sometimes twisted fingers of the caricatures could evoke the antisemitic notion that Jews have ‘a finger in every pie’, that they have control over everything, and by means of their long-range fingers they rule the world [11]. On some postcards, we are witnesses to an inept joke, for example, when a conversation between religious Jews is unexpectedly interrupted by a dog urinating on the hat of one of group [12]. This caricature intertwines all kinds of emotions: surprise, anger and derision, which, along with the facial expressions, are also indicated by the hand gestures. Although it is almost always men engaged in these conversational encounters, there are some exceptions. One is a postcard depicting a poor Jew from the East wearing a worn dirty kaftan in conversation with an assimilated Jewish woman wearing a fur stole and a hat adorned with coloured feathers. The thin impecunious man is paying court to the plump wealthy lady, who resembles the Jewish matron stereotype [13]. Both postcard and newspaper caricatures on this theme, based on the obvious differences between the characters, proved very popular and were further developed, for example, by means of contrasting a womanly man with a manly woman.⁴⁰ We can find one of  ‘Hier wird am billigsten gewogen!’ Holiday postcard from Marienbad, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2260.  ‘5 kg verloren – der erste Verlust der mer macht a Freud!’ Ibidem.  Cf., for example, Dipper (note 1), p. 202, fig. 22.

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Fig. 11: Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2828. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

the many pieces of evidence of the widespread antisemitic stereotype of ‘effeminate, unmanly Jews’ in the book Geschlecht und Charakter [Sex and Character] by the then influential Austrian writer, Otto Weininger (1880 – 1903).⁴¹ Conversation is also a theme that is depicted on the postcard bearing the ironic title ‘Lion, Bear, Deer and [various] species of Kohns in Karlsbad’. ⁴² A group of prosperous assimilated Jews with severely caricatured animal heads referring to their surnames (Löw, Bär, and Hirsch) stand in the foreground [14]. In the background, we see small gatherings in conversation who, according to the caption, represent various ‘species of Kohn, with the surname Kohn functioning here as a synonym for Jews in general.⁴³ Other postcards with similar antisemitic content also portray Jewish visitors as animals based on the surnames Löw, Bär and Hirsch. On a postcard depicting a bear in a hat, with side locks and negatively stereotyped Jewish physiognomy, we also see several cloves of garlic,

 Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter. Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, Vienna 1903.  ‘Löw, Bär, Hirsch und Cohnsorten in Karlsbad’. Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2761.  A figure called ‘little Kohn’ often featured in popular culture, who, apart from having stereotypically negative Jewish physiognomy, was portrayed as being very short. On West Bohemian postcards, for example, little Kohn is depicted yodeling. See Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/29.

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Fig. 12: Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, sent 1911. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2267. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

and a cup tied to a string in the manner of a spa guest taking their daily stroll along the colonnade [15]. The German text below the drawing reinforces the anti-

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Fig. 13: Holiday postcard, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2826. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

Fig. 14: ‘Lion, Bear, Deer and [various] species of Kohns in Karlsbad.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, sent 1902. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2761. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

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Fig. 15: ‘Karlsbad Zoo. Bear from Galicia (male, adult).’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. Private collection of Richard Švandrlík, Nuremberg. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

semitic tone of the image: ‘Karlsbad Zoo. Bear from Galicia (male, adult).’ ⁴⁴ A similarly repugnant portrayal can also be found on a postcard issued by Ottmar Zieher, a publishing house based in Munich which produced the most antisemitic of all postcards associated with West Bohemian spa resorts. The seemingly

 ‘Zoologisches aus Karlsbad. Bär aus Galizien (männlich, ausgewachsen).’ See Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/34.

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Fig. 16: ‘The Löw family at breakfast.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, c. 1900. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2763. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

innocent caption ‘The ‘Löw’ family at breakfast’ ⁴⁵ refers to a family of lions with grotesquely depicted Jewish faces feasting on garlic [16]. They are greedily devouring the garlic, a symbol of the unpleasant odour. Jewish guests at the spa resorts were sometimes even depicted with pig’s heads and hoofs for hands. In such cases, East European Jews are conversing on a bench in a spa park, easily recognisable by their long kaftans, head coverings, side locks and umbrellas. However, all attention is directed towards their pig snouts, a feature that has clear antisemitic connotations.⁴⁶ Moreover, in the Jewish tradition, the pig is seen as an unclean animal whose flesh it is forbidden to consume, and the mere mention of it is an insult and expression of  ‘Familie ‚Löw‘ beim Frühstück.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2763.  Published for example in Peter K. Klein, ‘‘Jud, dir kuckt der Spitzbub aus dem Gesicht!’ Traditionen antisemitischer Bildstereotypen oder die Physiognomie des ‘Juden’ als Konstrukt’, in Gold – Heuberger (note 1), pp. 43 – 78, esp. p. 55, fig. 15.

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profound contempt. The significantly anti-Jewish motif of the Judensau [Jews’ sow] appeared in European art in the Middle Ages⁴⁷ and experienced a renaissance around the turn of the century. On the other hand, from a visual perspective, the motif of ‘the three little pigs’ was commonly thought to bring good luck, especially in German-speaking countries, It is therefore possible that in such cases these two completely opposing notions were intertwined and resulted in this kind of explicit antisemitic image. In Karlsbad at least, there were postcards depicting the ‘Darwinian’ evolution from a vulture, a duck, or another animal into a wealthy assimilated Jew with distinctive nose and belly, by means of a number of partial drawings. The postcards were printed by the Antisemitische Buchhandlung von Emil Keil [Emil Keil Antisemitic Bookshop] in Berlin,⁴⁸ which, as its name suggests, specialized in the production of antisemitic postcards. These were not only sold in spa resorts, but in other places throughout Germany and were quite popular. The picture was accompanied by a text that read, for example, ‘From Vulture to Meier’,⁴⁹ underscoring the antisemitic context of the scene, i. e., over time, the rapacious vulture evolves into an equally rapacious banker named Meier, thus preserving its primal essence. Allusions to negative characteristics ascribed to Jews down the ages are also to be found on other spa postcards. For example, on a ‘Greetings from Karlsbad’ postcard from the beginning of the twentieth century, we see a wealthy assimilated Jew scrambling for a gold coin, a symbol of his supposed parsimony and greed [17]. If, however, we look for other such explicitly anti-Jewish and antisemitic themes in the postcards of West Bohemian spa resorts, such as blood libel, host desecration or poisoning a well, we are unlikely to find them, because they probably did not even exist. Both caricaturists and publishers sensed, and some even knew, that there was some notional boundary that must not be crossed in the interests of society as a whole. At the same time, there were certain organizations providing information on rising antisemitism,⁵⁰ which, along with Jewish communities, actively drew attention to the growing dangers in this area and publicly fought antisemitism.

 See the text in this book: Jan Dienstbier, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Judensau’.  Its address was: Berlin S. W., Friedrichstr. 238.  ‘Vom Geier zum Meier.’ See Švandrlík (note 13), p. IX/9.  For example, the most active of these organizations in Germany was the Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus, which operated from 1890 to 1933. Its Austrian branch was established in 1891 thanks to Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. See Auguste Zeiß-Horbach, Der Verein zur Abwehr des Antisemitismus. Zum Verhältnis von Protestantismus und Judentum im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik, Leipzig 2008.

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Fig. 17: ‘This rock was climbed by Mr Hirsch, / Who saw the crown below him first. / For such a thing his ancient race / has a special format nose. / No sooner seen, than who should blow in / but his mighty contender, Mr Cohn. / Surely within a pair of seconds / Mr Cohn will find the precious. / To leave a crown to that contender / would break the heart of any big spender. / Hirsch cares no more for life or limb, / A broken nose won’t bother him. / Entrusting himself to Abram’s lap / he makes a death-defying grab. / Only the brave deserve the fair, / how could ‘our’ own leave it lying there? / Coming home a little worser, / as confirmed his dear wife Sarah; / but otherwise he quite succeeded and got the crown, that’s all was needed. / Greatly admiring, the locals here / have dubbed that rock ‘the Deer Jump’.’ Holiday postcard from Karlsbad, sent 1902. ALAVA – TU Berlin, inv. no. 2275. Photo: ALAVA – TU Berlin.

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Photography, collage and new mechanical devices The medium of photography undoubtedly contributed to the diverse themes of spa resort postcards. The photography studio of Ernst Pflanz operated in Marienbad from at least 1889, first producing postcards with photographs pasted on and later classic photographic postcards. Other publishers adopted Pflanz’s photographs, such as that of Ottmar Zieher in Munich. Ernst Pflanz often worked with three or four Jewish characters and usually arranged and photographed them in his studio [18]. We therefore encounter identical figures resembling East European Jews in several dozen of his photographs. Although the characters wore kaftans, beards and side locks, there are legitimate doubts as to whether they were actual visitors to the spa. It is possible that they were paid models who had pasted their side locks on and donned the appropriate garb of East European Jews. In certain staged photographs set in a park or during a stroll there were three men, who were ironically named ‘the Trifolium’, ‘the firm: Wolf, Hirsch and Schlamasel’ and ‘the Council’. ⁵¹ The imagined culmination of the staged arrangement was the added simulation of rain.⁵² Even so, some photographic postcards have been preserved which quite clearly capture ‘real’ Jews, including rabbis sitting on benches or walking along a spa colonnade,⁵³ whose long kaftans testify to the quality and expense of the material, cleanliness and sometimes also a refined sense of style. These photographs of ‘real’ East European Jews thus undermine the simplistic notion of them as impoverished, dirty and ragged, and offer a more complex view of the diversity of this broad group of people. After the turn of the century, the collage technique became very popular, most often combining drawing with photography and text. In addition to the popular themes of the urgent need for the toilet and Jewish matrons, otherwise known as the arrival of the mother-in-law, there was a fascination with modern

 ‘Ein Trifolium’, ‘Firma: Wolf Hirsch et Schlamasel’, ‘Conzilium’; Metal bowls have been preserved with relief decoration depicting three Jews sitting on a bench, whose names are listed on the edge of the bowl as Mandelblüh, Afterduft and Finkelstein. Clear prototypes of this scene can be seen in the staged photographs from the turn of twentieth century that were also sold in West Bohemian spa resorts. Cf. Falk Wiesemann, Antijüdischer Nippes und populäre ‘Judenbilder’. Die Sammlung Finkelstein, Essen 2005, p. 44, figs. 39, 40. – Švandrlík (note 13), pp. IX/16 and X/5, 58.  Cf. Švandrlík (note 13), p. X/9.  Ibidem, pp. IX/53, 54.

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Fig. 18: Ernst Pflanz, Holiday postcard ‘Waldidylle – Marienbad’ [Forest idyll – Marienbad], c. 1900. Private collection of Richard Švandrlík, Nuremberg. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

mechanical devices. The previously ubiquitous bicycle,⁵⁴ which had presented plenty of opportunities for humorous situations, especially to poke fun at the

 Ibidem, pp. IX/28 and X/12, 29.

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spa’s plump people, was now replaced by the motorcycle, the car, the cable car, the hot air balloon and even the airship [19].⁵⁵ Many of these postcards were

Fig. 19: Holiday postcard ‘Marienbad in der Zukunft. Rübezahl’ [Marienbad in the Future. Rübezahl], c. 1900. Private collection of Richard Švandrlík, Nuremberg. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

printed by the Prague-based Jewish company Lederer & Popper, which continued to work with well-established visual Jewish stereotypes but never crossed over into explicit antisemitism. Others did, particularly German publishers, but also the Karlsbad publisher and bookseller Leopold Weil who was of Jewish origin. In the 1920s, when there was increasing sensitivity to antisemitism among the Jewish community, Weil’s shop was subject to a complaint. A Jewish visitor to the spa at Karlsbad protested that it was selling postcards that promoted antisemitism.⁵⁶

 Ibidem, pp. IX/36 and X/55, 56, 57.  Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr (note 1), p. 102.

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Artistic portrayals Most of the artists and caricaturists who created these postcards remain anonymous.⁵⁷ There are certain distinctive drawing styles indicating that the hand behind them was that of a professionally trained artist. One example is the Austrian artist Fritz Schönpflug (1873 – 1951), who was co-founder and, for a while, artistic director of the Viennese humorous weekly magazine Die Muskete. He also collaborated with other periodicals and produced around a thousand postcards for the Kohn brothers’ publishing house (Brüder Kohn Wien). From 1905 to 1910, he created a well-known and extensive series of postcards from the West Bohemian spa resorts, where he brazenly caricatured local visitors. East European Jews [8], whom he portrayed in a very stereotypical manner, were a frequent target of ridicule. Although he was a very skilled artist with a signature drawing style, when depicting Jewish figures he never attempted to deviate from the habits captured. On the contrary, he further accentuated the deep-rooted visual stereotypes befitting the antisemitism of that period.⁵⁸ When we compare the drawings and paintings of visiting artists who attempted to capture the atmosphere of the West Bohemian spa resorts with the postcards in question, we see an interesting distinction. Depictions of Jewish characters often featured in their works, and the artists clearly found them very engaging, but they did not caricature them. They depicted them without pejorative connotations and largely represented the whole social and religious spectrum of Jewish visitors to the spas. For example, in prints from 1896, based on a series of paintings by the Viennese painter Wilhelm Gause (1853 – 1916)⁵⁹ that were commissioned by the Karlsbad City Council, we see East European Jews on the colonnade in various kinds of attire and head coverings. The depictions of confident Jewish figures in luxurious satin kaftans walking upright

 There are some exceptions, for example, the local artists M. Beck and C. Fürst. Cf. Švandrlík (note 13), p. X/40. Jewish Museum in Vienna, sig. D 303 590.  Some historians describe him as an antisemite and highlight his conservative views. Cf. Franz Kadrnoska, ‘Auf den Schleichwegen der Karikatur’, in idem (ed), Aufbruch und Untergang: österreichische Kultur Zwischen 1918 und 1938, Vienna 1981, pp. 87– 134, esp. p. 97 and Julia Maria Secklehner, Belligerent Drawing? The Vienna and Prague Satirical Press in Political Crossfire 1918 – 1938 (PhD thesis), Courtauld Institute of Art, London 2018, p. 5.  A total of 29 prints were in a decorative album which the city council awarded to all spa guests who had visited Karlsbad 25 times. Gause’s paintings were translated into print by Robert Paulussen of Vienna. See Wilhelm Gause, the bound album of Karlsbad photo prints, Karlsbad Museum, sg. Ug 2147. I would like to thank Lukáš Svoboda of the Karlsbad Museum for drawing my attention to this series.

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and gracefully along the promenades, demolish the simplistic stereotype of the impoverished, ragged Jew from the East. We also find a diverse range of Jewish characters in the book Marienbad. Skizzen [Marienbad. Sketches] by the German caricaturist and illustrator Edmund Edel (1863 – 1934), which was published in 1905 in Berlin. In this humorous book, he portrayed the vivid society of the spa at the beginning of the century, which, of course, included its Jewish visitors. Each of the pictures is accompanied by a short commentary. For example, a scene of three laughing East European Jews is accompanied by the text ‘Rebbe tells a joke’,⁶⁰ and we really do see a man with a cup in his hand saying something funny and his companions laughing [20]. Both the rabbi and the man standing to his right, probably also a rabbi, are clearly overweight and even their kaftans are not able to disguise the fact. Edmund Edel thus defies the custom of depicting Jews from the East as slim or skinny in contrast with their affluent assimilated counterparts. He is not afraid to portray real people and their emotions as observed in real situations. He also chooses the figure of a rabbi, a character often ignored by postcard illustrators, and depicts him in a humorous situation without caricaturing or ridiculing him. The Munich artist and painter Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850 – 1920), who visited Karlsbad as a spa guest in 1909 and 1913, took a similar approach. Several years later, his book entitled Karlsbader Karikaturen und andere Zeichnungen ⁶¹ [Karlsbad Caricatures and Other Drawings] was published, containing pictures of a wide variety of Jewish people he had known from his own experience. The drawings of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864 – 1901) published in the book Au pied du Sinaï [At the Foot of Mount Sinai] are also well known. In the book, Georges Clemenceau (1841– 1929), the author and later prime minster of France, sided with Alfred Dreyfus and described his impressions of his journey through Karlsbad to Galicia. Lautrec’s illustrations depicting East European Jews are very expressive and, unlike works from that period and also his own drawings of assimilated wealthy Jews, they do not intentionally work with negative Jewish iconography. However, it is worthy of note that the drawings depicting ‘Polish Jews in Karlsbad’ were not created there, because Lautrec did not accompany Clemenceau on his travels, but drew inspiration for them from his visits to the Jewish quarters of Krakow and Paris.⁶²

 ‘Der Rebbe erzählt einen Witz’. Edmund Edel, Marienbad. Skizzen, Berlin 1905, p. 8.  Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Karlsbader Karikaturen und andere Zeichnungen, Munich 1923.  Cf. Gale B. Murray, ‘Toulouse Lautrec′s Illustrations for Victor Joze and Georges Clemenceau and their Relationship to French Anti-Semitism of the 1890s’, in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (eds), The Jew in the Text. Modernity and the Construction of Identity, London 1995, pp. 57– 82.

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Fig. 20: Edmund Edel, ‘Der Rebbe erzählt einen Witz’ [Rebbe tells a joke], in idem, Marienbad. Skizzen, Berlin 1905, p. 8. Photo: Richard Švandrlík.

Newspaper caricatures From the 1860s, caricatures depicting stereotypical Jewish physiognomy began featuring in newspapers, which serve as a useful comparison. However, it was not until the beginning of the 1880s when the first caricatures associated with Jewish visitors to spa resorts appeared in Bohemia. An example is Karel Krejčík’s drawing of an obese assimilated couple printed in Humoristické listy [Humorist Papers] in 1880, which caricatures their Jewish appearance and introduces an antisemitic notion linking corpulence and ‘good business’.⁶³ In subsequent years, well into the 1920s, the theme of lack of cleanliness or neglected hygiene

 Karel Krejčík, V lázních, see note 21.

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often appeared in newspaper caricatures in connection with East European Jews visiting West Bohemian spas.⁶⁴ Of course, this motif was not exclusively associated with Jewish spa guests. It was used across the whole of the social and political spectrum, but also in many drawings of various Jewish characters. An extreme example of this motif appeared during the Hilsner Affair at the end of the nineteenth century, when Leopold Hilsner (1876 – 1928), a Jew from Polná, was wrongly accused of committing murder, which antisemites called ritual (blood libel). Here, the theme of alleged ‘Jewish filth’, together with the motif of poor hygiene, took on a clear antisemitic form.⁶⁵ In general, we can say that the theme of lack of cleanliness was the most frequently accentuated motif in the depiction of Jewish guests of spa resorts in newspaper caricatures. Caricatures of Jewish guests can also be found in newspapers that were published in Luhačovice, a small spa town in south-eastern Moravia. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Luhačovice hosted several hundred, and later several thousand, Jewish visitors each year, and during the Czechoslovak First Republic, there were Jewish hotels, kosher dining halls and prayer rooms. Most of the Jewish clientele came from Slovakia, Poland and Subcarpathian Rus and were mostly pious Jews, including, for instance, the Hasidic rabbi, Chaim Elazar Spira from Mukachevo (1868 – 1937).⁶⁶ In the book Luhačovické dojmy [Impressions of Luhačovice], published in 1932, the amateur historian and writer Rudolf Richard Hofmeister (1868 – 1934) noted that among the religious Jews from the East were ‘rich merchants who no longer wore kaftans, but ordinary men’s attire’.⁶⁷ However, they were not portrayed in this way by Prague caricaturist and illustrator František Smatek (1899 – 1978) in Lázeňský Zpravodaj Luhačovický [Spa Newsletter Luhačovice]. In the years 1930 and 1931, he drew four caricatures that only depicted East European Jews for the newspaper. Along with the stereotyped physiognomy and the well-known theme of mammon or economic opportunism, with which Jews had been negatively associated since the Middle Ages, he focused on the motif of sexual harassment and rapaciousness. In one illustration [21] we see a Jew with a lustful expression on his face extending his big hand towards a young girl who is in the process of getting un-

 Cf., for example, ’Račte se před vkročením do bazinu sprchou opláchnouti‘, Humoristické listy XXXVI, 1894, No. 21, 25. 5., p. 5. – Karel Krejčík, ’Vzhůru do lázní!‘, Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 19, 10. 5., p. 5. – Karel Vítek, Humoristické listy LXVII, 1924, No. 33, 8. 8., p. 398.  Cf., for example, ’Masarykovcům teď nastane práce s drhnutím mouřenína Poldíka z Polné‘, Šípy XIII, 1900, No. 21, 5. 5., p. 5  See Blanka Petráková, ’Židé v Luhačovicích’, Acta Musealia Muzea jihovýchodní Moravy ve Zlíně IX, 2009, No. 1– 2, pp. 91– 110.  Rudolf Richard Hofmeister, Luhačovické dojmy, Prague 1932, p. 19.

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Fig. 21: ‘Wonderful! You see, miss, it always pays for me to bathe in first class. Upon my soul, don’t scream – I’ve paid for it.’ František Smatek, ‘Grossartig! Viděj slečinko…’ [Wonderful! You see…], Lázeňský Zpravodaj Luhačovický IV, 1931, No. 8, p. 9. Photo: Blanka Petráková.

dressed in a spa changing room. In the caption below the scene, in a mixture of colloquial Czech and distorted German, the eager Jew says: ‘Wonderful! You see, miss, it always pays for me to bathe in first class. Upon my soul, don’t scream –

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I’ve paid for it.’⁶⁸ A very similar illustration with an almost identical caption was published in the same newspaper a year earlier.⁶⁹ Caricatures depicting Jewish spa guests in newspapers were frequently focused on themes of extreme corpulence, poor hygiene, mammon and financial opportunism. These motifs are very similar to those found on spa resort postcards.

Three-dimensional images In addition to picture postcards and newspaper caricatures, figurines and sculptural groups of Jews were another manifestation of spa antisemitism. The small ceramic sculptural group, known as Karlsbader Idylle [The Karlsbad Idyll], appeared from the end of the nineteenth century, and always depicted three East European Jews sitting together on a bench [22]. They wore kaftans and head coverings, carried umbrellas or walking sticks, and their faces bore the imprint of unmistakable negative Jewish physiognomy. This theme is probably based on an older version depicting three Jews wearing tricorne hats engaged in fervent discussion. In academic literature, this older motif is referred to as ‘drei mauschelnde Juden’ [three Jews chatting in Yiddish], with the German verb mauscheln ⁷⁰ which means speaking Yiddish or the distorted language of the country with Jewish elements, thus the national language contaminated with Jewish elements (accent, pronunciation, sentence structure and lexicon). This motif appeared as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century and can be seen in low relief designs on wooden boxes, snuff and cigarette boxes and the exterior of pipe bowls.⁷¹ The number of characters and the discussion motif are obviously similar to that of Karlsbader Idylle, which is, however, also based on graphic designs, which we know from pictorial and photographic postcards from various periods.⁷² One of the manufacturers of these sculptural groups was the ceramics firm Johann Maresch Siderolith und Terracotta Fabrik, which was based in Ústí nad Labem and focused mainly on the production of small, genre-themed statuettes and garden gnomes. Its model number 669, depicting three Jews sitting on a bench, was in production until, at least, the beginning of World War I. It was pro-

 František Smatek, Lázeňský Zpravodaj Luhačovický IV, 1931, No. 8, p. 9.  František Smatek, Lázeňský Zpravodaj Luhačovický III, 1930, No. 14, p. 4.  The etymology of the expression mauscheln can probably be traced to the Hebrew word Moische (Moses).  Cf. Wiesemann (note 51), p. 42, figs. 35, 36, 37.  Cf. Švandrlík (note 13), pp. X/5, 13, 15.

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Fig. 22: Statuette ‘Karlsbader Idylle’ [The Karlsbad Idyll], early twentieth century, ceramics, 13.8 x 12.5 cm. Prácheň Museum in Písek, inv. no. H445. Photo: Prácheň Museum in Písek.

duced in minor variations, with inscriptions referring to spa towns such as Karlsbad, the Slovak town of Bardejovské Kúpele and Merano, in the north of present-

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day Italy.⁷³ The sculptural group served as a paperweight, a holder for envelopes or sheets of paper, a decorative item and, of course, above all, as a souvenir bought in one of the spa towns. The motif was also used in the form of low relief on tin ashtrays⁷⁴ or of printed decoration on ceramic bowls, which were produced at the well-known porcelain factory in Stará Role near Karlsbad in the 1920s and 1930s [23].⁷⁵ The German inscription Karlsbader Idylle is even printed

Fig. 23: Ashtray ‘Karlsbader Idylle’ [The Karlsbad Idyll], 1920s or 1930s, ceramics, 16.5 x 9.5 cm. Museum Karlovy Vary, acq. no. 20/2010. Photo: Museum Karlovy Vary.

on the side. An identical scene can be seen in hand-coloured photographs reproduced on postcards from Marienbad at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, however, the three Jews sitting on the bench were not described as Karls-

 Cf. Wiesemann (note 51), p. 43, fig. 38. – Maroš Borský and Jana Švantnerová (eds), Eugen Bárkány. Medzi Prešovom a Bratislavou. Between Prešov and Bratislava, Bratislava 2018, pp. 200 – 201.  Cf., for example a tin ashtray, West Bohemia Museum in Pilsen, inv. no. 11669.  I would like to thank Lukáš Svoboda of Karlsbad Museum for drawing my attention to this artefact.

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bader Idylle, but as ‘Spa guests from Galicia’. ⁷⁶ It is very likely they were models made up to look like East European Jews, as they feature in ten other photographs in variously staged poses. The motif of the Karlsbader Idylle, whether used in photography, or as a decor, or in a sculptural design, is not explicitly antisemitic; however, it works with stereotypically recurring Jewish physiognomy. Another popular product of the ceramic workshop of the Maresch family of Ústí nad Labem consisted of variations of a sculptural group of two Jews, one of whom would be a thin East European in a kaftan and the other a corpulent assimilated Jew wearing a waistcoat and modern coat. The names of these small objects, which were always painted in oils and were produced up until the 1920s, were engraved into the pedestal and read: ‘A Bourse Secret’, ‘Also a Secret’ and ‘Bourse Jew and Kaftan Jew’. ⁷⁷ The figures are characterized by the stereotypical depiction of the faces and expressive hand gestures [24]. Other ceramic and wooden figures have been preserved, however, that caricature Jews with a large spa cup or depict their angry expressions during discussion,⁷⁸ but all these artefacts are evidence of a latent form of generally accepted spa antisemitism.

Conclusion When we compare visual manifestations of spa antisemitism in Bohemia and Moravia with antisemitism in the German lands, we see that the form of antisemitism in the Czech lands was, with rare exceptions, relatively restrained and very far from the open radicalism of the German Reich. For example, the fashion for pornographic postcards in German spa resorts at the beginning of the twentieth century, depicting naked Jewish figures in provocative erotic poses and intimate acts,⁷⁹ had absolutely no impact on the Czech lands. Czech spa antisemitism manifested itself mostly in the form of picture postcards, newspaper caricatures and small figurines and sculptural groups. All the Jewish characters depicted shared the characteristic features of stereotyped physiognomy and distinctive emotionally loaded gestures. The iconographic repertoire of Jewish characters was deliberately narrowed down to two basic types: the poor East European

 ‘Curgäste aus Galizien.’ Cf. Švandrlík (note 13) p. X/10.  ‘Ein Börsengeheimnis’, ‘Auch ein Geheimnis’, ‘Börsenjude und Kaftanjude.’ Cf. Wiesemann (note 51), pp. 45, 63, figs. 41, 42, 72.  Cf., the reclining figure of a Jew with a large cup with the inscription ‘Karlsbader’, Wiesemann (note 51), p. 136, fig. 223. Also, the wooden sculptural group of two Jews, Jewish Museum in Prague, inv. no. 180.522.  Cf., for example, ‘Familie Schleckeles im Sandbad!’, Jewish Museum in Vienna, inv. no. 11908.

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Fig. 24: Statuette of two Jews, 1920s or 1930s, wood, 22 x 12.5 cm. Jewish museum in Prague, inv. no. 180.522. Photo: Jewish Museum in Prague.

Jew and his corpulent assimilated counterpart. The diversity of Jewish visitors to the spas was deliberately suppressed and replaced with a simplified visual duality. The portrayal of Jewish spa visitors and Jews in general was deliberately caricatured. Under the guise of humour was concealed the popular iconography of the antisemitism of the period, which primarily portrayed Jews as something completely alien, distinctive and mainly hostile. On postcards or in newspapers the cartoonists also mocked other national, social and religious groups visiting the Bohemian and Moravian spas. However, the number of these cartoons and their extent or intensity cannot in any way be compared to those which depicted Jewish visitors to the spa or Jews in general.

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Contemporary reproduction techniques – and in first place the medium of the postcard – were thus among many other factors that fuelled a broad interest in the Jewish presence in the spa towns, but the real goal of this interest became ridicule, defamation, and shame.

Michal Frankl

Jews Out of Place? Place and Space in Czech Antisemitic Caricatures Summary: Using examples of antisemitic caricatures published in the Czech press at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the function of place and space in this form of visualization of Jews. Existing research paid more attention to the deformed, racist rendering of Jewish physiognomy and to visual codes which made Jews recognizable and which expressed their alleged negative qualities. Experimenting at the crossroads of studies in visual antisemitism and spatial studies, this article is an attempt to make a critical examination of the construction of space through negative images of Jews. It focuses on two sets of caricatures, one placing Jews in the public space in Prague and in interaction and sometimes dialogue with non-Jews, and pictures reflecting on nationalist exhibitions in Prague in the 1890s. The article argues that these images depicted Jews as both included in the space and excluded through the logic of the (middle class, nationalized) space and that this visual representation co-produced the expectations related to places in ways which could potentially be translated into real exclusionary practices. Keywords: antisemitism, spatial studies, caricature Two largely identical images in which a ‘Jew’ is sitting in a tavern were published in the Czech satirical newspaper Humoristické listy [Humorist Papers] in a time span of a few years in the 1890s.¹ The familiar figure of a man with ‘Jewish’ physical characteristics such as a large hooked nose or outsize hands finds himself in a political conversation with a Czech, both enjoying a beer (and in one case smoking). In both cases, the conversation highlights the contrast between these figures and ironises the ‘Jew’ as a calculating, dishonest person. Yet while the first creates an election-campaign discussion with a journalist [1],² the other confronts the ‘Jew’ with a visitor to the Czech Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague [2].³ Such recycling of the same motif not only testifies to the hasty

 The author expresses his thanks to the following colleagues for their insightful comments: Miloslav Szabó, Eva Janáčová, Jakub Hauser.  See the caricature, ‘A s kterou stranou půjdete vy’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 9, 27. 2., p. 1.  See the caricature, ‘Výstava tady – výstava tam – výstava všude!’, Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 37, 13. 9., p. 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-005

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Fig. 1: ‘Journalist: And which party are you with, sir: the Old Czechs or the Young Czechs? – Schlappl: I’ll tell you straightaway, Mr. Editor, if you can tell me which has more members?’ Karel Krejčík, ‘A s kterou stranou půjdete vy…’ [And which party are you with…], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 9, 27. 2., p. 1.

style of work of Karel Krejčík, the main cartoonist of this and other journals at the time, but also opens questions about the function and meaning of places and spaces in antisemitic caricature. Is it no more than a background for an invented conversation, taking the figures out of place and space? Yet, at the same time, it is also an act constructing a shared social space: an invented conversation needs to be set in the space of daily life, making the tavern the place for an unlikely encounter. For many caricatures, the space is a significant part of weaving ‘Jews’ and others together in encounters, conversations or conflicts. This article offers me the opportunity to re-visit a familiar topic, one seemingly examined and dealt with: I have browsed Czech satirical illustrated newspapers in the course of the research for my dissertation, a history of the rise of Czech antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth century.⁴ I reviewed these im-

 Michal Frankl, ‘Emancipace od židů’. Český antisemitismus na konci 19. století, Prague and Li-

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Fig. 2: [middle image] ‘Well, if you really don’t want to visit our exhibition, Mr. Micheles, you should at least look at the silver streams of the fountain.’ – ‘Now, that wouldn’t be much to see! You can’t get anything for silver these days.’ Karel Krejčík, ‘Výstava tady – výstava tam – výstava všude!’ [Exhibition here – Exhibition there – Exhibition everywhere], Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 37, 13. 9., p. 1.

ages mainly in connection with the spread of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, reading together the textual and visual expressions of this worldview. In this article, however, I would like to conduct an experiment and decode at least a subset of these troubling images from the perspective of spatial studies. While the research presented here remains work in progress, it also aims to outline a possibly promising perspective on the crossroads of antisemitism studies, visual studies and spatial studies. It is a call to devote more attention to the representations of places and spaces in antisemitic caricatures. Space, indeed, is recognised as an essential factor in Jewish history generally and modern Jewish history specifically.⁵ Re-framing of Jewish spaces was a key

tomyšl 2007. – Idem, ‘Prag ist nunmehr antisemitisch’. Tschechischer Antisemitismus am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2011 (Studien zum Antisemitismus in Europa I).  Petra Ernst and Gerald Lamprecht (eds), Jewish Spaces. Die Kategorie Raum im Kontext kultureller Identitäten, Innsbruck, Vienna and Bozen 2010. – Alina Gromova, Felix Heinert and Sebastian Voigt (eds), Jewish and Non-Jewish Spaces in the Urban Context, Berlin 2015 (Jüdische Kulturgeschichte in der Moderne / Jewish Cultural History in the Modern Era IV). – Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (eds), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, New York 2017

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aspect of the Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century and beyond, both in the sense of creating new Jewish spaces as well as doing so figuratively through the liberation from the ‘ghetto’. In the process of integration into middle-class society and the abolition of anti-Jewish restrictions, Jewish spaces shifted and transformed. While the former Jewish neighbourhoods (‘ghettos’) were in decline and lost autonomy, Jews migrated to formerly ‘non-Jewish’ parts of the communities and participated in the development of new neighbourhoods and cities (such as Královské Vinohrady / Königliche Weinberge in Prague, or Moravská Ostrava / Mährisch Ostrau). New synagogues, often visible, situated in representative locations and styled in modern, fashionable architectural styles, symbolized the newly achieved status. Jewish integration into society was an inherently spatial project.⁶ Understanding how antisemitic discourses co-produced space is essential for measuring the impact of modern antisemitism and to understand the ways in which it could be translated into acts. Antisemitism as a part of social practice could only take place in a space and was a set of place-making programmes and acts.⁷ Over a long period of time, numerous nationalist and/or antisemitic texts, coded spaces and certain locations or businesses as ours or foreign, seeing the presence of the ‘other’ as a national and/or social transgression. For instance, intensive antisemitic campaigns by Czech nationalists in Bohemian and Moravian towns where they fought for electoral advantage and control of the communal councils, targeted Jewish businesses and sites, and produced an alternative national geography. Not surprisingly, such places became primary targets of antiJewish violence, especially during the riots in 1897 and 1899.⁸ If I were to revisit the history of nineteenth century antisemitism in the Bohemian Lands now, I

(New German Historical Perspectives VIII). – Michael Meng, Shattered Spaces. Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland, Cambridge 2011.  Michal Frankl, Ines Koeltzsch and Martina Niedhammer, ‘Umstrittene Gleichberechtigung. Juden in den böhmischen Ländern zwischen 1861 und 1917’, in Kateřina Čapková and Hillel J. Kieval (eds), Zwischen Prag und Nikolsburg. Jüdisches Leben in den böhmischen Ländern, Göttingen 2020, pp. 163 – 172.  Such an approach could be inspired by the new interest in space in the historiography of the Holocaust, see for instance: Tim Cole, Holocaust Landscapes, London 2016. – Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano (eds), Geographies of the Holocaust, Bloomington 2014. – Guy Miron, ‘ ‘Lately, Almost Constantly, Everything Seems Small to Me’: The Lived Space of German Jews under the Nazi Regime’, Jewish Social Studies XX, 2013, No. 1, pp. 121– 149.  Michal Frankl, ‘From Boycott to Riot. Moravian Anti-Jewish Violence of 1899 and Its Background’, in Robert Nemes and Daniel Unowsky (eds), Sites of European Antisemitism in the Age of Mass Politics, 1880 – 1918, Waltham 2014, pp. 94– 114.

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would invest much more attention in spatial studies and the way antisemitic ideas co-produced places and exclusionary spatial practices. While places tend to be taken for granted as physical structures which can be located on the map, photographed or depicted in images, current research increasingly leaves physical geography behind in favour of human geography. For many researchers, especially those coming from the Marxist tradition, the construction of places and spaces reflects and reinforces power structures and social hierarchies. Moreover, a place is understood as a dynamic concept made and remade based on the plurality of social relations – and by extension, thinking of society and relations outside spatial categories is impossible.⁹ The geographer Tim Cresswell, whose work inspired the title of this article, examined how different groups of people, based on class or ‘race’, are considered in or out of place in different contexts and probes events that transgress the expectations connected to a place. He analysed how space and place are used to structure the normative world and how discourse creates and maintains normative geographies.¹⁰ Building on this approach, this article asks how late nineteenth century satirical caricatures contributed to the place making and to the establishing and maintaining of normative, nationalist and exclusive ideas of city space. Tackling this troubled yet popular source, researchers, including those coming from visual studies or similar fields, focused more on stereotypes and visual codes as a way of marking and recognizing ‘the Jew’: by the alleged physical traits and codes – the ‘Jewish’ nose, deformed body, gesticulation, dress, umbrella, etc. In a trivialised version, the portrayal of these visual characteristics could have been seen as an expression of racial antisemitism and a precursor of Nazism. More sophisticated research uncovered the visual codes and their specific history and meanings, or probed into them against their textual contexts.¹¹ Much of this research focuses on the identification of stereotypes, characteristics ascribed to Jews as a group, in specific cultural and/or national contexts. For instance, an influential volume edited by Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör focused on Germany documented textual and visual images of the ‘Jew’ as a usurer (Shylock), of the ‘Ostjude’ and the Jewish capitalist, or Communist, as well as the

 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford and Cambridge 1991.  Tim Cresswell, In Place / out of Place. Geography, Ideology, and Transgression, Minneapolis 1996.  Michaela Haibl, Zerrbild als Stereotyp. Visuelle Darstellungen von Juden zwischen 1850 und 1900, Berlin 2000. – Julia Schäfer, Vermessen – gezeichnet – verlacht. Judenbilder in populären Zeitschriften 1918 – 1933, Frankfurt am Main and New York 2005.

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images of an alleged Jewish conspiracy.¹² Andrei Oișteanu, focusing on Romania, examined the different ‘portraits’ of the ‘Jew’: an occupational, intellectual, mythical or religious ones.¹³ Likewise, from a more Freudian angle, Sander Gilman examined the cultural representations of the ‘Jew’s body’ and the ‘creative tension resulting from the attribution of difference’. ¹⁴ Looking at the stereotypes and visual codes, the place and space might seem secondary in the attempt to isolate such deadly images of the ‘Jew’. And even more, focusing on the stereotypically depicted bodies of ‘Jews’, as necessary as it is, also runs the risk of taking them out of the spatial context included in these depictions. Place and space seem to have been spectacularly missing from this research on the caricatures in the satirical press: is it solely a self-evident coulisse, a backdrop of the stigmatisation of Jews? What would we win by refocusing on the space in which the Jewish figures are set, away from the hooked noses and gesticulation to what is often considered just a background? Some hurdles in applying questions and methods of spatial studies to antisemitic caricatures are obvious. Many antisemitic caricatures published in the popular press are set in a space which is hard to describe and localize, either as a specific place or a type of place. The depicted spaces often don’t represent real spaces, but seem to be ideological and artistic constructions. The space of the scenery in many cases seems to be no more than a background which draws attention to the Jewish and other figures. Yet, as illustrated below in a few examples from the Czech satirical journal Humoristické listy, much more can be said about the representations of space. It is not my ambition to give an exhausting or representative overview of antisemitic caricatures in Czech satirical journals. In fact, antisemitic drawings from Humoristické listy, Šípy [Arrows] or similar journals are already quite familiar – and have been reproduced in numerous publications and displayed in exhibitions.¹⁵ But, attracting attention for their openly displayed stereotypes and

 Julius H. Schoeps and Joachim Schlör (eds), Antisemitismus. Vorurteile und Mythen, München and Zürich 1996.  Andrei Oișteanu, Inventing the Jew. Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other CentralEast European Cultures, transl. Mirela Adascalitei, Lincoln 2009.  Sander Gilman, The Jews’s Body, New York and London 1991, p. 1.  Rudolf Jaworski, ‘Jungtschechische Karikaturen zum Nationalitätenstreit in Österreich-Ungarn. Die Prager ‘Šípy’ (1887– 1907)’, Bohemia XXII, 1981, No. 2, pp. 300 – 341. – Peter Becher (ed), Gleiche Bilder, gleiche Worte. Deutsche, Österreicher und Tschechen in der Karikatur (1848 – 1948), Munich 1997. – Václav Fronk, Sebereflexe české společnosti, Prague and Bílina 2011. – Idem, ‘Obraz židovského obyvatelstva v české karikatuře 90. let 19. století’, in Na pozvání Masarykova ústavu I, Prague 2004, pp. 29 – 32. – Michal Frankl, Emancipace od židů. Vražda v Polné – Výstava ke 100. výročí Hilsnerovy aféry, Židovské muzeum v Praze and Španělská syna-

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brutality, these images were sometimes deployed more as an illustration rather than a subject for critical analysis in their own right.

‘Jews’ in middle-class spaces I will focus on two sets of examples from Humoristické listy from the 1890s, one more focused on middle-class urban spaces, the other extending them by a more politicized visual discourse. Founded 1858, Humoristické listy (Satirical gazette, also referred to in a shortened form as Humory) was the most durable and influential Czech journal mixing textual satire, anecdotes and caricatures. It combined politics (in the 1890s mostly reflecting the politics of the Young Czech Party, the dominant political group) with topics taken from daily life.¹⁶ As with other similar journals, Humoristické listy had a clear history of reckless ‘othering’ through visual stereotypes and ironical language, with clearly developed visual codes for Jews, very similar to those of other satirical newspapers from the broader region, such as Fliegende Blätter and Kikeriki. In the 1880s and 1890s, the cartoonist Karel Krejčík employed clearly recognisable ‘Jewish’ types, building on the traditions of depiction of the ‘Eastern’ and the ‘capitalist-yet-different’ Jews. Most caricatures analysed here are situated in urban space, often recognisable as Prague, or at least familiar to the Prague middle-class population. The scenes from the countryside are often, and particularly in connection with Jews, an extension of the city, through following their inhabitants and their leisure-time activities and expressing middle-class preconceptions. The first set of examples draws from a social section of Humoristické listy devoted to topics and situations of daily life, beyond explicitly political subjects. It combined a series of images into a full-page composition, thus establishing connections between them through a shared situation or location. That also provides a possibility to place ‘Jews’ and others in a shared space (both the imagined, yet not quite unreal, space as well as on the journal page). In this section, the Humoristické listy reflected on and co-produced the public, shared space and visualised how these different people allegedly occupy, use and make sense of such space. These tableaux alternated between scenes of leisure time and of working activities: in parks, streets and markets, on vacation and during excursions into the countryside, in a swimming pool or spa, or at

goga 17.6.1999 – 3.10.1999, https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/program-a-vzdelavani/vyhledavani/ vrazda-v-polne-vystava-ke-100-vyroci-hilsnerovy-afery/60/, 15. 2. 2020.  Fronk, Sebereflexe české společnosti (note 15), pp. 14– 16.

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school and on the occasion of military conscription; and sometimes even private spaces are drawn to visualise a shared topic or phenomenon. Most of these tableaux expressed middle-class ideas about society, culture and space. For instance, the May 1, 1891, scene in Prague only satirised middle-class leisure time activities [3]. (While May 1 as Labour Day was still in its inception and disputed, the exclusion of the lower classes from the leisure time spaces speaks volumes.)¹⁷ Or consider a scene from the Tandelmarkt, a Prague market outside of the former ghetto and frequented by Jewish traders, which captured an alleged encounter of a peasant visiting Prague on a religious holiday and the trader luring him in a rude way. Significantly, the scene included an observer dressed in a middle-class way who also ironically contributes to the conversation [4].¹⁸ Moreover, the images of a market in which Jews trick and cheat naive peasants or even inhabitants of Prague refer not only to a general discourse about Jewish economic practices. As a specific place, the Tandelmarkt became, in Czech nationalist discourse (at least from the 1860s), a location for Jewish trickery, conflicts and anti-Czech animus.¹⁹ Invoking harmony, frivolous subjects or daily life conflicts and adversities, the section was not intended as a general criticism of the modern city (for instance, as rotten and criminal, or as ‘Jewish’). At the same time, it expressed a heightened awareness of the public (and to a degree private) space as both shared and disputed. While these caricatures make ‘Jews’ inhabit the same shared cityscape, they also embody, quite literally with the distorted stereotyped bodies, the tension embedded in this space. In fact, ‘Jews’ seem to be often the only ones disturbing the order and are thus both inside and outside, in the shared space and separated within this specific space. Space can both connect and divide: ‘Jews’ in these tableaux appear in tension with the place and the expectations linked to it. For instance, the depictions of trips to parks or to the countryside contrast ‘Jews’ with the environment: they value money and profit over nature and culture. Here the specific spatial setting plays an essential role in claiming the alleged alienation of Jews. The caricatures

 See the full-page tableau, ‘První máj Pražanů v Královské Oboře’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 18, 1. 5., p. 5.  See the full-page tableau, ‘V Praze o sv. Janě’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 20, 15. 5., p. 5.  Michal Frankl, ‘ ‘The Enchantment Has Gone’. Anti-Jewish Views of Jan Neruda in the Context of Czech Liberal Journalism in the 1860s’, Judaica Bohemiae XLVI, 2011, No. 2, p. 14. – Michael L. Miller, ‘A Noisy and Noisome Marketplace: The Jewish Tandelmarkt in Prague’, AJS Review XLIII, 2019, No. 1, pp. 105 – 123.

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Fig. 3: Karel Krejčík, ‘První máj Pražanů v Královské Oboře’ [The Praguers’ May 1st], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 18, 1. 5., p. 5.

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Fig. 4: Karel Krejčík, ‘V Praze o sv. Janě’ [In Prague on Midsummer’s Eve], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 20, 15. 5., p. 5.

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not only mock the alleged physical inability of ‘Jews’ to enjoy nature, but also expose their alleged tendency to monetise it: for instance, with an image in which the ‘Jewish’ father instructs the family to split up during a trip to get the most of the countryside ‘for the same amount of money’ [5].²⁰ The struggle over claiming the new middle-class spaces appears to have strengthened the tendency to exclude Jews through their physically deformed bodies: the alleged Jewish physiognomy is contrasted not only with non-Jews, but also with the space. A cartoon of a ‘Jewish’ family in a park, recognisable as a new middle-class space in Prague, takes this to the extreme: the ‘Jewish’ father advises his son how to get rid of a non-Jewish girl who doesn’t let him join the children sitting on a bench [6]. ‘But Moritzchen, g’scheit muss man sein [one has to be smart]! Breathe on her and she will escape.’ ²¹ As this image also illustrates, in such daily life scenes, ‘Jews’ are rarely, if at all, depicted as engaged in conversation with the others. If such a dialogue occurs, it is typically based on a funny misunderstanding, by talking at cross purposes. The tension and conflict over the public space is exacerbated by an almost complete ignorance of Jewish spaces, private or public. Unlike non-Jews, ‘Jews’ are not depicted in their private spaces; the spaces which would individualise them are expropriated in favour of the generalised stereotype. In the exceptional situations in which ‘Jewish’ private space was depicted, it typically focused on alleged luxury (standing for Jewish enrichment from the work of others) rather than any Jewish characteristics. Even a page with stories involving children and parents, and ironising aspects of middle-class education the only cartoon with ‘Jewish’ protagonists, a father and son (following the oft-repeated stereotype of Jewish fathers transferring experience and ideas of profit and smart behaviour on their sons), was placed in a café, whereas other families are located in spaces which could be probably described as private [7].²² The absence of the private is a significant marker of exclusion: not only did it show the lack of empathy for figures and families labelled as ‘Jewish’, but it eradicated the middle-class homes which were supposed to be the indispensable basis for participation in public life. In that, the visual discourse also showed ignorance and detachment from Jewish discussions and novels which tackled the meaning of emancipation for Jewish homes and (re)constructed subtle layers of Jewishness in the otherwise modernised and increasingly de-Judaised homes.  See the full-page tableau, ‘Na letním bytu’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 30, 24. 7., p. 5.  See the full-page tableau, ‘Bývalý 1. máj ve Stromovce’, Humoristické listy XXXVIII, 1896, No. 18, 1. 5., p. 5.  See the full-page tableau, ‘Pupence a poupata’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 16, 17. 4., p. 5.

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Fig. 5: Karel Krejčík, ‘Na letním bytu’ [The summer apartment], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 30, 24. 7., p. 5.

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Fig. 6: Karel Krejčík, ‘Bývalý 1. máj ve Stromovce’ [The former 1st May in Stromovka], Humoristické listy XXXVIII, 1896, No. 18, 1. 5., p. 5.

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Fig. 7: Karel Krejčík, ‘Pupence a poupata’ [Sprouts and sprigs], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 16, 17. 4., p. 5.

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The absence of the private space is exacerbated by the missing representation of Jewish spaces as places of religious life and identity. For instance, a repeatedly published picture which was probably grossly derived from the Prague Old New Synagogue was allegorised as a symbol of Prague German culture, politics and economy, as well as of Jewish business [8].²³ Closely linked to the elimination of the private is the absence of Jewish women in the shared space. Female ‘Jewish’ figures either remain completely unrepresented, or they are included without voice and agency. Unlike male ‘Jews’ who are depicted engaged in conversations, women are caricatured as silent figures. The more politicised version of the same figure of a fat ‘Jewish’ woman overdressed in a vain attempt to imitate the middle-class style, served as a code for the liberal German newspapers, such as the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna or Bohemia in Prague.

Fig. 8: ‘Nejblíže příští okrasa Prahy’ [Coming soon, the next beauty of Prague], Humoristické listy XIV, 1872, No. 26, 29. 6., p. 1.

 See the caricature, ‘Nejblíže příští okrasa Prahy’, Humoristické listy XIV, 1872, No. 26, 29. 6., p. 1.

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The idea that Jews are without roots and a moral and social basis is mediated through space, both in the tension created by satirically locating ‘Jews’ in shared spaces as well as through the absence of the private. Jews in these images inhabit a liminal zone and live in a socially defined border. By standing both inside and outside, they co-produce, confirm and strengthen the expectations connected with the new place constitutive for middle-class identity.

‘Jews’ and the exhibited nation The second set of examples makes it possible to examine the role of a place in a more politicised and nationalist context, and brings attention to the role of real places and events. A number of cartoons reflected on two major exhibitions which took place in Prague during the 1890s, the better known Jubilejní výstava [Jubilee Exhibition] of 1891 and the later and largely forgotten, yet equally important, Národopisná výstava [Ethnographic Exhibition] of 1895. The former was originally meant to represent the industrial and economic progress of Bohemian Lands over the previous century, referring to the anniversary of the provincial exhibition of 1791. Yet in the context of the radicalising nationalist politics in Bohemian Lands, it made visible the inability of Czech and German elites to strike a compromise and the project turned into a Czech nationalist demonstration instead of a show of regional economic and technological progress. The latter, exhibiting the folk culture, crafts, architecture etc. was designed to claim the region for the Czech nation. The exhibitions put the unity of the nation on display using spatial representations and metaphors. Czech nationalist media mobilised the public to participate and celebrated the growing numbers of visitors. The national ‘pilgrimage’ to these secular sites provided an opportunity to project ethnicity and loyalty into the city space. Both exhibitions were also turned into a show of antisemitism. Starting with the second half of the 1880s, antisemitism played an increasing role on the radicalising margins of the Young Czech Party and in the Christian Social movement and other Catholic political groupings. Both groups, although harbouring distaste for each other, were unified in the opposition to economic and political liberalism. Unlike the Germans, Jews were seen as endangering the integrity of the nation from the inside, making it impossible to imagine a spatial separation between them and us (the same way administrative partitioning of the Bohemian Lands was proposed to resolve the Czech-German nationality conflict). The Jubilee exhibition became a site for the celebration of the cooperation of antisemites across nationality divides: Czech nationalists excitedly welcomed the visit of the rabid Viennese Christian Social antisemitic agitator Ernst

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Schneider and a delegation of Viennese artisans. The Ethnographic Exhibition triggered calls for the economic organisation of the nation and for the boycott of its ‘enemies’, as well as for establishing antisemitic associations. Economists and nationalists argued for a new phase of the ‘národní obrození’ [national rebirth] which would endow the Czechs with economic independence.²⁴ Humoristické listy turned the exhibitions into a theatre of national and political belonging, played out in the environment of the fair and projected onto the wider space of the city of Prague. ‘Jews’ and the German-liberal press (understood as ‘Jewish’) were visually reported to shun and boycott the exhibitions and ridiculed for their failure to prevent their success.²⁵ Interestingly, this ironisation of an alleged Jewish animus took much further the relationship between physiognomy and space and brought the stereotype of the ‘Jewish’ nose to the forefront. Both in 1891 and 1895, the outsize crooked nose was transformed into a symbol. In one case, Krejčík combined a large number of figures with ‘Jewish noses’ into one tableau [9],²⁶ in another the nose was deployed as a hand in a clock counting visitors, separated from a ‘Jewish’ body [10].²⁷ The function of the ‘Jewish nose’, not a self-evident code in relationship to the exhibitions, went beyond harsh satire. Through the commentary, the motif was linked to the exhibitions: in the first case by claiming that ‘skoby’ (hooks, i. e., hooked noses) will be missing there. In both cases, the nose wasn’t only a sign of the radicalisation of the visual discourse, but the size of the ‘Jewish nose’ was deployed to visualise the absence of Jews, an alleged physical evasion of the exhibition. Two seemingly contradictory motifs appeared in the coverage of the satirical newspapers: Jews are shown boycotting the exhibition and desperately trying to visit it at the same time. On the level of the visual, this was satirically represented by an image of a Jew attempting to board the already crowded tram headed to

 Cyril Horáček, Naše hospodářské nedostatky, Chrudim 1894.  While using the same visual stereotypes of Jews, both Czech exhibitions were in contrast to the antisemitic reactions to the Hungarian Millennium Exhibition in 1896 in which Jews and the exhibition were described as the embodiment of liberal Magyar identity. Miloslav Szabó, ‘Invasion of ‘Judeo-Magyars’? The Hungarian Millennium of 1896 in the Antisemitic Carricature’, in Dagnosław Demski, Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, and Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska (eds), Competing Eyes / Visual Encounters with Alterity in Central and Eastern Europe, Budapest 2013, pp. 212– 229.  See the caricature, ‘Jubilejní výstava bude skutečně jen kusá: nebudeť v ní žádných skob a křesadel’, Humoristické listy XXXII, 1890, No. 50, 12. 12., p. 1.  See the caricature, ‘Rafije kasiňáckého cifrometru’, Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 33, 16. 8., p. 4.

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the exhibition [11²⁸, 12²⁹]. By doing so, Jews are located in the familiar cityscape and visualised together with an attention-grabbing novelty: an electric tram. The first tram line was opened in connection with the Jubilee Exhibition, more as part of the middle-class leisure space than a form of public transport. In this way, ‘Jews’ were visually excluded from the development of Prague and from its increasingly nationalised spaces. As much as they would have wished for and while physically present, these images tell us, they cannot participate in the results of the national effort. The tension between being inside and outside at the same time is further emphasised by a caricature of a Jewish family looking at the exhibition from the outside, through holes in the fence. In this way, the cunning Jewish businessman argues, in the text below the image, that he can claim not to have visited the

Fig. 9: Karel Krejčík, ‘Jubilejní výstava bude skutečně jen kusá: nebudeť v ní žádných skob a křesadel’ [The Jubilee exhibition will really be incomplete; it won’t have any hooks or firelocks], Humoristické listy XXXII, 1890, No. 50, 12. 12., p. 1.

 Karel Krejčík, ‘Co teď zbylo v Praze’ [What’s left now in Prague], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 29, 17. 7., p. 5.  See the full-page tableaux, ‘Co teď zbylo v Praze’, Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 29, 17. 7., p. 5 and ‘Z výstavy a o výstavě’, Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 25, 21. 6., p. 5.

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Fig. 10: Karel Krejčík, ‘Rafije kasiňáckého cifrometru’ [The pointer on the Casino Countingmachine], Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 33, 16. 8., p. 4.

exhibition at the same time as having seen it [13].³⁰ While also poking fun at the ethnonational divisions and pressures for national conformity, the caricature visualised the liminal position of Jews in the national society. This was also more broadly true for the visual representation of ‘Jews’ in Humoristické listy: Jews are both in and out, connected and disconnected through space and place, in their uncertain and disputed presence.

 See the full-page tableau, ‘Z legrand výstavních’, Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 27, 5. 7., p. 5.

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Fig. 11: ‘Ticket collector: Excuse me, but it’s 10 crowns to Bubeneč, not 5! – Moritzleben: Why 10 [in German]?! Can’t you see I only have one leg on the aiway?’ [Combination of ‘tramvaj’ (Czech for tram) and ‘ajvaj’ (the Czech rendition of ‘ojvavoj’ typically referred to in Czech journals at this time as a characteristic of Jewish speech)]. Karel Krejčík, ‘Co teď zbylo v Praze’ [What’s left now in Prague], Humoristické listy XXXIII, 1891, No. 29, 17. 7., p. 5.

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Fig. 12: ‘Trotter: Could I still get aboard too? – Conductor: Only if you hook yourself onto the edge of the roof with your own nose.’ Karel Krejčík, ‘Z výstavy a o výstavě’ [From the exhibition and about the exhibition], Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 25, 21. 6., p. 5.

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Fig. 13: ‘The trick of the the businessman Isak Moneles so that he can tell his Czech clients that he has seen the exhibition, and his German customers that he hasn’t been there.’ Karel Krejčík, ‘Z legrand výstavních’ [From the exhibition frolics], Humoristické listy XXXVII, 1895, No. 27, 5. 7., p. 5.

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Co-production of exclusionary practices The case studies above highlight the specific form of spatial ‘othering’ in relationship to Jews, in comparison with the representation of Germans. While both groups were attributed hateful features and behaviour by Czech nationalists, the forms of spatialising them were different. The position of Germans and of German politics in the cityscape of Prague was indeed disputed, yet German spaces such as the German Casino (the centre of German associational life) or the German-language theatre had a clear location. More broadly considered, in the context of the attempts to find a territorial solution to the national conflict (for instance, by German nationalists, to define a largely separate, nationally German territory in the Bohemian Lands), Germans could in principle be linked to certain spaces or territories. The visual representation of Jews, on the other hand denied any such connection – Jews couldn’t be matched with a space (apart from fictional spaces far away). Jewish space as such appears irrelevant at best, or illegitimate. The inability to spatialise Jews corresponded to the antisemitic notion of ‘the Jew’ as a figure standing outside the national order of the world and defying it.³¹ Moreover, the exclusion of Jews through the inclusion in shared spaces, as visualised in the satirical caricatures of the Humoristické listy, was more than only a metaphor for the nation and its figurative borders. It covered and recoded real places, familiar to many readers of the journal. While the social section coproduced the expectations of spaces of daily encounters and interactions, the satirical coverage of the exhibitions helped construct and maintain a national geography which could be acted upon and confirmed by actions that seemed selfevident and natural. Arguably, this co-production of space configured daily practices and antiJewish riots, repeated in Prague in 1897 and 1899 as well as around the end of World War I (and beyond). Moreover, when Prague and the Bohemian Lands were confronted with a large number of refugees during World War I, some of the spaces contested in these images were prohibited for Jews – at least those from Galicia and Bukovina who were perceived in line with the widely known stereotype. In 1917, the city of Prague prohibited Jewish refugees (and no other refugees) from riding the city trams; and later, during the Holocaust, Jews

 Klaus Holz, Nationaler Antisemitismus. Wissenssoziologie einer Weltanschauung, Hamburg 2001. – Idem, ‘Die antisemitische Konstruktion des ‘Dritten’ und die nationale Ordnung der Welt’, in Christina von Braun and Eva-Maria Ziege (eds), Das ‘bewegliche’ Vorurteil. Aspekte des internationalen Antisemitismus, Würzburg 2004, pp. 43 – 61.

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were limited in taking trams and prohibited from entering parks, as well as other parts of the city. And while not causally connected, the places of deportation, the collection point and the railway station at Prague-Bubny, were located in close proximity to the Prague exhibition grounds. While it would be an exaggeration to construct a direct continuity between the unscrupulous and racist images in Humoristické listy and the World War I or Holocaust-era exclusion, looking at caricatured space in more detail could provide another way of examining how antisemitic images and words co-produced expectations and meanings related to places which, in turn, could be translated into exclusionary practices.

Julia Secklehner

Simple Entertainment? Die Muskete and ‘Weak’ Antisemitism in Interwar Vienna Summary: This article considers the impact of ‘weak’ antisemitism in the Viennese popular press between 1918 and 1938. It argues that, in addition to the aggressive rhetoric of right-wing forces, visual antisemitism in interwar Viennese satirical magazines was also permeated by softer undercurrents of Jewish stereotyping. Masked as light entertainment, these were perhaps less obvious than their aggressive counterparts, but nonetheless represented a dangerous aspect of popular campaigns to ostracise the Jewish population. Juxtaposing aggressive forms of antisemitism from the satirical magazine Der Kikeriki with ‘weak’ antisemitism in the humorous magazine Die Muskete, the article shows that the ‘othering’ of the Jewish population was widely asserted as a cultural fact in the popular entertainment press, and, particularly in its weaker forms, spanned all political and social lines. Keywords: satirical magazines, caricature, interwar Vienna, Jewish stereotypes, antisemitism If one searches for ‘Antisemitism in Austria before 1939’ on the website of the United States Holocaust Museum,¹ the material displayed shows exclusively caricatures from the satirical magazine Der Kikeriki and election posters by the reactionary Christian Social Party.² These two were, no doubt, the factions that were the loudest in employing antisemitic attacks and produced perhaps the crudest displays of visual antisemitism in interwar Vienna, aside from the propaganda machine of the National Socialists. However, within this perception, there is a danger of seeing right-wing forces as the only perpetrators. This essay aims to highlight that visual antisemitism was, in fact, much more widespread across social and political factions and that, aside from blatant attacks on ‘the Jew’, softer undercurrents of stereotyping in entertainment magazines

 This article is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 786314).  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/?q=ANTI SEMITISM%20-%20Pre%201939 %20–%20Austria&search_field=Photo%20Designation, 12.12. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-006

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represented another, less visible though no less dangerous, layer of popular campaigns to ostracise the Jewish population. To date, caricatures and satirical magazines across Central Europe have predominantly been assessed by their function in stirring people up – as a weapon which either attacks from below, or, in relation to antisemitic visual culture, marginalises and ostracises specific groups within the population.³ In both cases, we are talking about caricature in its extreme form, out there to provoke and to agitate. Yet there is another element to caricature, one that is much more inconspicuous and supports a more aggressive visual rhetoric with softened content, ostensibly geared towards entertainment, yet nonetheless playing its role in the shaping of public opinion. For lack of a better term, my focus is on ‘weak’ antisemitism in the Viennese humorous magazine Die Muskete, after brief consideration of examples of ‘overt’ or ‘aggressive’ antisemitism in Der Kikeriki.

Der Kikeriki: An interwar ‘politics of fear’⁴ Der Kikeriki was published in Vienna from 1861 until 1934. In its beginnings, the publication, founded by journalist Ottokar Franz Ebersberg (using the pseudonym O. F. Berg), was liberal and pro-Jewish. This changed in the 1880s under the influence of editor-in-chief Friedrich Ilger, married to Ebersberg’s daughter Annie, who owned the publication until 1925.⁵ The magazine contained smaller images of poorer quality than haute bourgeois publications such as Die Bombe and Wiener Caricaturen, but more of them: some signed with initials, some anonymous. The signed caricatures largely focused on political events, while most of the blatantly racist images targeting Viennese Jewry were published anonymously [1]. The same is true of the magazine’s literary contributions, which consisted of short commentaries, poems and feuilletons concerned with the harsh econom-

 Ernst Gombrich and Ernst Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature’, British Journal of Medical Psychology XVII, 1938, pp. 319 – 342. – Sigmund Freud, Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, London 1916. – Eduard Fuchs, Die Karikatur der europäischen Völker vom Jahre 1848 bis zur Gegenwart, Berlin 1903. – Christa Bader, Der Kikeriki unter O. F. Berg (dissertation) Universität Wien, Vienna 1985. – Herbert Rütgen, Antisemitismus in Allen Lagern: Publizistische Dokumente zur Ersten Republik Österreich 1918 – 1938 (dissertation), Universität Graz, Graz 1989. – Julia Schäfer, Vermessen, gezeichnet, verlacht: Judenbilder in populären Zeitschriften 1918 – 1933, Frankfurt am Main 2005. – Hermann Hakl, Streitschrift gegen alle: vom ‘Eipeldauer’ zum ‘Götz von Berlichingen’, Vienna 1975.  Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean, London 2015.  Schäfer (note 3), p. 47.

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Fig. 1: ‘Weihnachten’ [Christmas], Der Kikeriki LIX, 1919, No. 51, 21. 12., p. 3. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

ic situation in the country, as well as theatre reviews and restaurant and cafe recommendations. Der Kikeriki corresponded with the conservative right-wing politics of the Christian Social Party, which remained loyal to the monarchy in the early years after the World War I and had publicly displayed a rampant antisemitism ever since its former leader Karl Lueger had been Mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910.⁶ In its German nationalism and rabble-rousing against the moneyed bourgeoisie, Der Kikeriki enjoyed great popularity, maintaining a considerable circulation of 25,000 copies from the 1870s onward.⁷ Der Kikeriki’s name was taken from the onomatopoeic German word for a rooster’s cry. A distinctive feature of the magazine was its frequent use of a mascot, Herr Kikeriki, who not only featured on the cover of every issue, but also appeared within the publications. In line with the publication’s support for the Christian Socialists, Herr Ki-

 S. W. Gould, ‘Austrian Attitudes toward Anschluss: October 1918 – September 1919’, The Journal of Modern History XXII, 1950, No. 3, pp. 220 – 231, esp. p. 220.  Bader (note 3), p. 18.

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keriki stood for the ‘small man’ addressed by the magazine, while asserting a link to the party’s staunch Catholicism in the form of the rooster as an emblem for vigilance in early Christian iconography:⁸ With its name and mascot alone, Der Kikeriki claimed to be the voice of the conservative ‘everyman’ not afraid to speak his mind. Der Kikeriki’s aggressive antisemitism, displayed in countless caricatures directed both at concrete figures, such as Baron Rothschild, and at a Jewish population more generally, employed established historical stereotypes, both in terms of its conservative drawing style and the kinds of visual tropes used: the orthodox Jew in Hasidic clothing for example, or the moneyed assimilated Jew of the haute bourgeoisie – both figure types with exaggerated physical features such as long, hooked noses, distorted bodies and dark, exoticised. A firm part of Viennese popular culture, Der Kikeriki had established a broad repertoire of visual antisemitism by the late nineteenth century, which was openly aggressive and used the Jewish population as a scapegoat for all kinds of grievances, from a perceived ‘Bolshevist threat’ to Zionist conspiracy theories [2].⁹ Ruth Wodak’s The Politics of Fear, which analyses right-wing populist discourse in Europe in the twenty-first century, is instructive in relation to Der Kikeriki’s tactics.¹⁰ Wodak has examined the form and content of right-wing populist rhetoric in the media, arguing that parties like Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) ‘successfully construct fear and … propose scapegoats that are blamed for threatening or actually damaging our societies’. ¹¹ Though the author has been concerned with a much more recent phenomenon than Der Kikeriki, she provides a discursive analysis of populist parties and their use of the media in a relevant context: the FPÖ is carrying on the legacy of far-right conservative parties from interwar Austria by polarising society with xenophobic sentiment.¹² In connection with Der Kikeriki’s attacks on both the Jewish community and its biggest political rival, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDAP), two phenomena stand out: ‘the politics of fear’ and ‘arrogance of ignorance’.¹³ The former refers to the technique of capitalising on traumatic events, such as the World War I and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, in order to incite a panic in the

 Erwin Fahlbusch (ed), The Encyclopedia of Christianity V, Grand Rapids 2008, p. 263.  Schäfer (note 3), p. 47.  Wodak (note 4).  Ibidem, p. 1.  FPÖ party leaders and politicians repeatedly find themselves on the border of illegality with comments and media posts implying antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racism. See http://einzelfall-liste.at, 14.12. 2019.  Wodak (note 4), p. 2.

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Fig. 2: ‘Another era of persecution of Christians. / ‘Don’t you know, you disgraceful snotty brat, that you keep provoking [us] with your pure Aryan looks?’ / The Muscovite Angel of Peace as he was seen in Vienna on 15 July.’ ‘Wieder einmal ein Zeitalter der Christenverfolgung’ [Another era of persecution of Christians] and ‘Der moskowitische Friedensengel’ [The Muscovite Angel of Peace], Der Kikeriki LXVII, 1927, No. 30, 24. 7., p. 2. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

population that their lifestyle and heritage is endangered by a foreign force – such as ‘the Jews’. The ‘arrogance of ignorance’ on the other hand describes the appeal to the ‘little man’ to rely on ‘common sense’, and the condemnation of intellectualism. This was a consistent element in Der Kikeriki, which presented the SDAP party leaders as haute bourgeois manipulators of the common peo-

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ple.¹⁴ By misusing social and political changes to incite fears among the population, and providing them with a Feindbild (‘image of the enemy’) built on established stereotypes (such as ‘the Jewish Bolshevik’ in a conflation of antisemitic and anti-SDAP sentiment), Der Kikeriki offered guidance to its readers with a definition of a clearly demarcated Austrian identity. They employed fear to justify the Christian Socialists’ and other right-wing parties’ anti-democratic, antisemitic and anti-SDAP stance, painting these elements as responsible for the destabilisation of Austrian society and signalling that action against them was necessary to ‘protect the nation’.¹⁵ Another relevant part of Wodak’s analysis is her warning that ‘it would be dangerous to regard modern populism as void of serious content … and thus to downplay its reach’. ¹⁶ The impact of Der Kikeriki as a propagandist mouthpiece for the political Right should not be underestimated simply because it carried out most of its attacks under the guise of humour. A seemingly lightweight popular Witzblatt [Humorous Paper], it gained importance in the propaganda process for its reliance on humour, which triggered emotion and established an ‘emotional bond’ between reader and publication through laughter, instilling a sense of trust.¹⁷ Der Kikeriki thereby contributed to the legitimisation of antisemitism in the popular sphere by forging a seemingly irreconcilable difference between Austrian identity, ‘Jewishness’ and socialism, which separated a ‘true’ Austrian population of Kikeriki sympathisers from an imagined, unwelcomed rest.¹⁸ By extension, Der Kikeriki normalised antisemitism before violence against Jews was institutionalised by National Socialism. While its actual impact cannot be sufficiently measured, it is clear that there was a high propensity of violence against Jews in its caricatures throughout the interwar years, which slowly turned into a reality. Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius argues that this correlation between visual regimes and reality is, in fact, what constitutes the power of cartoons and caricatures. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘notion of regimes of truth’ and Stuart Hall’s definition of ‘visual regimes’ as ‘regimented modes of seeing and perceiving’, Murawska-Muthesius sets cartoons and caricatures on a par with photography and film, arguing that they are a ‘particularly good instance of the practices of stereotyping and of the constitution and the naturalisation of ‘scopic

    

Bürgermeister, ‘Notwendige Genugtuung’, Der Kikeriki LXVII, 1927, No. 30, 24. 7., p. 2. Wodak (note 4), p. 5. Ibidem, p. 3. Ibidem, p. 123. – Freud (note 3), p. 146. Wodak (note 4), p. 50.

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regimes’’. ¹⁹ In other words, caricatures and cartoons, and satirical magazines by extension, helped to naturalise certain ‘modes of seeing and representing the world’. ²⁰ Taking this into account in conjunction with Der Kikeriki’s continuing popularity, one may detect a deeply engrained antisemitism in Austrian culture, in which visual stereotypes represented part of an established, much broader anti-Jewish sentiment that would eventually serve the legitimisation of antisemitic policies and mass murder by the National Socialist regime. At the same time, Der Kikeriki was directed at a specific part of the population, embodied by its mascot as the representative for the ‘common man’. However, as outlined at the beginning, there was also a different kind of visual antisemitism, which perhaps was not as apparent and aggressive as Der Kikeriki’s but, precisely for that reason, spread notions of Jewish difference even more widely in the popular culture of the day. Geared towards a better-educated section of the population and presented more within the context of an entertainment, rather than an explicitly political magazine, the ‘weak’ antisemitism of Die Muskete shows that there was another way of pronouncing Jewish difference in humorous magazines, which increasingly blurred the line between pronouncedly ‘harmless’ illustrations and the visual differentiation of a Jewish ‘other’. An important aspect in this context is the function of humour as a diffuser, represented by Die Muskete as one of the few satirical magazines that continued to be published after the takeover of the National Socialist regime. In line with Patrick Merzinger’s argument, that the population yearns for simple and entertaining comedy at times of oppression, under Nazism Die Muskete offered a sought-after, light-hearted world of escape.²¹ As I suggested elsewhere, it thus survived because of its deadpan humour and conventional visual language, while the existence of its expressively political left- and right-wing counterparts (Der Kikeriki, Die Leuchtrakete) was not only bound to times of particular sociopolitical upheaval, but also a democratic environment.²² Considering Die Mus-

 Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘1956 in the Cartoonist’s Gaze. Fixing the Eastern European Other and Denying the Eastern European Self’, Third Text XX, 2006, No. 2, pp. 189 – 199, esp. p. 191.  Ibidem, p. 191.  Patrick Merzinger, ‘Humour in Nazi Germany: Resistance and Propaganda? The Popular Desire for an All-embracing Laughter’, in Marjolein ‘t Hart and Dennis Bos (eds), Humour and Social Protest, Cambridge 2008, pp. 275 – 290.  Julia Secklehner, ‘Bolshevik Jews, Aryan Vienna? Popular Antisemitism in Der Kikeriki, 1918 – 1933’, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book LXIII, 2018, No. 1, pp. 157– 178, https://doi.org/ 10.1093/leobaeck/yby011, 14.12. 2019.

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kete as a middle-ground publication, I propose that precisely its use of bland humour, intersected with ‘weak’ antisemitic imagery, led to its longevity, which, in turn, shows that antisemitism was much more widespread than in extreme-rightwing publications alone. Rather than countering the aggression of magazines like Der Kikeriki, Die Muskete therefore normalised antisemitism in critical moments of Austrian history: the early 1920s, when the country wrestled to come to terms with its new state formation, and from the mid-1930s onwards, when it slowly descended into National Socialism.

Die Muskete: High-brow, haute bourgeois antisemitism? Assessed mostly in the context of Viennese fin-de-siècle visual culture, Die Muskete is often treated as a less successful version of the Munich satirical publication Simplicissimus, based on its aims to provide the reader with humorous content that was critical, up-to-date and of high artistic quality.²³ Yet, while Die Muskete was a successful venture in the pre-war years with contributors such as Peter Altenberg, Stefan Zweig and Kolo Moser, it changed hands several times in the immediate post-war years and struggled financially until it ceased publication under the control of the National Socialists in 1941.²⁴ In comparison to the pre-war years, when attention was paid to good material and high print quality, interwar issues of Die Muskete were of a smaller format, printed on cheaper paper and with fewer colour illustrations.²⁵ Its desolate financial situation led to irregular publication, which did not stabilise until November 1924, when Die Muskete became a regular, bi-monthly publication under editor-inchief Karl Robitsek, a painter of Jewish origin who issued the magazine through his own publishing house, Karl Rob Verlag.²⁶ Until the mid-1920s, Die Muskete was advertised as a ‘satirical art journal’, signalling that considerable emphasis was placed on the aesthetic quality and sophistication of its literary and artistic content.²⁷ Several contributors were fine artists and writers, such as Robert Musil and Albert Paris von Gütersloh.  Murray G. Hall, ‘Die Verlags- und Redaktionsgeschichte’, in idem (ed), Die Muskete: Kulturund Sozialgeschichte im Spiegel einer Satirisch-Humoristischen Zeitschrift, 1905 – 1941, Vienna 1983, pp. 7– 18, esp. p. 9.  Hall, ‘Die Verlags- und Redaktionsgeschichte’ (note 23).  Ibidem, p. 10.  Ibidem, p. 17.  Ibidem, p. 15.

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Generally, Die Muskete did not entertain one particular style but left a great degree of stylistic freedom to its contributors. This practice was not necessarily the norm: records by Alexander Moszkowski, editor-in-chief of the German satirical magazine Die Lustigen Blätter, show that ‘editorial tutelage … covered not only the political content of drawings, but also included the artistic formulation of these themes’. ²⁸ While this comment was specifically concerned with Lyonel Feininger’s contributions to Die Lustigen Blätter, Ulrich Luckhardt suggested that ‘for turn-of-the-century caricaturists, the process as recorded by Moszkowski would have been the usual’. ²⁹ Given the varying styles of the caricatures in Die Muskete, however, it appears that greater artistic freedom was encouraged here, related to its fashioning as a humorous journal of artistic merit. Moreover, since the creative director of the magazine at the time, the Austrian caricaturist and painter Fritz Schönpflug, was himself a frequent contributor, greater room for experimentation may have been possible than elsewhere – all within the frame of high-quality entertainment.

Antisemitism in ‘moderation’ Overall, Die Muskete was directed at the educated, upper bourgeoisie and while it did not subscribe to any particular party ideology, antisemitic tendencies were regularly featured – but only until the Karl Rob Verlag took over. One especially pertinent case study for the ways in which ‘weak’ antisemitism permeated Die Muskete until then is shown on the magazine’s cover of 15 June 1924 by Viktor Weixler with a caricature titled Film recording [3]. It showed precisely that: director and camera man in the background, two actors at the front of the picture plane. Judging by the male actor’s costume and posture, the film in question was a Western, with the director shouting to the actor ‘Abeles, shoot!’ The response (mimicking an accent): ‘I can’t – I can’t bear the smell of a corpse!’ In terms of visual form, the caricature played safely, alluding to modernist form with strong, expressive lines, and use of a single primary colour, yet not economised to the point of abstraction. This ‘careful’ modernism was representative of Weixler’s oeuvre overall. A trained architect, he worked predominantly as an illustrator and graphic designer, producing, for example, posters for the  ‘Die redaktionelle Bevormundung … bezog sich nicht nur auf politische Inhaltsfragen der Zeichnungen, sondern schloss die künstlerische Ausarbeitung der Themen mit ein’, see Ulrich Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger: Karikaturen und das zeichnerische Frühwerk, Munich 1987, cit. p. 57.  ‘Für die Karikaturisten der Jahrhundertwende wird der von Moszkowski aufgezeichnete Weg der Entstehung einer Karikatur der übliche gewesen sein’, see ibidem.

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Fig. 3: ‘Abeles, shoot!’ – ‘I can’t – I can’t bear the smell of a corpse!’ Viktor Weixler, ‘Filmaufnahme’ [Film recording], Die Muskete XXXVIII, 1924, No. 11, 15. 6., p. 1. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

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Vienna International Trade Fair in 1924, as well as advertising posters for fashion houses.³⁰ Across his oeuvre, as in his caricatures, Weixler was what might be termed a ‘moderate modernist’; someone, who was clearly aware of international developments in all of his fields of work but employed them in a toned-down manner. His politics could be described similarly: staying conspicuously ‘a-political’, his continuous teaching positions and few building projects in the 1930s suggest some allegiance with the Austro-fascist regime installed in 1933/34, without him ever taking an overt political standpoint.³¹ This middle-ground position also relates to Weixler’s uses of Jewish stereotyping. By the scene’s Western setting alone, Film recording insinuated the popular stereotype that Jews played a disproportionally high role in the American/Hollywood film industry, while the ‘Jewishness’ of at least one figure, the actor going by the Jewish name Abeles, was made explicit. In an interplay of references to ‘Jewishness’, stereotypes were constructed and re-affirmed, while avoiding outright attacks. A further element of this ‘weak’ antisemitism, buttressed in visual terms by the actor’s prominent nose and dark features, was represented in Abeles’ refusal to shoot for example, which, crudely, also implied sexual impotence to insinuate Jewish ‘unmanliness’ – a popular antisemitic stereotype pseudo-scientifically analysed in Otto Weininger’s influential book Sex and Character, published in its twentieth edition by 1920.³² Yet while the text only explicitly makes the actor Jewish, both the director and, particularly, the actress can be identified as such by association. In reference to Lisa Silverman’s analysis of Jewish identity construction, the position of the Jewish woman – a much less frequently assessed element in analyses of antisemitic imagery – especially comes to mind, given the actress’s exoticisation with dramatic dark eyes and a heavily sexualised curvaceous body. Silverman has argued that ‘Jewish difference [in interwar Austria] functioned as a deeply engrained system used to shape contemporary interpretations of unexpected events in unstable times’. ³³ By extension, the designation ‘Jewish’ in interwar Vienna did not exclusively apply to members of the Jewish community but described various aspects of contemporary culture, including ‘erotic literature, newspaper publishing, and positivist philosophy’ – as well as the growing

 Ursula Prokop, ‘Viktor Weixler’, Architektenlexikon, http://www.architektenlexikon.at/de/ 679.htm, 12.12. 2019.  Ibidem.  Otto Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, Vienna 1920.  Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars, New York 2012, p. 25.

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film industry.³⁴ ‘Jewishness’ was therefore constituted in relation to certain activities, recalling Judith Butler’s definitions of gender by certain performative acts.³⁵ Silverman also points out Weininger’s combining of misogynist and antisemitic sentiments in Sex and Character, emphasising the (assimilated) Jewish stereotype that Jews were particularly ‘feminine’, which in the caricature in question is implied in Abeles’ squeamishness in ‘shooting’. Yet while such depictions of Jewish men were more the exception than the norm in Die Muskete, another Jewish stereotype highlighted by Silverman corresponds with many of the modern women shown in the magazine – Jews as consumers of luxury culture: ‘Cover art and advertisements often showed figures who were marked as just ‘Jewish enough’ – with dark and curly hair for example – to engage codings that would generate consumer desire.’³⁶ In Roland Strasser’s Dernier cri [Last shout], published in Die Muskete on 6 May 1920, the modern woman even became a luxury item [4]. The French title emphasised reference to high fashion, while the soft, impressionistic lithograph, depicted a dark-haired woman with short wavy hair, sitting at a table, marked with the sign ‘luxury goods’. As in Film Recording, here, too, the woman was alone in a public space, at the mercy of men in the background who are watching her: ‘Look how she’s presenting herself as something better [than she is]!’ ³⁷ The image conflated the luxury of the woman’s fashion, her desire to attract male attention, and herself. The woman’s richly ornamented dress and jewellery both stylised and objectified her, implying that she and her taste were defined by a hunger for male attention. Both the actress and the woman in Dernier cri correspond with Silverman’s description of the Jewish woman as luxury consumer. In both cases, ‘Jewishness’ is thus to be understood as a collective term for modern culture, rather than (solely) as a marker of ethnicity. Implicitly linked to a French or American (‘foreign’) modern culture and representing stereotypical depictions of the haute bourgeois Jewish woman in modern luxury consumer culture, they were shown as a foreign phenomenon, detrimental to the healthy life of the ‘Austrian nation’.

 Ibidem, p. 51.  Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal XL, 1988, No. 4, pp. 519 – 531, esp. p. 519.  Silverman (note 33), p. 84. – Darcy Buerkle, ‘Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany’, Women’s History Review XV, 2006, No. 4, 1. 9., pp. 625 – 636, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612020500530778, 22.11. 2015.  See Die Muskete XXX, 1920, No. 761, 6. 5., p. 4.

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Fig. 4: ‘Look how she’s presenting herself as something better [than she is]!’ Roland Strasser, ‘Dernier cri’ [Last shout], Die Muskete III, 1920, No. 761, 6. 5., p. 4. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

While the ‘othering’ of Abeles, the film director and the actress as Jewish stereotypes was made poignantly clear in the accompanying text and the visual stereotyping deeply embedded in contemporary culture, Film recording was not particularly hostile or violent towards Jews – especially when compared with the caricatures depicted in Der Kikeriki. However, it pronounced Jewish difference as a cultural fact, normalising perceptions of Jews as somehow ‘different’ from the heteronormative (meaning Germanic) population. A hint that this was indeed within the awareness of Die Muskete editors and ownership is that even such ‘weak’ antisemitic stereotyping ceased after November 1924, when Karl Rob took ownership of the magazine. Notably however, the magazines encountered several run-ins with the law for pornographic content in the years to follow,

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as it was seen to endanger the morals of the young.³⁸ This not only gives a clear indication that the influence of humorous magazines on its readership was acknowledged – at least when deemed suitable – but in view of the change of ownership also merits further attention in relation to notions of implicit antisemitism in popular culture. That freer sexuality was perceived as threatening is exemplified by the case of Hugo Bettauer, an Austrian journalist and writer of Jewish origin, who was assassinated by a National Socialist fanatic in 1925. Bettauer published the magazine Er und Sie. Wochenschrift für Lebenskultur und Erotik (1925), which was ‘to offer many readers sexual education in a popular manner, to help them deal with the problems of life, especially sexual ones’.³⁹ The publication’s second issue already had a circulation of 60,000, with approximately 200,000 readers.⁴⁰ In an aim to instigate a ‘sexual revolution’, Bettauer promoted abortion, campaigned for the decriminalization of homosexuality, and hired medical staff to answer questions about sex sent in by readers.⁴¹ The magazine soon caused outrage among conservatives, and the Christian Social Party started a public campaign against Bettauer, which snowballed into a political battle between the Christian Socialists and the SDAP: the former demanded the closure of the journal, while the latter supported Bettauer’s aims, particularly on the issue of abortion.⁴² Er und Sie was prohibited after only four issues. Er und Sie was seen as a threat to the young, particularly young women, as shown in a letter sent to one of Bettauer’s colleagues, Max Ermers, after his murder: ‘We want to draw your attention to the fact that your time, too, will soon have run out if the poisoning of our German youth with your smutty weekly… does not end. Do you want to make whores out of our German girls?’ ⁴³ While the letter was an extreme example, it contained a significant aspect to which the perceived threat of a freer sexuality was linked: a foreign influence, endangering the nation. Bettauer’s Jewish heritage thereby became a point of attack for the Christian Socials, who saw ‘Jewish sexuality’ as a threat to the ‘German’ nation. Just as for Hall (note 23), p. 17.  ‘Soll den vielen Lesern Aufklärung in populärer Weise bieten, sich mit Problemen des Lebens, vor allen erotischen, auseinandersetzen’, see Murray G. Hall, Der Fall Bettauer, Vienna 1987, cit. p. 41.  Ibidem.  Ibidem.  Ibidem, p. 47.  ‘Wir machen Sie aufmerksam, dass in nächster Zeit auch Sie daran kommen werden, falls die Vergiftung unserer deutschen Jugend durch Ihre versaute Wochenschrift … nicht bald aufhört. Wollt Ihr aus unseren deutschen Mädchen Huren machen?’ Anonymous letter to Max Ermers, see ibidem, cit. p. 174.

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eign influences were implied in Film recording, so were connotations of ‘Jewishness’ used to imply that conservative ‘Germanic culture’ was under attack from ‘outside forces’, whose ‘un-Germanic’ morals it was the duty of the Austrian Right to oppose. In the cultural context of the time, the sexual openness that was so frowned upon and perceived as a threat was therefore also closely linked to ‘Jewishness’, and, as the case of Bettauer and Er und Sie illustrates, shows another facet of antisemitism in popular culture, which spiralled from announcements of Jewish ‘difference’ to physical violence.⁴⁴

‘Diffusing’ humour in unstable times While Bettauer’s murder and the censoring of Er und Sie dimmed popular calls for a revolution in the bedroom, the charge for pornographic content did not mean the end of Die Muskete – nor of the caricature Film Recording, for that matter. With the rise of the National Socialist regime in Germany, Nazism also grew in Austria, even though the party had been banned since 1933. After the July Agreement between Germany and Austria in 1936, which gave the National Socialists a much freer hand in Austria, it was only a matter of time before an annexation took place, in March 1938.⁴⁵ Die Muskete, however, hardly seemed to register these events. Published just five days after the Anschluss, its cover was occupied by a baby in a lavender ballet dress with a wreath in her yellow hair, confronting the onlooker with piercing blue eyes – a baby that perfectly matched the Aryan stereotype [5]. Operating a record player, she crouches in front of a red and white lifebelt, the caption reading ‘A ballet angel enlivens the red-white-red idyll ‘The Blue Danube’’. ⁴⁶ Looking beyond the kitsch subject matter, the re-coloured photograph was filled with ambiguity: ‘beleben’ not only means ‘to enliven’ but also to ‘resuscitate’ or ‘regenerate’. Equally ambiguously, the lifebelt, representative of the Austrian flag in its colours, represents both emergency and safety. As the Aryan-looking baby takes charge of the record player, looking at the viewer with piercing blue eyes, it controls the music, which alludes to the idiom ‘den Ton angeben’ – ‘to call the shots’. In an entangled combination of stereotypes, therefore, a baby representing National Socialist ideas took control over Austria, which was represented as a gentle country of culture  An explicit example of this link can be found in Herwig Hartner, Erotik und Rasse, Munich 1925, pp.18 – 25. It connects all aspects of modern culture to ‘Jewishness’.  Friedrich Weissensteiner, Der Ungeliebte Staat: Österreich zwischen 1918 und 1938, Vienna 1990, pp. 284– 290.  See Die Muskete XXXIII, 1938, No. 12, 17. 3., p. 1.

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Fig. 5: ‘A ballet angel enlivens the red-white-red idyll ‘The Blue Danube’’ ‘Ein Ballettengerl…’ [A ballet angel…], Die Muskete XXXIII, 1938, No. 12, 17. 3., p. 1 (detail). Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

with reference to the popular composer Johann Strauss the Younger’s The Blue Danube. While the implication was that an Aryan force resuscitated Austria in reference to the country’s failing economy and political conflicts, the figure is nonetheless a clumsy and inexperienced baby. As Die Muskete was produced by a Jewish-owned publishing house with Karl Rob Verlag, until it was Aryanised in autumn 1938, the cover may implicitly express a warning about the looming threat of National Socialism. The real political situation, however, showed that

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Fig. 6. ‘The ever-intensifying militarism hunts down the last civilian.’ Hulboy, ‘Der immer starker werdende Militarismus…’ [The ever-intensifying militarism…], Die Muskete XXXIII, 1938, No. 12, 17. 3., p. 6. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

this threat had already become a reality with German soldiers marching in the streets, and a rapid rise in untrammelled antisemitism.⁴⁷ The wild mobs did not go entirely unnoticed in the magazine. On page six of the issue after the Anschluss, a caricature published under the pseudonym Hulboy pictured uniformed men packed together in a large crowd, their hands lifting truncheons in the air and their guns shooting oversized bullets at a single man, fleeing, arms raised to the sky to indicate defeat or surrender [6]. The caption reads: ‘The ever-intensifying militarism hunts down the last civilian.’ ⁴⁸ The caricature was unusually political for Die Muskete in the 1930s, but ambiguously so. Given the socio-political climate at the time, the ‘hunting down’ of the civilian applied as much to the antisemitism that exploded in Vienna’s streets immediately after the Anschluss, as to the curtailing of civil liberties with the arrival of a brutal regime. Not least, the ‘ever-intensifying militarism’ referred to Austri Verena Schembera, Das ‘Anschlusspogrom’ 1938 in Wien (MA thesis), Universität Wien, Vienna 2008, p. 45.  See ‘Der immer stärker werdende Militarismus bringt den letzten Zivilisten zur Strecke‘, Die Muskete (note 46), p. 6.

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an civilians who openly embraced the National Socialist regime in a radicalised world.⁴⁹ Looking closer, the faces of the figures in the crowd were individually recognisable and showed a variety of faces: individuals distinguished from one another in the crowd despite their bodies forming one coherent mass. Notably, several of the figures joining the crowd for the manhunt bear stereotypical ‘Jewish’ features. In the contemporary climate, this ambiguity deflected from the fact that, in reality, there was a clear division between those being hunted down and their persecutors. While it is possible that Hulboy simply used a well-practiced array of ‘types’, the picturing of Jewish stereotypes in the persecuting crowd hardly seems coincidental. In the face of the Reibpartien that were taking place on the streets of Vienna at the very same time, the caricature acquired an antisemitic angle, not just in the visual stereotypes used, but also the implication that the contemporary victim-perpetrator relationship was one between the military and civilians, rather than the racially motivated witch-hunt that was institutionalised at this moment.⁵⁰ On the one hand, Hulboy’s caricature implied a great deal of scepticism towards the Anschluss, particularly in the light of the sarcastic comment accompanying the image.⁵¹ On the other hand, the caricature, as Die Muskete overall, disguised the fact that the most pressing issue of the time was not the rise of militarism itself, but a divisive labelling of the population in order to target political opponents, Jews, as well as other minorities, in a pre-determined, racially biased way. Taking this into account, the magazine continued to practise what liberal and socialist forces in interwar Vienna have long been found guilty of: it barely stood up to antisemitism at all and, instead, used it to subvert the rhetoric of the conservative right for its own cause.⁵² The antisemitic imagery in the Muskete issue after the Anschluss built on a visual language that had been common across all political camps for decades, obfuscating the nature of antisemitic pogroms that became so prevalent in Austria that even German soldiers were taken aback and had to call for order.⁵³

 Schembera (note 47), p. 47.  In the so-called Reibpartien, members of the public forced opponents of national socialism and Jews to brush off pro-Austrian slogans and p ropaganda from the streets and pavements, while Jewish stores were robbed and synagogues occupied by the SS. Weissensteiner (note 45), p. 295.  Die Muskete (note 48), p. 6.  Rütgen (note 3), pp. 60 – 64.  Schembera (note 47), p. 47.

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Notably, in the same issue, just days after the annexation, Weixler’s caricature Film recording, first published in 1924, reappeared [7]. With a change of text, the director now instructs the two actors, ‘Tempo, tempo! Bring a little more life into this death scene!’ ⁵⁴ The fact that the caricature no longer commented on an-

Fig. 7: ‘Tempo, tempo! Bring a little more life into this death scene!’ Viktor Weixler, ‘Tempo, tempo!’, Die Muskete XXXIII, 1938, No. 12, 17. 3., p. 9. Photo: © Austrian National Library, Vienna.

 See Die Muskete (note 46), p. 9.

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tisemitic stereotypes implies that they had been normalised to such an extent in the Austrian entertainment press by that time, that they represented a habitual part of visual culture, which no longer needed referencing. Meanwhile, the graphic forms of the image, stripped of colour (and of its author’s signature), heightened the characters’ ‘Jewish’ features, emphasising black hair and eyes in bold, opaque black, and crooked noses and strange bodies with strong outlines. Avoiding any means of shading or greyscale, this was antisemitism in black and white extremes. Notably, these stereotypes, far from increasing in frequency in subsequent issues of Die Muskete as Austria was incorporated into the Third Reich, slowly vanished. Thus began the erasure of graphic evidence of Jewish life in Vienna, while the figures’ real counterparts either escaped into exile, or were sent to concentration camps from November 1938 onwards.⁵⁵

‘Weak’ antisemitism as continuity and persistence: conclusions As the only satirical magazine that continued to be published throughout Austria’s authoritarian regime under Austro-fascism, the Anschluss and Nazism, Die Muskete highlights that it was the bland, nondescript and nostalgic that could survive political changes and upheaval. Rather than explicitly supporting the ideology of National Socialism after March 1938, Die Muskete provided an alternative reality, a reassuring fantasy, for its readers, which reaffirmed a heteronormative world of old times: not only did it sport sexist jokes about relationships and women as subservient, pleasing objects – which fit seamlessly with the patriarchal politics of the Austrian dictatorship and National Socialism alike – but the magazine’s focus on domestic and entertainment settings gave readers permission to imagine that, in those private spheres at least, they could live in a state of freedom and autonomy. But the kitsch world of waltz nostalgia was denied to anyone but the German male readership: all others were excluded, or mocked and sexualised as inferior. Die Muskete thus served the National Socialists more than it may have anticipated in its attempt to eradicate difference on all levels. To be apolitical at such difficult times was to be complicit.

 After the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht) on 9 – 10 November 1938, the deportation of male Viennese Jews to concentration camps started. Donald McKale, Hitler’s Shadow War: The Holocaust and World War II, New York and Oxford 2006 (2002), p. 109.

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Used twice over the course of the interwar years, in different political contexts, the case study of Weixler’s Film recording in Die Muskete in this context is telling. Clearly, not all satirical and humorous magazines attacked the Jewish population straightforwardly in interwar Vienna, as was the case in Der Kikeriki. Rather, the caricatures from Die Muskete provide an insight into how prevalent antisemitism was in the popular culture of the day with implicit references and statements. They show that there were two levels of visual antisemitism that pervaded Viennese satirical magazines in the interwar years; one relating to the violence and aggression that went hand in hand with National Socialism and other far-right politics; the other in the more nebulous and subtle features of everyday popular culture, which did not necessarily present the Jews as enemies, but implicitly accentuated that there was a difference between them and a native, hegemonic nation amid seemingly care-free issues, ostensibly geared towards entertainment. Where aggressive, racist antisemitism could easily be spotted and accorded to the politics of the Christian Socials and the National Socialists, this ‘weak’ antisemitism shows that the ‘othering’ of Jews was a deeply ingrained practice in the Austrian press and found its way into the public sphere through myriad implications – tied not least to representations of class and gender. Through the continued use of ‘weak’ antisemitic stereotypes in varying forms, the ‘othering’ of the Jewish population was asserted as a cultural ‘fact’, which served to legitimise the violence against them in reality. While this practice was decidedly more forceful in right-wing publications, the halfhearted reactions to aggressive antisemitism in publications such as Die Muskete, in the end, emphasised that the ‘othering’ of the Jewish community was not only a National Socialist phenomenon but spanned all political and social lines.

Jakub Hauser

Faithful to Tradition: Visual Depictions of Antisemitism in Humoristické listy in the 1920s and 1930s Summary: According to the prevailing view of First Republic Czechoslovakia, open manifestations of antisemitism were the domain of anti-state and extremist elements, and as such were outside the acceptable social norm. However, the caustic anti-Jewish attacks which appeared throughout the 1920s and 1930s on the pages of the conformist periodical Humoristické listy (1858 – 1941), known for its conservative values and the basis of the successes of J. R. Vilímek’s publishing empire, present a good example of what was considered acceptable in a journal targeted at a broad conservative middle-class readership. It was precisely this periodical that at the end of the nineteenth century became one of the main platforms of the escalation of anti-Jewish hatred. This contribution presents the visual production of the 1920s and 1930s when Humoristické listy, by publishing antisemitic drawings that were extremely varied in style and content, continued in the line of the worst of its own history. Keywords: Czechoslovak First Republic, J. R. Vilímek Publishing House, illustrated periodicals, caricature Humoristické listy [Humorist Papers] were the most durable of the illustrated satirical and humorous magazines published in Czech, and one of the mainstays of the J. R. Vilímek publishing house. It is a striking example of conformist, rightwing conservative media in the little-researched area of illustrated journals in Czechoslovakia’s First Republic. In varying degrees, it directed its malevolent content towards what it saw as the enemies of the nation throughout the entire interwar period, which included numerous instances of open antisemitism. In this respect, Humoristické listy (often referred to as Humory) maintained a remarkably fertile tradition, of which the publishing house was proud. When we look at the development of the visual style of the periodical, we see that the frequent changes in style did not go hand in hand with the content. Despite the great diversity in artistic styles, the magazine held firm to its value judgments and persisted in its antisemitic attacks.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-007

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The visual archive of the J. R. Vilímek publishing house The art collections and literary archives of the Museum of Czech Literature in Prague contain virtually the entire archive of J. R. Vilímek, one of the most successful enterprises of its kind in the history of publishing in the Czech lands.¹ A substantial part of its art collection, comprising over 85,000 works, and including drawings, prints, photographs and other materials, consists of items printed in the publishing house’s pre-eminent periodical, Humoristické listy (1858 – 1941), which was the foundation for the success of the publishing empire of Josef Richard Vilímek senior (1835 – 1911) and his son Josef Richard Vilímek junior (1860 – 1938). This visual archive in the collections of the Museum of Czech Literature includes both published and unpublished works by a wide range of artists and allows us to view not only the artists’ works but also many other aspects of the art production created for the publishing house more generally and Humoristické listy in particular. The large number of antisemitic items in the collection bears testimony to this aspect of the publishing house’s tradition, which was cultivated throughout its existence. It is remarkable that expressions of antiJewish stereotypes persisted virtually unchanged, even though significant changes were made to the overall visual concept of the periodical during the 1920s and 1930s. Although these antisemitic depictions can, to a certain extent, be viewed as an expression of the particular attitudes of individual artists towards these thematic areas,² it is also true that even after the stabilizing of relations in First Republic Czechoslovakia, Humoristické listy, as a major project and cornerstone of Vilímek publishing, did not in any way depart from the antisemitic stance that had been explicitly formulated predominantly in the 1890s.

 For a brief history of the publishing house, see Aleš Zach, Stopami pražských nakladatelských domů. Procházka mizející pamětí českých kulturních dějin, Prague 1996, pp. 29 – 34. On the beginnings of Humoristické listy, see Josef Richard Vilímek st., Ze zašlých dob, Prague 1908.  For example, Václav Fronk believes that after the turn of the century ‘the demand for a universal form of enemy [was] declining, the illustrations [were] more a matter for the artist, and any antisemitic expressions [were] soon the product of personal opinion.’ See Václav Fronk, Sebereflexe české společnosti. Přelom 19. a 20. století v perspektivě humoristických časopisů, Prague and Bílina 2011, cit. p. 93.

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Right-wing caricature? Humoristické listy is one of the many humorous and satirical periodicals in the Czech language to which very little attention has been devoted.³ The narrow focus of interest to date has primarily consisted of the established canon of Czechoslovak caricature, the most prominent of whom were Antonín Pelc, František Bidlo, Adolf Hoffmeister, Josef Lada, Zdeněk Kratochvíl and Vratislav Hugo Brunner. This was a key element in the prevailing understanding of the development and basic features of caricature and cartoon humour in the Czech language environment. The general view of First Republic caricature is that it predominantly pertained to drawings that were left-wing, liberal and anti-fascist.⁴ The Czechoslovak canon of politically engaged caricature was largely established in the early 1930s by Adolf Hoffmeister, writer, artist, caricaturist, co-founder of Devětsil and a prominent figure of SVU Mánes [Mánes Union of Fine Arts]. In many texts, he defined caricature as above all an effective means of political struggle and, as such, considered it the culmination of the development of drawing. For example, in 1930, in an article entitled ‘Technika nové kresby’ [New Drawing Techniques], he wrote that ‘the necessity of expression intensifies in the course of the development from drawing to caricature’.⁵ In his view, caricature should be ‘… an at-

 The literary historian Pavel Pešta claims that over ninety humorous and satirical periodicals were published during the First Republic. See Pavel Pešta, ‘Proměny meziválečných satirických a humoristických časopisů. Náčrt několika problémů’, in Dušan Jeřábek, Milan Kopecký and Karel Palas (eds), Literárněvědné studie. Profesoru Josefu Hrabákovi k šedesátinám, Brno 1972, pp. 161– 173, cit. p. 162. Of the dozens of illustrated periodicals published in Czechoslovakia after 1918, close attention has been paid to only a few significant examples: the left-wing Trn, cf. Radko Pytlík and Milan Jankovič, Trn v zrcadle doby, Prague 1984; the émigré Czech-German anti-fascist Simplicus, cf. Martina Pachmanová, ‘The Liberating Power of Exiled Laughter: Gender, Caricature, and the Antifascist Movement in the Pre-War Czechoslovakia. The Case of Simplicus’, Umění LI, 2003, pp. 44– 52; on the other side of the political spectrum, more attention has been devoted to the Protectorate publication Ejhle! See Petr Karlíček and Volker Mohn, ‘‘Voller propagandisticher Erfolg?’ Das Karikaturblatt Ejhle (1944– 1945)’, Medien und Öffentlichkeit. Bohemia I, 2011, pp. 164– 202.  This is particularly true of the most comprehensive overview of the history of Czech caricature in the first half of the twentieth century: Ondřej Chrobák and Tomáš Winter, V okovech smíchu. Karikatura a české umění 1900 – 1950, Prague 2006. A significant contribution to the topic with a more differentiated view Julia Secklehner, Belligerent Drawing? The Vienna and Prague Satirical Press in Political Crossfire 1918 – 1938 (PhD thesis), The Courtauld Institute of Art, London 2018.  Adolf Hoffmeister, ‘Technika nové kresby’ (1930), in idem, Poezie a karikatura: slova z let třicátých a z nedávné minulosti, Prague 1961, pp. 67– 72, cit. p. 71. Hoffmeister characterized the first half of the 1930s as a period ‘that pushed caricature so far ahead of other expressions of

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tack, an election poster, a piercing blow against the party, opposition to coalition. … It is a black symbol inscribed on the forehead of adversaries. Black because it is part of the black print of newspapers, those black sins against truth and honesty.’ ⁶ For Hoffmeister, due to the very essence of the media, right-wing political drawing could not exist. In the text ‘Karikaturisté a karikovaní’ [Caricaturists and the Caricatured], (1934) he writes: ‘I do not know a single caricaturist, not even an average one, who would serve reaction. All pens, brushes and sharpened pencils are directed against darkness, stupidity, bureaucracy, reaction and violence.’ ⁷ The following year, in a speech delivered upon the opening of an exhibition of his own works and those of Antonín Pelc works in Benešov, he even claimed: ‘Caricature has always been on the left side of the world, it could only be there. Caricature has always been anti-fascist. It is no coincidence that the Germans do not have caricaturists. … It is simply not possible, because art as a manifestation of free creative spirit, and caricature in particular, loses its voice when attired in the brown or black shirt of violence. One need not go too far to see that caricature is always revolutionary. The grand tradition of Czech caricature confirms this condition with its celebrated periods of 1848, 1918 and 1920. Contemporary Czech caricature, as just one example, as represented by names such as Pelc, Bidlo and others, clearly proclaims that the whole of our caricature and that of the world is on this left bank.’ ⁸ The wide and practically uncharted field of conservative and nationalist caricature in right-wing periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s is usually of marginal interest, even in texts dealing with Czechoslovak antisemitism, where it serves as evidence of persistent anti-Jewish animosity that is extreme but more the exception in First Republic Czechoslovakia, prime examples of which are Zrcadlo židů: Žid podle Talmudu [The mirror of Jews: The Jew according to the Talmud] (1925) and Spása světa: ubozí, pronásledovaní židé [The salvation of the world: Wretched, persecuted Jews] (1926) by Karel Rélink (1880 – 1945). In a passage devoted to the periodical Árijský boj [Aryan Struggle] (1940 – 1945) in an article on antisemitic literature during the Protectorate, the literary historian Jiří Brabec claims that the periodical ‘continued in the tradition of Czech antisemitism, which … has always tottered on the extreme periphery of national life due to the moral unscrupu-

art’. See idem, ‘Řeč při zahájení výstavy Adolfa Hoffmeistera a Antonína Pelce v Benešově’ (February 1935), in ibidem, pp. 86 – 91, cit. p. 86.  Hoffmeister, ‘Technika’ (note 5), p. 72.  Hoffmeister, ‘Karikaturisté a karikovaní’ (1934), in idem, Poezie a karikatura (note 5), pp. 37– 42, cit. p. 37.  Hoffmeister, ‘Řeč při zahájení výstavy’ (note 5), cit. p. 90.

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lousness and intellectual emptiness of its emissaries.’ ⁹ The clear attempt to define antisemitic works as inferior, standing on the periphery of cultural affairs, and to focus solely on extreme examples of fanatical antisemitic propaganda, draws attention away from the normality and omnipresence of anti-Jewish diatribes which were not part of these extreme positions, i. e. in mainstream conformist media such as Humoristické listy – not only in the 1890s,¹⁰ but practically throughout the whole of the period of the First Republic.

Nationalism and loyalty Josef Richard Vilímek senior was the editor-in-chief of Humoristické listy from its founding in 1858 until 1864, and then again between 1875 and 1906. He was succeeded by his son Josef Richard Vilímek junior in 1908, who (with an interlude between 1930 and 1935) occupied the position until the end of his life in 1938.¹¹ The periodical featured cartoon humour based on antisemitic diatribes, while depicting itself as a traditionalist publication targeting a wide range of conservative middle-class readers. The manifestations of antisemitism in its pages are, to a certain extent, a continuation of its own, in this respect, ‘rich’ tradition. Julia Secklehner rightly describes Humoristické listy, along with the Viennese Die Muskete, as a periodical that increasingly resorted to escapist fantasies throughout the 1930s, allowing its readers an easy escape from reality and the opportunity to withdraw from political issues.¹² Nevertheless, throughout this period, we observe a heightened appeal to national unity in the pages of the Prague magazine and also calls for the exclusion of what the periodical considers foreign ele-

 Jiří Brabec, ‘Antisemitská literatura v době nacistické okupace’, Revolver revue L, 2002, pp. 275 – 301, cit. p. 281.  On antisemitism in the late nineteenth century in the Czech-language environment, with several examples of antisemitic works in Humoristické listy, see Fronk (note 2), Roman Prahl, Radim Vondráček and Martin Sekera, Karikatura a její příbuzní. Obrazový humor v českém prostředí 19. století, Řevnice and Plzeň 2014, as well as Michal Frankl’s contribution in this volume. For more detail on the development of local antisemitism in this period, see Michal Frankl, ‘Emancipace od Židů’. Český antisemitismus na konci 19. století, Prague and Litomyšl 2007.  František Skácelík and Karel Sezima, ‘Humoristika u Vilímků’, in Karel Sezima (ed), Jos. R. Vilímek. Osobnost i závod. Úvahy a vzpomínky, Prague 1937, pp. 119 – 128, cit. p. 120.  ‘As ‘Die Muskete’ and ‘Humoristické listy’ showed simple worlds filled with leisurely entertainment scenes, their gradual withdrawal from political engagement suggests that the fantasy world they built not only provided a sense of escape from reality, but also had the potential to instil the confidence in its readers that their immediate environment was secure, implicitly externalising looming social and political threats.’ See Secklehner (note 4), cit. p. 278.

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ments, saboteurs, and the internal and external enemies of the Republic. In addition to its escapist eroticized kitsch and attacks on modern art, architecture, theatre and dance, Humoristické listy presented itself, above all, as a platform for often offensive, nationalistic depictions directed against what were considered enemies of the nation, mainly in the form of Deutscher Michel – a generally understandable caricatured depiction of a German, typically wearing a nightcap, nightgown and clogs – and numbers of differentiated stereotypical depictions of Jews and foreigners in general. The seemingly neutral title of the 1932 drawing V republice máme 250.000 cizinců [There are 250,000 foreigners in the Republic] [1]

Fig. 1: ‘We have 250,000 foreigners in the republic. She should have been a careful housekeeper from the beginning: annoying foreign insects would not have proliferated so dangerously in our country.‘ ‘V republice máme 250.000 cizinců’ [We have 250,000 foreigners in the republic], Humoristické listy LXXV, 1932, No. 49, p. 627. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

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is symptomatically accompanied by a picture of a female figure symbolizing the Czechoslovak Republic who is exterminating ‘annoying foreign insects’ that have ‘proliferated so dangerously in our country’. In November 1938, at the beginning of the Second Republic, the magazine’s political profile had developed to the point where it was calling for a ‘funeral’ of the political parties. The coffin pictured was accompanied by a cheering crowd (one of the pallbearers was drawn with distinctively caricatured Semitic features) as if the nation – with the exclusion of the Jews – was welcoming the decline of the political system led by those who do not belong to the unified nation [2]. It even called for celebrations to mark Slovakia’s declaration of autonomy which led soon to the formation of the fascist Slovak State under Jozef Tiso’s leadership [3] .

Fig. 2: ‘Funus, který by potěšil celý národ…’ [A funeral that would please the whole nation…], Humoristické listy LXXXI, 1938, No. 46, p. 710. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

The editors of Humoristické listy also used the continuity of the magazine’s stance and its emphasis on national identity as subject matter worthy of inclusion on its pages. One example is a text which goes so far as to describe the founding of the magazine as a seminal moment in the history of the national movement leading to the emergence of an independent Czechoslovakia [4], printed on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial plaque dedicated to Josef Richard Vilímek senior in his birthplace of Vamberk in 1931: ‘In the hard

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Fig. 3: On the left: ‘Homeland and nation above all! Order, unity, and the honest and direct correction of errors!’ On the right: ‘Communism, party strife and wheeler-dealing, selfishness, movement to the left’ ‘Bratr Slovák začal energicky…’ [Slovak Brother has begun vigorously…], Humoristické listy LXXXI, 1938, No. 46, p. 715. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

times of oppression, he was the first to find the Achilles’ heel of Austria, paying no heed to imprisonment or fines, he was unrelenting in dispatching new arrows of satire and sarcasm; in this way he helped to stiffen the backbone of the Czechs, and in his dauntlessness and unflagging fighting spirit, as dictated by his burning love for the nation, injected into Czech hearts the first sparks of resistance, which later, during the World War, flared into a raging fire liberating the sorely tested homeland.’ The intended meaning of the text is emphasised by the accompanying drawing by Dobroslav Haut. It depicts a man in a jester’s costume, the personification of Humoristické listy, at the head of a trio of Czechoslovak legionnaires guarding the monument dedicated to Vilímek. Invocations of nationalistic pathos, such as references to the legionnaire myth or the celebration of the Sokol [Falcon] patriotic sports movement as representative of the healthy core of the nation were among the staple themes of Humoristické listy throughout the entire interwar period. An illustrative example of this is the

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Fig. 4: ‘Memorial to Josef R. Vilímek, native of this town, awakener of the nation, Deputy of the Bohemian Diet and declarant, and founder of Humoristické listy’ Dobroslav Haut, ‘Dne 6. září t. r. odhalena byla ve Vamberku v Čechách na městské radnici pamětní deska Jos. R. Vilímkovi st.’ [On September 6th, a memorial plaque dedicated to Jos. R. Vilímek was inaugurated on the Town Hall in Vamberk.], Humoristické listy LXXIV, 1931, No. 37, p. 506. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

cover page of the 27th issue of the magazine, which was adorned with an erotized drawing of a semi-naked muscular gymnast by František Horník (1889 – 1955) on the occasion of the 8th All-Sokol Festival in 1926 [5]. The cult of an athletic body typically serves here as a message about physical strength of the nation – contrasted with the numerous depictions of caricatured and presumably physically feeble Jews. Similarly, the last pre-war Sokol festival in 1938 provided the occasion for the publication of a drawing by Artuš Scheiner depicting a Czechoslovak soldier with a young Sokol athlete as ‘faithful guardians of the Czechoslovak Republic’ [6].

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Fig. 5: František Horník-Lánský, ‘Vítejte nám’ [Welcome among us], Humoristické listy LXIX, 1926, No. 27, p. 365. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

Changes in style In the collection entitled Jos. R. Vilímek. Osobnost i závod [Jos. R. Vilímek. The Personality and the Company] of 1937, the doctor and writer František Skácelík and the writer and critic Karel Sezima, who had previously collaborated with the publishing house, reflect on the history of Humoristické listy in the period after the birth of Czechoslovakia with palpable embarrassment, as a period of decline after a glorious past. They note that Humoristické listy ‘was gradually losing its thorns, having its satirical stings pulled out. It was moving backwards with every step, and in both its content and illustrations it allowed itself to be forced down to the level of an outdated family newspaper. … Times are undoubtedly

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Fig. 6: Artuš Scheiner, ‘K X. všesokolskému sletu’ [On the occasion of the 10th All-Sokol rally], Humoristické listy LXXXI, 1938, No. 28. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

bad. With this uncertainty, the internal quality of the journal also fluctuates, suffering, above all, from a lack of collaborators and contributors, real humorists.’ ¹³ The style of both of the above-mentioned drawings on the theme of the Sokol movement followed the coherent approach of appealing realistic expression that prevailed throughout the interwar period, and which was exceptionally well-suited both to this kind of nationalistic depiction and to the suggestive escapist scenes that formed most of the content of Humoristické listy. At the same time however, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the magazine was enriched by an unprecedented variety of expression: while it served largely as a

 Skácelík–Sezima (note 11), p. 123.

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platform for preserving very conservative social attitudes in the interwar period, there is much more to its artistic character than the description ‘conformist academic kitsch’, although, to some extent, that is certainly what it was. The pressure from the editors and Vilímek himself for an ingratiating ‘slick’ style, as described by Josef Lada with reference to his contributions for Humoristické listy before the establishment of Czechoslovakia,¹⁴ evidently relaxed over time, and, in the period that followed, the periodical oscillated between very different styles of art, often within the course of a single year. It is possible to chart the range of artistic concepts by means of three Humoristické listy cover pages from 1929, which typify the publication’s increasingly diverse artistic profile. The first is Harry Patočka’s collage, mocking the poster style of the magazine Šejdrem published by Jiří Stříbrný, who is pictured on the cover in the embrace of Edvard Beneš [7]. The second is the erotized personification of spring in the drawing by Josef Kočí [8]. The third cover, drawn by the little-known artist Svetislav Vuković, adopts a modernist style of expression in order to ridicule the modern lifestyle – with added racist connotations [9]. This oscillation in style was, at the same time, consistently transposed on the overall visual concept of the cover page, including the typographic form of the magazine title. While Patočka’s cover page seems quite radical in terms of the style of periodical, with skyscrapers placed on the skyline of Prague’s Castle district and the playful Dadaist use of newspaper cuttings, Vuković’s use of the motif of abstract sculpture and modern architecture in the background is more or less only employed as a means of attacking the two characters in the foreground, with the caption ‘Cupid and Psyche in the style of a modernist painter’ completely dissociating itself from the style of the drawing. Given the diverse representation of artistic styles and the wide variety of both more and less conventional contributors, it is virtually impossible to generalize the style of the art component of Humoristické listy unequivocally into the categories progressive and modern versus conventional, academic and regressive. For the purposes of this text, I will focus here on several examples of visual antisemitica: there are a number of examples of antisemitic expression which clearly show the variety of artistic styles employed by the magazine’s contributors. Rudolf Adámek (1882– 1953), who produced over 1,000 drawings for Humor-

 ‘Vilímek was never keen on me. My drawings were not slick enough or ‘sophisticated’, which he always emphasized. … There was no place for experiments in Humory, it had to be drawn according to the wishes of the publishers: nice and very nicely drawn. … Vilímek was surrounded by advisors who could not forgive me for their lost positions of power.’ See Josef Lada, Kronika mého života, Prague 1954, cit. pp. 254– 255. On Josef Lada’s work for Vilímek’s magazine cf. Tomáš Prokůpek, Josef Lada Humory. Kreslené anekdoty z Humoristických listů 1911 – 1916, Prague 2014.

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Fig. 7: Harry [Jindřich] Patočka, Cover page of Humoristické listy LXXII, 1929, No. 14, p. 193. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

istické listy in the years between 1910 and 1936, drew very effectively on his artistic experience from the Sursum association of artists (1910 – 1912) in applying symbolist pictorial formulas to political topics, such as commentaries on Soviet Union affairs, which usually had a highly antisemitic charge in the spirit that interpreted Bolshevism as dominion by the Jews.¹⁵ In the drawing Hypnotizování je v módě [Hypnotism is fashionable today], published in issue number 37 in 1919 [10], we see Leon Trotsky as a devilish hypnotist standing over a sleepwalking crowd of people. His Semitic features become more prominent in the drawing

 On the linking of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik discourse in the Czechoslovak context, cf. esp. Michal Frankl and Miloslav Szabó, ‘Rasa a revoluce’, in idem, Budování státu bez antisemitismu? Násilí, diskurz loajality a vznik Československa, Prague 2015, pp. 206 – 299.

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Fig. 8: Josef Kočí, ‘Vítání jara’ [Spring Welcoming], Humoristické listy LXXII, 1929, No. 15, p. 207. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

V ruském ‘ráji’ [In the Russian ‘paradise’], which was published in issue number 4 in 1920 [11]. In this picture, Trotsky is depicted as a demiurge in puddles of blood creating a ‘new man’ – a revolutionary – but unable to ‘endow him with soul or heart’ as we can read below the image. He is being fanned by a figure personifying Jewish capital, thereby underscoring the notion of the revolution as the result of an international Jewish conspiracy. Trotsky appears in a number of Adámek’s other works for Humoristické listy. For example, in 1933 he is portrayed as an emigrant dreaming of Czechoslovakia, which is ‘paradise for our people there, a promised land.’ This stands in contrast to Germany, where, in the background of the caricature, Jews are pictured being swept away with a broom [12]. Aside from artistically less distinctive artists who were rather more conventional in their expression, such as the painter and illustrator Karel Vítek (1877–

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Fig. 9: Svetislav Vuković, ‘Amor a Psyché v pojetí moderního malíře’ [Cupid and Psyche in the style of a modernist painter], Humoristické listy LXXII, 1929, No. 38, p. 489. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

1953) and Ženíšek’s pupil Josef Kočí (1880 – 1961), in the late 1920s and early 1930s Dobroslav Haut (1906 – 1945), in particular, contributed significantly to developing the antisemitic iconography on the pages of Humoristické listy and, at the same time, changed the overall artistic appearance of the periodical to a considerable degree. In drawings by Karel Vítek, Jews appear as Soviet tyrants and, in others, as dirty, smelly foreigners. The drawing ‘Názorné’ komunistické vyučování [‘Graphic’ communist instruction] [13] is based on the contrast between a happy schoolroom discussion and the topic, which is hanging the ‘bourgeois’, with gruesome images in the background. So that there can be no doubt as to the interpretation of the Soviet regime as the work of bloodthirsty Jewish criminals, the teacher figure is depicted with a large Star of David on his coat. In

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Fig. 10: ‘Hypnotism is fashionable today. In Russia especially, they like to suggest the most beautiful dreams.’ Original drawing by Rudolf Adámek (‘Hypnotising is fashionable today’, 1919, Indian ink, paper, 54.3 x 40 cm. Museum of Czech Literature’s art collections, coll. J. R. Vilímek publishing house) compared with the caricature as it appeared in the journal Humoristické listy LXII, 1919, No. 37, p. 292. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

the background, beside a caricatured portrait of Lenin, we see rows of women, young children and peasants who have been hung by the neck. In another drawing from the same year, a father, portrayed as a stereotypically depicted Jewish immigrant from the east, is handing his son a bar of ‘genuine household soap’ as a keepsake for life [14]. The artist also addressed the alleged poor hygiene of Jewish immigrants in an earlier depiction from 1920. A man with long side locks is

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Fig. 11: ‘In the Russian paradise. So this god too has made a new man, but is unable to endow him with soul or heart …’ Original drawing by Rudolf Adámek (‘In the Russian paradise’, 1920, Indian ink and pastel, paper, 58.7 x 44.1 cm. Museum of Czech Literature’s art collections, coll. J. R. Vilímek publishing house) compared with the caricature as it appeared in the journal Humoristické listy LXIII, 1920, No. 4, p. 43. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

objecting to the haste with which a barber is cutting his hair. The barber’s face is one of disgust [15]. The more decorative and somewhat academic work of Josef Kočí [16,17], whose creations for Humoristické listy were mostly artistically more demanding full-page colour illustrations, worked with milder forms of caricature deformation, which primarily express an aversion to Jews, but not in the aggressive, offensive manner of the drawings by Dobroslav Haut, discussed further in the text. In the early 1930s, Haut’s work for Humoristické listy included some of the most extreme antisemitic caricatures in the entire history of the magazine. He would later contribute to the Protectorate publication Ejhle (1944– 45). From an artistic point of view, Haut deviated considerably from academic aesthetics, which were represented in the magazine’s pages not only in drawings by Josef Kočí, but in those by Karel Stroff and Fráňa Smatek. Together with the above-mentioned Harry Patočka, Haut employed a collage technique which he combined with sharp-angled contour lines, a striking simplicity of colour typical of large format works, and a spray technique. Haut combined this effective and, for Humoristické

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Fig. 12: ‘Trotsky: I had a nose for not going to Germany! Yeeees… to get in that way to Czechoslovakia, I would like that, it is paradise for our people there, a promised land! Yeees!’ Rudolf Adámek, ‘Trocký: To jsem měl nos, že jsem nešel do Německa!’ [Trotsky: I had a nose for not going to Germany!], Humoristické listy LXXVI, 1933, No. 23, p. 288. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

listy, rather modern style of art with remarkably offensive content. On the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, the cover page of issue number 43 of 1931 [18] featured a collage by Haut composed of photograph clippings of dancing figures in folk costume in front of the monument to Czechoslovak legion-

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Fig. 13: ‘Graphic Communist Education. / Teacher: Tell me, Nathan, if you have twelve bourgeois and six come from prison, how many would you have then? – Nathan: I’d have eighteen bourgeois. – Teacher: And if you had seven of them hanged, how many would you have left? – Nathan: None, because I’d have them all hanged! – Teacher: Excellent! You’ll go far!’ Original drawing by Karel Vítek (‘Graphic Communist Education’, 1922, Indian ink and watercolour, paper, 22.9 x 28.9 cm. Museum of Czech Literature’s art collections, coll. J. R. Vilímek publishing house) compared with the caricature as it appeared in the journal Humoristické listy LXV, 1922, No. 40, p. 475. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

naires entitled Prague’s Victorious Sons by Josef Mařatka.¹⁶ In the foreground, there is a drawing of a very satisfied Jewish factory owner in conversation with a German. The German is depicted in the stereotypical form of Deutscher Michel, wearing wooden clogs and a white night cap and further embellished with Haut’s ‘Heil’ inscription on his belt. The picture is in a frame with a view of Prague Castle in the upper left-hand corner and factory chimneys in the bottom right. The Jewish factory owner turns to Deutscher Michel with the following words caricaturing his outlandish pronunciation of Czech, adding the letter ‘t’ where it does not belong: ‘So, you see, my friend, at that time we were so afraid and yet the good times returned’. The return of the good times is a clear reference to control (by Jews and Sudeten Germans) of the running of the state. The whole scene can thus be read as an expression of disappointment with political developments, with the artist insinuating who the real winners of the post-war order are. The foreignness of the main character in the drawing is also emphasized by his caricatured Czech speech. Haut is even more explicit in establishing this notion in the drawing Prodaná nevěsta v roce 1931 [The Bartered Bride in 1931] [19]

 The monument was unveiled a year later on 29 October 1932 in the New Town in front of Emmaus Monastery.

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Fig. 14: ‘Today is your birthday, Moritz, and I have bought you a present that will stay with you all your life.’ – ‘What’s that, Papa?’ – ‘Genuine household soap …’ Karel Vítek, ‘Dneska jsou tvé narozeniny, Móric’ [Today is your birthday, Moritz…], Humoristické listy LXVI, 1923, No. 15, p. 181. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

The Jewish factory owner, identified by, among other things, the name ‘Isac Kohn’ on his factory in the background, pounces on a figure symbolizing the Republic in a Phrygian cap while other characters on the podium look on. Here, Haut brings together several antisemitic attack lines in the simultaneous depiction of sexual lust and its use as a motif of power over the defenceless ‘bride’ – the Czechoslovak Republic. The obscene spectacle is being watched by the personification of the Czech nation in the form of Vašek, who has been silenced with a padlock on his mouth, Deutscher Michel, with half-closed eyes, and members of the government such as the armour-clad Rudolf Bechyně, the priest Jan Šrámek and Edvard Beneš, who has turned his back and is leaving the podium with a sack full of money in his hand. The representatives of the state, Czech Vašek, and Deutscher Michel are thus giving away the Republic to the Jewish capitalist with a dowry: ‘country, schools, language and name, all this you will give me’ as emphasized by the accompanying text. At the same time, it questions Jewish loy-

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Fig. 15: ‘For God’s sake, slow down! Do you think you’re cutting the grass in a park.’ – ‘What on earth! That would smell sweet!’ Karel Vítek, ‘Pro pána boha, phomalu!’ [For God’s sake, slow down!], Humoristické listy LXIII, 1920, No. 31, p. 314. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

alty to the Czechoslovak state: ‘I can be a Czech like you, who has gold, has bread for two’. With Haut’s antisemitic drawings of the early 1930s, Humoristické listy plumbed the depths of what was, at that time, tolerable anti-Jewish hatred for conservative and nationalistic but not anti-establishment periodicals. In the years that followed, explicit antisemitic drawings appeared only sporadically in Humoristické listy. Nevertheless, some notable contributions in this respect were still printed even in the last two years of its existence during the Protectorate years. These were anonymous drawings taken from the Italian magazine II Travaso [20].

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Fig. 16: Josef Kočí, ‘Sára, koukej se z okýnka, aby sem už žádnej nešel’ [Sarah, look out of the window so that nobody comes to sit here…!], Humoristické listy LXVII, 1924, No. 41, p. 497. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

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Fig. 17: ‘What do you think, Gentlemen, didn’t I play the Old Year well in the New Year scene?’ – ‘Excellently, Mr Lövenberg! Didn’t you hear the rejoicing, the toasting and the joyful embracing when the devil carried you off at midnight?’ Josef Kočí, ‘Myslíte tedy, pánové…’ [What do you think, Gentlemen…], Humoristické listy LXIX, 1926, No. 2, p. 21. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

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Fig. 18: ‘So, you see, my friend, at that time we were so afraid and yet the good times returned.’ Dobroslav Haut, ’28. říjen 1931’ [October 28, 1931], Cover page, Humoristické listy LXXIV, 1931, No. 43, p. 583. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

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Fig. 19: ‘The Bartered Bride in 1931. / Think again, Mařenka, think again, / all your protests are in vain, / you’ll bring a dowry just the same: / country, school, language and name, / all this you’ll give me when / with so little I’m content. / Think again, Mařenka, think again, / sour faces win no gain. / I can be a Czech like you, / who has gold has bread for two, therefore lay aside your shame, / you’ll be mine, I yours the same.’ Original drawing by Dobroslav Haut (‘The Bartered Bride in 1931’, 1931, Indian ink and watercolour, paper, 47.8 x 39.7 cm. Museum of Czech Literature’s art collections, coll. J. R. Vilímek publishing house) compared with the caricature as it appeared in the journal Humoristické listy LXXIV, 1931, No. 45, p. 614. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

Conclusion The predominantly escapist aesthetics of Humoristické listy were augmented by a nationalist element throughout the interwar period, accompanied by attacks against those excluded from its conception of the nation. In continuing its own antisemitic traditions, Humoristické listy, as a mainstream and seemingly apolitical periodical, significantly contributed to the normalization of anti-Jewish stereotypes and, as a result, created the conditions for even more radical manifestations. Although the social role and impact of humorous and satirical magazines on public debate should not be overestimated, Humoristické listy clearly anchored antisemitic discourse within its readers’ reactionary worldview, alongside many other types of prejudice such as that directed against female emancipation, and modern art, architecture and dance. This commentary on a very di-

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Fig. 20: ‘Jews in the sea. / ‘I don’t mind them sinking the steamer, but having to take a bath really annoys me!’’ ‘Židé v moři’ [Jews in the Sea], Humoristické listy LXXXIV, 1941, No. 29, p. 3. Photo: Jakub Hauser.

verse selection of antisemitic depictions that appeared on the pages of Humoristické listy in the 1920s and 1930s is a brief exploration of the multifarious scene of the First Republic’s illustrated magazines. It attempts to enhance the understanding of the conceptual and ideological foundations of interwar caricature and to change the perception of what cultural spheres were willing to condone or even openly approve of in terms of antisemitic attacks. In this respect, Humoristické listy is in no way an extreme example. On the contrary, it presented itself as a conservative and right-wing publication, while as a humorous periodical it had no openly formulated political ambitions. It would seem, rather, that Humoristické listy was a mainstream platform for acceptable expressions of hate campaigns.

Petr Karlíček

Antisemitic Caricatures in the Protectorate Press (1939 – 1945) and their Authors Summary: This study analyses manifestations of antisemitism in Czech political caricatures shortly before and during World War II. It does not focus only on the caricatures themselves but on their most significant creators such as Karel Rélink, Dobroslav Haut and František Voborský. Their work, fully compliant with the requirements of the Nazi authorities, was not very imaginative, nor did it achieve the aggression and brutality of the cartoons that were being made at the same time in Nazi Germany itself or on Slovak territory. Considerable emphasis is also laid on the periodical in which the antisemitic cartoons appeared. Remarkable for example is the colour magazine Ejhle, which the Nazi authorities published from 1944 to 1945, that is, at a time when activities not absolutely necessary for carrying on the final phase of the war were being suppressed on the territory of the ‘old Reich’. Keywords: antisemitism, Nazi propaganda, caricature, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia From the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews often appeared in Czech caricatures, as did Germans. In the Czech lands as elsewhere, they were depicted as alien opponents in the affairs of the nation. It is well known that antisemitic stereotypes changed relatively little in that time. The caricature of the Jew was almost identical throughout western and central Europe and a reader of magazines of that period would easily recognize a Jewish character by means of a simple code. They very often had misshapen bodies and prominent crooked noses. Other features included protuberant lips, crooked legs, ridiculous (unusual) clothing, and a large belly, where the depiction was of a successful businessman. The most common traits of these characters were avarice, guile, and treacherousness. Not long after 1918, antisemitic caricatures appeared in more or less all of the satirical magazines published in Czechoslovakia. These were, most often, depictions of Jewish profiteers (Keťas)¹ or adventurers yearning for a Soviet-style

 In Czech, Keťas [profiteer] was a pejorative term for a person ‘who did chain transactions during and after the World War’. See ‘Keťas’, in Příruční slovník jazyka českého II, K–M, Prague 1935, p. 107. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-008

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revolution. Nevertheless, over time, the number of such images decreased. This seems to be related to the humanistic spirit of the First Republic and the publicly declared attitude of, above all, President T. G. Masaryk, who denounced antisemitism in any form. Moreover, caricaturists were certainly also careful not to infringe the paragraph of the Act on the Protection of the Republic (1923) which stated: ‘Anyone who publicly incites hatred towards individual groups of the population on the grounds of their nationality, language, race, or their faith, or because they are without faith, will be sentenced to a period of imprisonment from 14 days to 6 months for the offence.’ ² Even so, popular antisemitism in Bohemia and Moravia did not vanish, it was simply deliberately displaced. To a lesser extent, antisemitic caricatures continued to appear throughout the First Republic and were – apart from some Czech journals – present in periodicals published by the ethnic German minority (Der Igel) and in Slovakia (Kocúr).³

The case of the painter Karel Rélink The deplorable star of antisemitic caricature of the First Republic, the Second Republic and the Protectorate was undoubtedly the illustrator, painter and caricaturist Karel Rélink (1880 – 1945). However, this is not the sole reason he commands such attention. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rélink was considered a promising young artist.⁴ His caricatures and illustrations regularly appeared in Vilímek’s Humoristické listy [Humorist Papers] and Smích republiky [Laughter of the Republic], published by Karel Stroff [1]. In the latter, Rélink inveighed against Germans, profiteers, and skeptically propagated the idea that, in the new Republic, Jews wielded considerable and unhealthy influence.⁵ He liked to call attention to his academic education and even looked down disdainfully on the work of some of his fellow caricaturists.⁶ However, as early as the 1920s, his work was being criticized and ridiculed as largely unoriginal.⁷ His illustrations for the sentimental novels by Popelka Biliánová and the Školák Kája Mařík [The Schoolboy Kája Mařík] books by Felix Háj (the pseudonym of the writ-

 From the Act no. 50/1923 Sb. for the protection of the Republic in Sbírka zákonů a nařízení státu československého, 19. 3.1923, pp. 207– 217.  See Petr Karlíček, Napínavá doba. Politické karikatury Čechů, Slováků a českých Němců (1933 – 1953), Prague 2018, pp. 185 – 197.  Nu [Stanislav Nikolau], ‘Rélink Karel’, in Ottův slovník naučný XXI, Prague 1904, p. 531.  See Karel Rélink ‘Nám je to jedno, kam patříme’, Smích republiky II, 1920, No. 32, 5. 8., n.p.  For example, Karel Rélink, ‘Modelka’, Smích republiky II, 1920, No. 37, 6. 9., n.p.  ‘Zrcadlo židů’, Rozmach IV, 1926, No. 2– 3, 1. 3., p. 96.

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Fig. 1: Karel Rélink, ‘Nám je to jedno, kam patříme’ [We don’t care where we belong], Smích republiky II, 1920, No. 32, 5. 8., n.p. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

er Marie Černá) are still quite widely known. In 1925, the ban on Rélink’s exhibition entitled Žid podle Talmudu [The Jew according to the Talmud] attracted a great deal of attention.⁸ Prior to that, the work of the prominent Austro-Hungarian antisemite August Rohling had made a great impression on the artist. His pamphlet entitled Der Talmudjude was a great inspiration for Rélink.⁹ The  ‘Karel Rélink otevřel znovu výstavu’, Národní listy LXV, 1925, No. 248 (supplement), 10. 9., p. 9.  It is worthy of note that Karel Rélink used the German-sounding surname Röhling until 1919. It would seem that he then modified it in response to the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic. From a researcher’s point of view, this raises the seductive possibility of kinship with the antisemite Rohling, who also worked in Prague at the end of the nineteenth century. Although it can-

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proscribed exhibition eventually took place at a different venue with four of the paintings missing, for which the author substituted white canvases with the explanatory label ‘confiscated’. Several contemporary reviewers (some of whom were conservative) were disgusted by the exhibited works: ‘According to Rélink’s illustrations, the Jew is a human beast who is ready to rob, deceive, rape, and murder poor pitiable Christians of both sexes without considering it a sin in his faith. … Rélink uses grandiloquent effects aimed at tearful sentimentality and unthinking feeblemindedness such as: Jewish moneylender confiscates poor Christian widow’s crucifix (probably silver); Jewish lecher tries to molest pretty Christian virgin in provocative negligee; and another Jewish villain cuts a rope being held by a drowning Christian woman. But these drawings are empty, hard, and crude, like their morals, and yet they still borrow from others…’ ¹⁰ Rélink then ‘immortalized’ the ‘persecuted’ exhibition in the pamphlet Zrcadlo Židů [The Mirror of Jews], which contained 33 antisemitic reproductions with partly acknowledged quotations from Rohling.¹¹ Moreover, while Rohling cynically manipulated his sources when interpreting the Talmud, Rélink simply took from Rohling what suited his purposes, an embarrassing fact that was explicitly noted even then by the writer Karel Josef Beneš.¹² Rélink attributed criticism of his work to foreign and domestic Jewish plots, and this further strengthened his extreme antisemitism. His book Spása světa [The Salvation of the World] (1926)¹³ would continue in the same vein [2]. The strangely titled booklet Nenažranski, ministr, humanista-filistr [Gluttonous Minister, Humanist Philistine] (1927) featured antisemitism and Masonic plots along with attacks on Edvard Beneš, then Foreign Minister. It was disguised as a Russian verse play for puppet theatre and its title was as meaningless as its content.¹⁴ A few years later, Rélink resumed his antisemitic diatribes in greater

not be proven, it would explain a lot. Moreover, it is rather comical that during World War II he returned to the German variant of his surname and in official correspondence with the Nazi authorities he signed himself Karel Rélink-Röhling. See the Archive of the City of Prague, Register of Marriages, sv. Jakub, 1887– 1914. Records of marriage and notes on changes of surname, p. 195 and the National Archive (hereinafter NA), Police Headquarters Prague – population records (Karel Rélink).  JRM [Josef Richard Marek], ‘Talmud Karla Rélinka čili mnoho povyku pro nic’, Národní listy LXV, 1925, No. 284 (supplement), 17. 10., p. 9.  Karel Rélink, Zrcadlo Židů, Prague 1925.  K.[arel] J.[osef] Beneš, ‘Umělec a antisemitismus’, Přítomnost III, 1926, No. 13, 8. 4., p. 202– 205.  Karel Rélink, Spása světa. Ubozí pronásledovaní Židé. Úvahy z deníku pravého humanisty, Prague 1926.  Idem, Nenažranski, ministr, humanista-filistr, čili ‘Kdo na tebe tvrdou palicí – ty na něho (měkkou) ministerskou stolicí’, Prague 1927.

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Fig. 2: Karel Rélink, Spása světa [Salvation of the World], Prague 1926. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

measure with the book Vývin židomarxisty [The Evolution of the Jewish-Marxist] (1938).¹⁵ After the establishment of the Protectorate, the ‘uncensored’ edition of Rélink’s Zrcadlo židů [The Mirror of Jews] was published.¹⁶

 Idem, Vývin židomarxisty, Prague 1938.  Idem, Židovské zrcadlo: Žid podle Talmudu – dle známých badatelů rabínské literatury, Prague 1939.

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The Second Republic – antisemitic caricature on the rise Antisemitic caricature in Czech periodicals began to reappear in larger numbers after the Munich Agreement in the autumn of 1938. For the time being, however, this was in rather peripheral printed materials targeting the First Republic regime and sympathizing with Nazism or Italian fascism. The idea of eliminating Jews was supported by members of militant fascist groups, especially Vlajka [Flag] [3]. The periodical Arijský boj [Aryan Struggle] (the Czech equivalent of the Nazi Der Stürmer) gained notoriety in the Czech lands for its anti-Jewish vitriol. Karel Rélink contributed to both of these publications.¹⁷ Antisemitic carica-

Fig. 3: ‘The enterprising activity of the Louny Vlajka keeps the local gossipmongers awake at night. We bring a picture of the local office of the Louny Vlajka where a sensible person finds much instruction about contemporary world development and the necessity for the absolute separation of the international Jew from Czech citizens.’ The shop window of the district office of the Fascist magazine Vlajka [Flag] in Louny, Vlajka XI, 1942, No. 28, 13. 9., p. 8. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

 Karlíček (note 3), p. 311.

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tures had also appeared in Štít národa [the Shield of the Nation], which came out in November 1938 and was the forerunner of Arijský boj. ¹⁸ Towards the end of the Second Republic, there appeared an anonymous and quite bizarre booklet of caricatures entitled Hrobaři národa českého [Gravediggers of the Czech Nation] [4]. Alongside allegations about Czechoslovakia being the product of a conspiracy between the Jews and the Masons were caricatures of prominent figures of state accompanied by comments. At first glance, the drawing style is visibly inspired by the work of František Bidlo (1895 – 1945), the finest Czech caricaturist of the interwar period. The book’s authors welcomed the Munich Agreement, the fall of the First Republic and the abdication of President Edvard Beneš. Even so, the political successors of the First Republic, such as the government of Prime Minister Rudolf Beran, were not spared criticism. Its activities were to be dealt with in an already prepared further issue of the booklet. It is worth noting that, for security reasons, the printing was done in Liberec, i. e. on the territory of a Nazi-occupied border region. The rationale was as follows: ‘Of course, the printing has to be done in the Sudetenland, because the Jewish-Marxist police hyena is constantly seeking out new victims, but even this hyena will be made accountable for its deeds and we know full well ‘our day will come.’ Nationalism will not and must not be trampled to death by lying-nationalism, so I have no fear in writing and illustrating this book.’ ¹⁹ It was distributed at the beginning of 1939 and, according to a post-war investigation, the book’s authors were Václav ‘Váša’ Velinský, antisemitic journalist and member of the fascist movement Vlajka, and the inglorious painter, caricaturist and journalist Jan Tulla (1890 – 1945),²⁰ who was completely dismissive of the political elites of the Second Republic, and of the Protectorate that followed it. In his radical view they were all Jew-Masons or agrarian-Marxist apparatchiks who were ‘long ripe for the concentration camps.’ ²¹

 See, for example, the caricatures of poor technical quality published in Štít národa I, 1938, No. 1, 16. 11., passim.  Hrobaři národa českého, Reichenberg 1939, n.p.  Archiv bezpečnostních složek (ABS) [Archive of the Security Services], Commission of Inquiry into the National and People’s Court at the Ministry of Interior, No. 301– 91– 3. For more on Jan Tulla, see Karlíček (note 3), p. 313.  Transcript of Jan Tulla’s speech dated 30 May 1939, confiscated by the Protectorate police. NA, Police Headquarters Prague II – General Registry (1931– 1940), box 11616.

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Fig. 4: ‘The (last) Minister of National Defence SYROVÝ. Jewish Freemason and wooden soldier. Walked around twenty years without a head and actually a schemer.’ Army general Jan Syrový, in Václav Velinský and Jan Tulla, Hrobaři národa českého [Gravediggers of the Czech Nation], Reichenberg 1939, n.p. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia The post-Munich Czecho-Slovakia disintegrated with the declaration of Slovak independence on 14 March 1939. A day later, the Czech lands were occupied by German forces. On 16 March 1939, Adolf Hitler established the Protectorate

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of Bohemia and Moravia by proclamation and the first anti-Jewish measures were introduced immediately after its inception. The occupation administration demanded that the Protectorate government quickly issue its own version of the Nuremberg Laws, but it abstained from any such decree. Its argument at that time was that since people of Jewish descent had been removed from public life there was no need for special laws. Nuremberg-inspired Nazi laws were eventually signed into effect by Reichsprotektor Konstantin von Neurath in June 1939. Their provisions strictly restricted the right of Jews to own property and allowed ‘Aryanization’ to take place outside the influence of the Protectorate government. While in the Czech Lands ‘Aryanization’ was understood as Germanization, in Slovakia, it was a welcome opportunity to take the property of the resident Jewish ‘Hungarians’ into Slovak hands.²² Virulent antisemitism was one of the fundamental principles of National Socialist ideology. Its objective was to justify the removal of people of Jewish origin from public and, particularly, economic life. The transfer of material possessions was interpreted as a kind of purification and the terms ‘Aryanization’ or ‘de-Jewing’ were used to describe it. Thus, the Jews were gradually subjected to increasingly harsh restrictions with regard to their property rights, which included expropriation, the forced sale of property and the cancellation of pensions. In addition, there were severe violations of human rights, such as the curtailment of freedom, social segregation and terror, which often led to pogroms. The culmination of antisemitic Nazi policy was the building of ghettos and deportations to places of mass extermination.²³ From 1933, the machinery of Nazi media, controlled by Joseph Goebbels, played a major role in shaping the anti-Jewish sentiment of the population. The Jew in the Third Reich was the archetypal ‘enemy within’ and, in time, also became the enemy beyond its borders. Goebbels’ ministry had a direct hand in provoking the Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 and portrayed them as a spontaneous outburst of ‘the rage of the people’.²⁴ Jews abroad were also officially presented as those who ‘forced the war’ on Germany in the autumn of 1939. Viewed through this lens, it could be claimed that the Jews

 Tomáš Pasák, Pod ochranou říše, Prague 1998, pp. 123 – 128.  See, for example, Jan Kuklík, Znárodněné Československo. Od znárodnění k privatizaci – státní zásahy do vlastnických a dalších majetkových práv v Československu a jinde v Evropě, Prague 2010, pp. 87– 95. Also Drahomír Jančík and Eduard Kubů, ‘Arizace’ a arizátoři, Prague 2005, pp. 12– 34. For a synopsis of the persecution of Jews during the Protectorate, see Livia Rothkirchen (ed), Osud Židů v protektorátu 1939 – 1945, Prague 1991. Also, for example, Miroslav Kárný, Konečné řešení. Genocida českých Židů v německé protektorátní politice, Prague 1991.  Peter Longreich, Goebbels. Úplná biografie ministra propagandy Třetí říše, Prague 2013, p. 601.

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were striving to destroy Germany and that the tough approach towards them was merely a necessary act of self-defence.²⁵ The occupation administration had a direct influence on the content of periodicals in the Protectorate (especially the daily newspapers). The editors of daily newspapers would regularly receive instructions on how to write about the ‘Jewish problem’. For a certain period (1940 – 1943), press policy was directed by an officer of the SS named Wolfgang Wolfram von Wolmar, whose office (Gruppe Presse) came under the cultural and political department of the office of the Reichsprotektor. He was very well informed as to how Czech newspapers should be written and the strictly confidential instructions he gave to representatives of the press were very explicit: ‘The work of the press is a very responsible undertaking and its tasks are great. In your papers, you should interpret basic matters relating to Jews using German literature as a touchstone. It would not be wise to write that Jews have been here throughout the ages. A thing like this happened and it will have further repercussions. An article about Jews like this was published and I only received the draft three days later. I will not tolerate such dirty tricks’. ²⁶ In connection with the occupiers issuing orders to the press, it is worth mentioning a particular grammatical edict relating to the Jewish inhabitants of the Protectorate. During the First Republic, Jews were not classified by their ethnicity, but only according to whether they declared the Jewish faith. In accordance with the rules of grammar, this was then signified by the lowercase letter ‘ž’ from židé [the Jews – indicating the religion]. Even during the occupation, a number of printed periodicals continued to adhere to this convention. Nevertheless, this practice was halted by decree of the Protectorate: ‘The word Jew must be written with a capital ‘Ž’’ [as in Žid – a Jew – indicating the nationality]. This was decided half a year ago without asking various institutions’. ²⁷ In connection with the release of the film Jud Süß [Jew Süss] by Veit Harlan, from around the end of 1940 militant journalists began a lengthy reminiscence on the ‘sinister influence’ of Jews on Czech society: ‘The Jews were everywhere, or their allies, white Jews, even during the Second Republic. They had a pervading influence, and, with assistance from their friends, they concealed property, transferred shops and supplies …. From a social point of view, the people suffered the worst under the Jews.’ This text by the militant journalist Antonín J. Kožíšek

 Ibidem, p. 508.  This is from a press conference held on 15 November 1940. Jakub Končelík, Barbora Köpplová and Jitka Kryšpínová, Český tisk pod vládou Wolfganga Wolframa von Wolmara, Prague 2003, p. 219.  Regular weekly meeting of chief editors of the daily press on 8 August 1941, in ibidem, pp. 375 – 377.

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presents Czech Jews in the worst possible light – as exploiters, fake socialists, depraved individuals, and igniters of national struggles.²⁸ The first transports of Jewish inhabitants of the Protectorate began in the autumn of 1941, although it had been attempted as early as the autumn of 1939. From September 1941, Protectorate Jews also had to wear visible an identifying star. On the eve of the introduction of this segregation decree, Wolfgang Wolfram von Wolmar slyly encouraged Czech journalists to support the cause: ‘There can be no objection to asking for the identification of Jews, so that they can recognise each other at first sight. Just write about it factually and dispassionately without attacking the authorities or government. We are working on it, but it’s a confidential matter’. ²⁹ It is certainly worth noting that in November 1939, a few months after the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union was concluded, there was a minor but interesting international spat. Soviet diplomats complained to the German foreign ministry that an exhibition of Vlajka in Prague continued to equate antisemitism with anti-Sovietism. The complaint largely referred to paintings by Karel Rélink. At that time, however, it was not only Rélink and the Czech fascists who were perplexed by the sudden change in circumstances, but also the Nazi censors, who had allowed the not entirely ideologically sound exhibition to go unnoticed.³⁰ The attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought the politics of Nazi Germany back in line with Rélink’s view of the world.

Militant caricaturists – Dobroslav Haut and František Voborský The contemporaries Dobroslav Haut (1906 – 1945) and František Voborský (1906 – 1984) were the most prolific creators of antisemitic caricature in the Protectorate. During the First Republic, Haut contributed to Humoristické listy and in the period 1939 – 1941 drew non-political caricatures for Pražský ilustrovaný zpravodaj [Prague Illustrated Reporter], which was issued by the publishing house  Antonín J. Kožíšek, ‘Žid Süss’, Moravská orlice LXXIX, 1941, No. 1, 1. 1., n.p.  Stenographic record of Antonín Finger from the press conference held on 29 August 1941. Končelík–Köpplová–Kryšpínová (note 26), p. 394.  Gerald Mund (ed), Deutschland und das Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren. Aus den deutschen diplomaitschen Akten von 1939 bis 1945, Göttingen 2014, documents No. 202, 203 and 205, pp. 306 – 310. On the exhibition, see [FAP], ‘Protižidovská výstava v Praze nadšeně přijata. Velký úspěch prvního dne’, Vlajka IX, 1939, No. 109, 29. 10., p. 1.

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Melantrich.³¹ The more active of the two, however, was František ‘Fráňa’ Voborský. His drawings appeared in 1928 on the pages of the weekly magazine Pestrý týden [Colourful Week]³² and, for a period of time, he worked for the weekly magazine Rozkvět [Bloom]. Initially, he was head of the children’s section and created light-hearted pictures and texts for young children.³³ By the beginning of the 1930s, he was producing drawings for the cover page and for comic strips inside.³⁴ He received greatest acclaim for the illustrated tales of the country girl Pepina Rejholcová, which were the subject of a feature-length folk comedy film released in 1932. The breadth of Voborský’s talent is evidenced by the fact that the sentimental song he wrote in response to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland border region in autumn 1938 entitled Chaloupky pod horama [Cottages under the Mountains] can be heard even now.³⁵ One of the first antisemitic caricatures under the Protectorate regime was published in a periodical where no-one would expect to find it. It was drawn by Dobroslav Haut and depicts two officers in Czechoslovak and German army uniforms having a friendly conversation [5]. The German is wondering why so many Czechs still like Jews: ‘Have they ever contributed to the Czechoslovak Republic?’ the German asks in disbelief. The Czech officer responds laconically, ‘Yes, to its demise, in particular’. This caricature is unusual in that that it depicts representatives of both the German and Czechoslovak armed forces. Even more bizarrely, it appeared in a paper for youngsters of the Czech Sokol [Falcon] sports movement. Nevertheless, at that time, blaming ethnic Jews for the disintegration of the Republic was not a particularly original theme in the press, caricature or satire.³⁶ In the twisted logic of antisemitic satirists, Jews founded Czechoslovak Republic so that later they could tear it apart. For a long time, traditional Czech humorous magazines ignored the active antisemitic policy. For example, the first truly antisemitic satirical drawing appeared in Kvítko [Little flower] only at the end of March 1941. It was the work of František Voborský and depicted the US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in  For example, Karel Bureš, V týmu s Foglarem. Příběh redaktora legendárních časopisů, Prague 2009, p. 44.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Náš Radio-Journal’, Pestrý týden III, 1928, No. 52, 29. 12., p. 15.  ‘Dětská besídka – řídí F.[rantišek] Voborský’, Rozkvět XIX, 1926, No. 40, p. 12.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Racionalisace Weekendu’, Rozkvět XXIV, 1931, No. 27, p. 1.  Karlíček (note 3), p. 313. For more detail on Voborský’s life, see Tomáš Prokůpek, ‘František Voborský. Vzestup a pád génia lehké můzy’, AARGH! Komiksový sborník, 2013, No. 13, pp. 47– 56.  See the caricature, Dobroslav Haut, ‘Z pohnutých dnů’, Sokolské besedy XXXIII, 1939, No. 9., p. 142.

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Fig. 5: ‘From those stirring days. / ‘How is it, my friend, that so many of your people still love the Jews? Have they ever contributed to the Czechoslovak Republic?’ – ‘Yes, to its demise, in particular!’’ Dobroslav Haut, ‘Z pohnutých dnů’ [From troubled days], Sokolské besedy XXXIII, No. 9, 1939, p. 142. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

the barber’s chair. To his misfortune, he has fallen into the hands of a British barber – a Jew – who addresses him thus ‘I hope you will forgive me, your Excellency,

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if I nick a little vein. We British need to bleed you for the cause.’ ³⁷ This alluded to the fact that the USA, which up until that time had been neutral, was supplying arms to Britain in the fight against Germany. Especially in the early stages of war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was very often portrayed as a protector of Jews. For example, in one caricature he was depicted as a Jewish guardian angel.³⁸ In January 1942, Voborský published in Kvítko a gallery of leaders of the coalition of allies fighting the Nazis, one of whom was Edvard Beneš, drawn as a clown to the Jews. Voborský’s portrait caricatures are complemented by feebleminded verses comparing the president-in-exile to a Jewish gigolo who longs only for ‘the groschen of Judea’.³⁹ President Roosevelt is depicted as a gangster and a robber (with a knife in one hand and a wad of dollars in the other) against the backdrop of night-time New York. His murky activities are supposedly revealed in the following text: ‘A gangster I am and a gangster I will be / to the disgrace of America. / I stick with the Jews, / and shout their slogans, / although the US people curse, / and warn and call out: it’s evil! / For myself, I am not afraid / as long as the Jew gives me the loot!’ ⁴⁰ Furthermore, Voborský crated numerous antisemitic assaults for České slovo [The Czech Word] and Kvítko during this period: for example, in the spring of 1942 he used the ever-recurring motif of the Jew who is leaving for foreign lands after enriching himself dishonestly [6],⁴¹ and in June of the same year he authored a satirical strip entitled Česnekový ráj [Garlic Paradise], depicting the pre-Munich Czechoslovak Republic as a paradise for Jews [7].⁴² In the first half of 1942, an antisemitic comic strip called Móricek [Little Moritz] was regularly published in Kvítko magazine, among other motifs addressing the deportation of the Jewish inhabitants of the Protectorate [8].⁴³

 See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Jehova buď s Rooseveltem’, Kvítko XVI, 1941, 30. 3., p. 1. It was usual for the American president to be drawn in the company of the British Prime Minister. For example, there is an antisemitic caricature of Roosevelt and Churchill depicted as Jewish prophets. They have six-pointed stars for halos and are pictured lamenting. See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Proroci…’, Moravská orlice LXXX, 1942, No. 162, 10. 7., n.p.  See the caricature, ‘Židovský anděl strážný’, Kvítko XVI, 1941, 9. 11., p. 1.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Ze spojenecké poezie’, Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 21, 24. 5., p. 15.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Rooseveltova oblíbená’, Kvítko XVI, 1941, 7. 6., p. 1.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Tak k nám přicházeli…’, České slovo XIV, 1942, 5. 4.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Česnekový ráj’, České slovo XIV, 1942, No. 139, 16. 6., p. 1.  See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Móricek se stěhuje’, Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 9, 1. 3., p. 3.

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Fig. 6: ‘That’s how they arrive in our country. / And that’s how they leave it!’ František Voborský, ‘Tak k nám přicházeli…’ [That’s how they arrive in our country …], České slovo XIV, 1942, 5. 4. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

Leading cultural personalities did not escape antisemitic denunciations. In fact, they were a favoured target of Nazi propaganda as they were considered saboteurs from the former regime. Indeed, von Wolmar urged Czech journalists

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Fig. 7: ‘Garlic Paradise / Non-Aryans warmly welcomed! / Once upon a time there was a republic, / and this is no fairy tale. / that boldly could be called / The Garlic Paradise. / Daddy [Masaryk] brought the seedlings / Ahasuerus’ spirit / And so began to vex the land / With a garlic stench.’

to defame them in mid-September 1941.⁴⁴ His words fell on fertile ground, as evidenced by the three-part series of cartoon portraits entitled Z galerie ‘tvůrců’ bývalého čs. filmu [From the gallery of ‘creative artists’ of former Czechoslovak film]⁴⁵ [9]. Most of the people depicted there managed to leave Czechoslovakia in the years 1938 – 1939. Some of them, however, did not have such good fortune and died in concentration camps (Emil Meissner, Alfred Baštýř and Arnold Reimann). The portrait caricatures are complemented by very primitive verses (parodying the allegedly wrong pronunciation of Czech in some passages) which disparage the politics or culture of the First Republic. The most famous figures among them were the actor Hugo Haas and ‘the Jews Voskovec and Werich’, who, from the  Končelík–Köpplová–Kryšpínová (note 26), p. 419.  See the caricatures, František Voborský, ‘Z galerie ‘tvůrců’ bývalého čs. filmu I–III’, Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 26, 28. 6., p. 15. – Ibidem, No. 27, 5. 7., p. 9. – Ibidem, No. 28, 12. 7., p. 11. The author of the verses is most probably Josef Rejthar.

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Fig. 7.1: ‘Twenty years was it cultivated / to the delight of the [Jewish] masters. / They chose their cultivator, / Edvard Beneš. / He wouldn’t not allow garlic / stuffed it according to their will / into art, into culture, / in short, wherever he could.’

perspective of the propaganda of the period, were also Bolsheviks and, at the behest of Beneš, made fools of the audience. Kvítko also carried other rather radical material such as drawings of the graves of Edvard Beneš, Hana Benešová, Jan Masaryk, and Alice Masaryková. In verse composed by the collaborationist journalist Josef Rejthar, their epitaphs eloquently illustrate the level of collaborationist satire. The one dedicated to Alice Masaryková, who was, at the same time, a frequent subject of fantastical rumours in Arijský boj, went as follows: ‘Now seriously, joking aside, / here lies a jewel of the Semitic race. / She turned her life into a rose garden, / her voice was tender, like an old brewer. / Her intended, Mister Bondy, dumped her before the wedding. / (Well, a Jew always has a good schnoz!) / After the lady was thus deceived by Mister Bondy, / she remained a virgin and

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Fig. 7.2: ‘The ministries reek of garlic / garlic invades the Castle / who smells of it most / is the biggest robber. / Wherever you enter, it hits you there / the stench in your face / they helped to cultivate it, / the Freemason brethren.’

lived off her trusts, / as a cow in the meadow lives off grass… / so cows live off the grass on her grave’. ⁴⁶ In a caricature by another radical caricaturist, Dobroslav Haut, the alleged worldview of Jews is planted in the minds of readers. It depicts two Jews who are rejoicing in grotesquely distorted Czech that the Soviet front is solid: ‘Hey! Did you say that the Bolsheviks have not retreated a single step!?’ – ‘No, fifty kilometers…’ The two men are wearing Jewish stars and have bandaged hands, by which the artist presumably wanted to indicate that they were malingerers.⁴⁷ A great deal of propaganda in which antisemitic subject matter played a primary role continued to be directed against the US, as had been the case since the

 See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Epitafy’ (accompanied by the verses by Erjé [Josef Rejthar]), Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 30, 26. 7., p. 11.  See the caricature, Dobroslav Haut, ‘Kratičké štěstí’, Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 41, 11. 10., p. 4.

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Fig. 7.3: ‘This state is to the credit of Hilsner / It is the doing / of many intellectuals / who also stuffed that garlic / into the souls of children. / Garlic destroys the human heart / secretly corrodes / till the whole nation collapses / into thirty [political] parties.’

beginning of 1939. Throughout the war, America was associated with Judaism, Bolshevism and gangsters. In this spirit, František Voborský ‘enhanced’ the Statue of Liberty. In place of the torch, it now held a hammer and sickle and the other hand was grasping a sack of dollars. In addition, it had such an enlarged nose that it was unrecognizable. In the same picture, Roosevelt is riding on a donkey with a sack of dollars.⁴⁸ Foreign antisemitic satire also appeared in the Protectorate press from countries such as Italy (Il Travaso).⁴⁹ Naturally, there was always room for satirical drawings from the German Reich (e. g. Fliegende Blätter).⁵⁰ Antisemitic propaganda was present in Kvítko also after it was no longer an independent magazine, but published in black and white as part of České slovo [Czech Word]. Anti See the caricature, František Voborský, ‘Přehlídka severoamerických presidentů’, Kvítko XVII, 1942, 29. 11., p. 1.  For example, Kvítko XVI, 1941, 16. 11., p. 1.  For example, ‘Růžový sen v bílém domě’, Kvítko XVI, 1941, 16. 11., p. 1.

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Fig. 7.4: ‘Once upon a time there was a republic, / and this is no fairy tale. / The firm fell and with it disappeared / the Garlic Paradise. / The people of that land now greet / the healthy air with gratitude, / otherwise they would still be choking / on mouldy garlic.’ František Voborský, ‘Česnekový ráj’ [Garlic Paradise], České slovo XIV, 1942, No. 139, 16. 6., p. 1. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

semitic propaganda sourced from abroad generally suggested that the Jew wanted dominion over the world [10].⁵¹ Cartoon satire here continued to be accompanied by feeble-minded antisemitic anecdotes.⁵²

 See the caricature, ‘Ten a věčně on…!’, Kvítko XVIII, 1943, No. 25, 4. 7., p. 10.  For example, Kvítko XVIII, 1943, No. 26, 11. 7., p. 10.

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Fig. 8: František Voborský, ‘Móricek se stěhuje’ [Móricek is moving], Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 9, 1. 3., p. 3. Photo: Petr Karlíček

Fig. 9: ‘From the gallery of ‘creators’ of former Czechoslovak film: The Jew Hugo Haas Jewishness, it flows like lava / floods Czech film today. / Perched upon the peak we find / Jew Haas! Hurrah! Hooray! / Ladies, maidens, would for love / perish for this Jew / so Jew-lovers, stupid fools / serenade our Hugh. / The Jews Voskovec a Werich Two parasites called V + W / Follow the fickle crowd. / Corrosion cleverly concealed / In every single word. / ‘Twas Beneš handed them their task / To influence the masses / And light a Bolshie candle flame / To guide applauding asses. / The Jew Ota Heller Where all smells of Jewishness, / there can be nothing wrong / just as the camera handle / spins no other song. / Jews brought more dirt to film / than overflowing buckets. / Ota Heller reaps it through the lens. / Thanks to the left-wing critics. / The Jew Emil Schmelkes Songs from film on the gramophone / are mostly by the Jews. / Business is business! – though music as such / is hardly their native Muse. / All the brands they have in hand, / Should some disc appeal: / Ultmann, Fuchs or Harkopf, / yet it’s solo led by Schmelkes Emil.’ František Voborský, ‘Z galerie ‘tvůrců’ bývalého čs. filmu’ [From the gallery of ‘creative artists’ of former Czechoslovak film], Kvítko XVII, 1942, No. 26, 28. 6., p. 15. – Ibidem, No. 27, 5. 7., p. 9. – Ibidem, No. 28, 12. 7., p. 11. Photo: Petr Karlíček

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Fig. 10: ‘Ten a věčně on!’ [Him and him forever!] (drawing taken from the Berlin magazine Lustige Blätter), Kvítko XVIII, 1943, No. 25, 4. 7., p. 10. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

During the Protectorate, a variety of antisemitic literature was published with the support of the authorities. For example, antisemitic caricatures can be found in Eduardova Odyssea [Eduard’s Odyssey], which has the alternate title Podivuhodná dobrodružství ješitného trpaslíka [The Remarkable Adventures of a Conceited Dwarf] [11]. Its main hero is the exiled president Edvard Beneš,

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Fig. 11: ‘VIII. Among their own in Palestine / All at once the Sirocco caught hold of Ed / in his wrath, burning with anger, / and flung him beyond the Red Sea. / It turned out fortunate, once more he’s lying / in the shade under the palm trees – / that is, the Sirocco spat him out to Palestine. / Where there was nothing but Czechoslovaks, / who recognised him in an instant: / ‘That’s the one who used to come to us with Mr. Masaryk!’’ Josef Rejthar and František Voborský, Eduardova Odyssea [Eduard’s Odyssey], Prague 1942. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

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who wanders the world. The author of the tawdry verses was Petr Král (probably a pseudonym of the collaborationist dramatist Josef Rejthar mentioned earlier) and the caricatures were by František Voborský. The book was a great success and was published in two editions in 1942 and 1943.⁵³ In the same year, Voborský illustrated another book containing antisemitic caricatures and verses entitled Úsměvem i karabáčem [With a Smile and a Scourge]. The pseudo-witty epigrams were again the work of Rejthar.⁵⁴

Conflicts and never-ending dissatisfaction In the field of antisemitic caricature, the satirical magazine Kvítko was largely the domain of František Voborský, whereas České slovo, by the same publisher, often featured the more mechanical caricatures of Dobroslav Haut. In these depictions, we find Jews of all professions and the accompanying captions are characterized by the now familiar distortion of the language.⁵⁵ Both caricaturists worked to order, subject to the demands of newspapers and magazines at any given time. And because the Nazi-controlled press demanded satire vilifying the home-grown and foreign enemies of the Reich, both artists were able to make a comfortable living. Moreover, Haut and Voborský benefited from the fact that the country’s top political caricaturists had not, for various reasons, been ensnared by the Nazis. Although Haut and Voborský did not cross paths in editorial offices, their works often appeared side by side, for example, in Vlajka [12] and Pražský ilustrovaný zpravodaj, and in 1942 a bitter quarrel broke out between them. At that time, both men worked for the humorous magazine Kvítko. Even though there was enough room for both caricaturists in its pages, Voborský felt, for reasons unknown, that Haut was depriving him of the chance to feature his work. There were even threats of legal action. Eventually, this awkward dispute had to be settled by the Protectorate authorities, since a public squabble between the two ‘best’ caricaturists did not look good. In all probability, it was greed and the mental instability of both men that lay behind the dispute.⁵⁶

 Petr Král [Josef Rejthar] and Vobo [František Voborský], Eduardova Odyssea. Podivuhodná dobrodružství ješitného trpaslíka, Prague 1942.  Erjé [Josef Rejthar] and František Voborský, Úsměvem i karabáčem, Prague 1942.  For example, Dobroslav Haut, České slovo XV, 1943, No. 217, 16. 9., p. 1.  See the letter from Dobroslav Haut to Emanuel Moravec dated 4 July 1942 deposited in ABS [Archive of the Security Services], collection 305 (Headquarters of the State Security Services), No. 305 – 839 – 11/1, 9.

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Fig. 12: ‘So he doesn’t want to go – But he will go, he has to – However, just as he came, do you hear, you thief? / – But no! There is something that’s yours! And those two bundles (INTERNATIONALISM and FREEMASONRY) you’re welcome to take!’ Dobroslav Haut, ‘Na rozloučenou’ [Farewell], Vlajka IX, 1939, 9. 7. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

In April 1942, the two were stepping on each other’s toes once again in terms of themes. On 3 April 1942, a satirical cartoon strip by František Voborský was published in České slovo on the theme of Easter.⁵⁷ Two days later, a similar

 See the cartoon strip, František Voborský, ‘Velikonoční sloupek’, České slovo XIV, 1942, 3. 4., p. 3.

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strip by Dobroslav Haut appeared in the same publication.⁵⁸ Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt featured in both of them. They are depicted receiving an unwanted Easter gift and a good thrashing from the Germans and their allies. From 1939 onwards, antisemitic caricatures were also regularly published in the fascist Vlajka. ⁵⁹ The most significant contributor was the most famous of Czech antisemitic caricaturists, the aforementioned Karel Rélink.⁶⁰ In this publication, he also featured some of his earlier works (which were timeless in the context of primitive antisemitic propaganda). For example, in a series of pictures entitled ‘Has anyone ever seen around here…’, he made a contrived and laboured case that Jews had never made an honest living. According to Rélink, no one had ever seen a Jewish chimney sweep, fireman, miner or pilot, or a Jewish laundry woman.⁶¹ During the Protectorate, Karel Rélink’s antisemitic work was finally given the platform that he felt it deserved and the controlled press duly praised him.⁶² In the spring of 1942, the Minster of Education, Emanuel Moravec, gave a speech at the opening of his exhibition Židobolševismus – nepřítel lidstva [Jewish-Bolshevism – the Enemy of Mankind]. It came as no surprise that Arijský boj enthusiastically celebrated the creations of the ‘anti-Jewish painter’. ‘After his wicked treatment by the Republic’s lords and masters and all the persecution he suffered from them, Master Rélink has eventually been rewarded and has finally received great recognition – in his time. Yes, time has proved Rélink right, since his artistic work has been ahead of its time by decades! His paintings with anti-Jewish motifs are eternally vital because they are truthful and every single stroke of the master’s brush represented a certain advance in an unequal struggle. Good against Evil, the struggle between Aryan mankind and an enemy of the most terrible kind – international Jewry….’ ⁶³ Over time, more primitive productions replaced the drawings by Rélink in Vlajka (the quarrelsome ‘artist’ fell out with the editors over money). In one such drawing, there is a hammer (inscribed with Vlajka) killing a worm with strongly Semitic features in a single blow. The accompanying caption further

 See the cartoon strip, Dobroslav Haut, ‘Velikonoce spojenců’, České slovo XIV, 1942, 5. 4., p. 4.  In the regular section of Vlajka magazine entitled Ozvěny ze Sionu [Echoes from Zion], there was even an article published with the title: ‘Židé v české satiře 19. století’, Vlajka IX, 1939, 2. 6., p. 1.  See the caricature, Karel Rélink, ‘Královna moří – koudel jí hoří’, Vlajka X, 1940, No. 145, 30. 6., p. 10.  See the caricature, Karel Rélink, ‘Viděl někdo u nás’, Vlajka IX, 1939, 25. 6., p. 7.  František Peiger, ‘Zahájení výstavy Rélinkova díla v Praze’, České slovo XIV, 1942, No. 79, 26. 3., p. 3.  ‘Mistr Karel Rélink. Půl života bojů proti Židům’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 13, 4. 4., p. 5.

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elaborates: ‘Vlajka fights against the Jewish vampires of the Czech nation and Beneš collaborators!’ ⁶⁴ One noteworthy deviation from the publication’s ordinary antisemitic output is the arrest warrant for Edvard Beneš that appeared shortly after the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich. The president-in-exile is featured with distinctive Semitic features (in addition to ears that stick out). The title is ‘Who is who’ in order to resemble an American arrest warrant and is accompanied by the comment: ‘Wanted – international criminal, murderer of thousands of Czechs, Eduard Beneš, last seen as a supply teacher at the Business Academy in Prague on Resslerova street. This wanted criminal is small in stature and bald. He has protruding ears, the facial expression of a dimwit, a shrill voice, and a nervous talkative disposition.’ ⁶⁵ The antisemitic weekly magazine Arijský boj was also very much devoted to this genre. Every issue was made up mostly of lies and denunciations such as sensational articles full of fantastic fabrications about Alice Masarykova’s harem at Yasinia⁶⁶ and the curse a dying priest cast on Beneš.⁶⁷ Its regular denunciation column Reflektor do pražských ulic [Searchlight on the streets of Prague]⁶⁸ had the worst impact. It contained similar smears contributed by voluntary correspondents from all regions of Bohemia and Moravia.⁶⁹ The section entitled Zpěvy sobotní čili Šábes žalmy [Saturday Songs or Sabbath Psalms], containing versed denunciations and insults (whose targets were most often First Republic ‘democrats’, Jews and emigrants), was supplemented by illustrations by František Voborský.⁷⁰

Antisemitic cartoon satire at the end of the war The caricatures in the satirical fortnightly publication Ejhle [Lo and Behold] (1944 – 1945) were also based on antisemitic stereotypes that were widespread in Nazi propaganda. One example is a satirical drawing of a wealthy Jewish factory owner comfortably sprawled out in his chair. He is thinking to himself: ‘I don’t care if people say my business is dirty. The main thing is that I make a

 Vlajka XI, 1941, No. 34, 19. 10., p. 3.  See the caricature, ‘Kdo je kdo’, Vlajka XII, 1942, No. 49, 21. 6., p. 3.  ‘Harém Alice Masarykové u Jasiny’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 4, 24. 1., p. 1– 2.  ‘Kletba umírajícího kněze na hlavu Beneše’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 7, 21. 2., p. 1– 2.  For example, ‘Reflektor do pražských ulic: ‘Vdova po Židu láká peníze’’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 18, 9. 5., p. 3.  For example, ‘Ze všech krajů Čech a Moravy’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 18, 9. 5., p. 6 – 7.  ‘Zpěvy sobotní čili Šábes žalmy’, Arijský boj III, 1942, No. 21, 30. 5., p. 5.

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good profit from it.’ ⁷¹ Another caricature tried to make readers believe that the editorial office of Czech radio broadcasting in London consisted entirely of Jews. This was done in two ways: by the familiar distorting of the names of the editorial staff to Khopecký, Khoníček and Khon; and by depicting them with stereotypically large noses, which were also highlighted in red.⁷² In a preChristmas edition, a drawing entitled V osvobozeném Jerichu [In liberated Jericho] appeared in Ejhle. A large crowd of hungry people are demonstrating outside the home of a wealthy Jew. The obese Jew brands them an ungrateful rabble, as he too would one day like to know the feeling of hunger – seemingly to slim down.⁷³ In another issue, Winston Churchill is pictured as an employee of ‘Jew Theatre London’. He is pasting a notice that reads ‘Postponed indefinitely’ over a poster advertising ‘Victory in Europe’.⁷⁴ With the passing of time, however, antisemitism as a principal motif of propaganda began to disappear from periodicals during the Protectorate. In April 1944, Adolf Hitler ordered that anti-Bolshevik and antisemitic propaganda be strictly separated. From then on, Nazi propaganda containing images of alleged ‘Jewish retribution’ began to be replaced by terrifying reports of Bolshevik crimes.⁷⁵ The domestic enemies of the Reich had ceased to be Jews, whom it was virtually impossible to meet in Nazi Germany, and were now those who doubted the final victory, malingerers or those who squandered scarce materials.⁷⁶ The cover page of the first 1945 issue of Ejhle still depicted unmistakable antisemitic allusions to Jewish conspiracy and world domination. In a reference to the Epiphany date of issue, it shows Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt as the three kings with the caption ‘What they offer Europe’. Stalin offered a continent governed by Soviets, Roosevelt offered a bag filled with stereotypically portrayed Jews, and Churchill, the ruler of a withering empire, appeared empty-handed. The antisemitic message was enhanced by the Star of David shining in the background in place of the morning star.⁷⁷  Ejhle I, 1944, No. 22, 15. 11., p. 2.  Ejhle I, 1944, No. 4, 15. 2., p. 4.  See the caricature, Dobroslav Haut, Ejhle I, 1944, No. 24, 15. 12., p. 2.  See the caricature, Dobroslav Haut, ‘Odloženo na neurčito’, Ejhle I, 1944, No. 23, 1. 12., p. 6.  For example, Longreich (note 24), p. 582.  For example, a widely used character by the advertising graphic artist Wilhelm Hohenhausen was called Köhleklau (coal thief). For more on this and other similar characters, see, for example, Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich – LTI – Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook, London 2000.  See the caricature, IP, ‘Co nabízejí Evropě’, Ejhle II, 1945, No. 1, 1. 1., p. 1. The British prime minister is even pictured saying ‘I’m still here as well!’

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By the end of the war, however, stand-alone antisemitic caricatures had disappeared from the pages of Protectorate magazines and no longer appeared in the daily press. The content of the daily press was stripped down in the final phase of total war and there was virtually no room for satirical drawings. Even so, antisemitic satire appeared in Ejhle right up until April 1945. However, this was only as part of a serial story about a reporter called Pepíček created by Josef Opluštil [13]. The graphic element of this serial was produced by Dobroslav

Fig. 13: Dobroslav Haut, ‘Správkárna ksichtů’ [Mug repair shop], Ejhle I, 1944, 15. 10. Photo: Petr Karlíček.

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Haut up until the final issue of the magazine, which was published in April 1945.⁷⁸

Conclusion It is difficult to say how effective these satirical antisemitic caricatures really were and whether the Nazis succeeded, as they had intended, in winning over a mass of readers in this strategically important territory (largely because of arms production). Throughout the war, the population of the Protectorate was well informed about the situation at home and abroad from foreign radio broadcasts. The content of newspapers was not usually taken seriously, except for the society and sports pages. Nevertheless, the Nazi authorities considered it worthwhile to publish the colour magazine Ejhle between 1944 and 1945. It is noteworthy that this was a period when activities in the ‘Altreich’ were running down, as they were not crucial in the final phase of total war. The most prolific creators of antisemitic caricatures in the Protectorate fully accomplished all the tasks they were assigned by the Nazi authorities and their work was not very imaginative. On the contrary, the caricatures they produced are, from a contemporary point of view, embarrassing, and often nonsensical. In view of the fate of the Jewish population during the war, they can be considered heartless and cynical. Even so, they cannot compare with the monstrosity and malevolence of certain caricatures that appeared in the same period in Nazi Germany or on the territory of Slovakia. In this period, the painter Karel Rélink was the most famous producer of antisemitic caricatures (though not the most prolific). During the war, because of his quarrelsome nature, he managed to get into disputes with all the Czech fascists, but he vigorously supported the policies of the Nazi authorities until the end. He had several exhibitions, the most publicized of which was entitled Židobolševismus – nepřítel lidstva in March 1942. In the preserved (and variously dispersed) correspondence (which was often denunciatory in nature), Rélink boasted that he was the only Czech painter whose work was represented in the collections of Adolf Hitler. Nevertheless, he continued to feel undervalued as an artist. Towards the end of the war, on his own initiative, he became custodian of Křivoklát Castle and spent his time there painting. Although not particularly accomplished, his canvases with motifs of the Křivoklát region have been pre-

 Petr Karlíček and Volker Mohn, ‘Voller propagandisticher Erfolg?’, Bohemia LI, 2011, pp. 164– 202.

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served there to this day. Rélink and his wife committed suicide at Křivoklát Castle in May 1945.⁷⁹ Until the middle of April 1945, Dobroslav Haut drew caricatures for the Nazi publication Ejhle (and also, to a lesser extent, for České slovo, which had very little space for cartoon satire at the end of the war). He died in Vršovice in unexplained circumstances during the Prague Uprising on 9 May 1945.⁸⁰ The circumstances of the death of Jan Tulla,⁸¹ the journalist, occasional caricaturist and, above all, provocateur and Gestapo agent, are also unknown, according to post-war authorities. He died sometime in February 1945. František Voborský survived the war. In its final year, he had curtailed his work as a political artist. However, soon after it ended, he was taken into the custody of the Extraordinary People’s Court in Prague and in 1946 he was sentenced to twenty-five years for activities aiding the occupiers.⁸² In the spring of 1947, he was given another five years for denouncing the businessman František Lucemburk. In 1942, Voborský had informed the German criminal police that Lucemburk was guilty of overcharging, concealing supplies and having contact with Jews.⁸³ Upon his early release from prison, František Voborský once more began to work. He painted landscapes, designs for record covers and, strangely enough, designs for the state police (Sbor národní bezpečnosti [National Security Corps]). His work even featured in posters for road safety. In the late 1960s, Tramp magazine published several sequels to his comic book Zrzek Bill [Ginger Bill].⁸⁴

 Karlíček (note 3), p. 311.  Ibidem, p. 306.  ABS [Archive of the Security Services], Commission of Inquiry into the National and People’s Court at the Ministry of Interior, No. 301– 91– 3.  SOA Praha [State Regional Archives in Prague], MLS Praha [Extraordinary People’s Court in Prague], František Voborský (1946).  Ibidem, MLS Praha, František Voborský (1947).  Karlíček (note 3), p. 313.

Daniel Uziel

Polish Jews in the Visual Reporting of the Propaganda Companies Summary: This paper will look at the way the Propaganda Companies of the Wehrmacht shot antisemitic visual material in occupied Poland which was used by the German media from 1939 until 1941. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939 the Propaganda Companies covered not only purely military events, but also civilian aspects related to the occupation of the country. From early on, these reports also included antisemitic films and photos of Jews in different cities, towns and ghettos. Illustrated press reports and newsreels based on these reports reflected not only the pre-war antisemitic arguments, but also several new ones placed within the context of the war. Furthermore, these propaganda products were adjusted to the dynamically changing propaganda environment. In the next couple of years the Propaganda Companies’ reporters continued to deliver similar materials, which were used in the press, in films of different genres and in other publications. These publications contributed to several German propaganda drives, in which antisemitism was either a central theme, or supported another central propagandist theme. Keywords: propaganda, Wehrmacht, general government, film, photograph The occupation of Poland in 1939 provided the Third Reich numerous new opportunities. Among them was a direct access to the country’s large Jewish community, which quickly became a target to an increasing persecution and prejudice. Among others, the Polish Jews became central in the wartime depiction of the Jews in the propaganda and in establishing their negative images. The propaganda organization of the Wehrmacht was one of the most important elements of the Nazi propaganda community during World War II and it played a crucial role in these processes. Acknowledging the importance of psychological warfare in modern wars, the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht cooperated effectively from the mid-1930s in an effort to prepare the country for the next war. They sought ways to improve Germany’s ability to withstand psychological warfare in order to prevent a collapse of the home front, as happened in the last phases of World War I. In 1938 the Wehrmacht established five Propaganda Kompanien [Propaganda Companies] – PK, whose main task was to collect different kind of media from military operational areas and deliver it to the ministry for dissemination to the media. Thus they included photographers and cameramen, which https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-009

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were mostly reservists whose civilian profession was relevant to their military one. Because of the importance of these units, their photographers were equipped with the best photographic equipment available at that time. Each PK also included a technical squad, which processed the obtained film rolls and arranged its delivery to Berlin. Following the first operational deployment of these units during the German takeover of the Sudetes, the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht decided to establish within Oberkommando der Wehrmacht [Wehrmacht’s high command] a special department for the coordination and the daily management of the military propaganda. The new department, known as Abteilung für Wehrmachtpropaganda [Department for military propaganda], was activated in April 1939. It expanded the military propaganda organization and its training, and by the beginning of World War II eight army, two Luftwaffe and one naval PKs were available for operations. Eight of these units participated in the invasion to Poland.¹ Since the reporters of the PKs were the only reporters allowed to work in operational areas, they became the main source of material for the German war propaganda. After the end of the campaign in Poland, some PKs were stationed from time to time in occupied Poland. Their reporters continued to provide the Propaganda Ministry with material, mostly about military topics, but not only. Among others, their war correspondence material contributed to the antisemitic propaganda. This article will focus on the visual contribution of the PKs to the shape and content of the Nazi visual antisemitic propaganda. In this respect, images of Polish Jews and their living environment played the most significant role.

Methodology Three main periods are being covered in this study: 1939 – The military campaign, the conquest and division of Poland, and the initial phase of the German occupation. During this period the Germans subdivided their share of occupied Poland into two main parts: the annexed territories in the West and the General Government, which was also supposed to be annexed in the future. During this period the persecution of the Jews was largely haphazard and without central planning and control.

 On the propaganda troops see: Hasso von Wedel, Die Propagandatruppen der deutschen Wehrmacht, Neckargemünd 1962. – Daniel Uziel, The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front, Oxford 2008.

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Late 1939 – 1940 – The establishment and implementation of a German new order in occupied Poland. In this period Germany’s main designated policies for occupied Poland were fully implemented. These included massive economical exploitation, ethnic cleansing and an evolving anti-Jewish policy that was highly integrated in the first two elements.² 1941 – The preparations and beginning of ‘Operation Barbarossa’. This crucial period in the development of the ‘Final Solution’ was shaped largely by the radical ideology towards the Soviet Union and its Jewish-Bolshevik regime, as viewed by the Nazis. In each period we will look at the activities of the PKs and the use of their visual antisemitic material in the German propaganda. The main media used here are the press (especially the illustrated), newsreels and movies. The illustrated newspapers examined for this research were mainly those with particularly large circulation at the beginning of World War II.³ They include the most popular illustrated weekly, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (1,500,000 copies in 1939), the popular illustrated version of the Nazi Party’s own newspaper, the Illustrierter Beobachter (800,000 copies), and the SS’ own increasingly popular newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps (500,000 copies in 1937).⁴ It should be noted that antisemitic content was widespread in the relevant time frames also in the local German published press in occupied Poland. However, due to its narrow regional scope it was left out of its study.⁵ The German newsreels of this period are also used here, although their relevance is limited to the first period. This media was regarded by the Nazi regime as one of the most powerful propaganda tools at its disposal.⁶ The wartime newsreels represented the technical superiority of the German propaganda by delivering unprecedented wartime images which were largely shot by PK camera-

 Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, 1939 – 1942, Lincoln 2005, pp. 12– 14, 23 – 35.  On the use of photography from occupied Poland in the German press see: Miriam Y. Arani, Fotografische Selbst- und Fremdbilder von Deutschen und Polen im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939 – 45 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Region Wielkopolska, Hamburg 2008, pp. 249 – 310.  Norbert Frei and Johannes Schmitz, Journalismus im Dritten Reich, Munich 2011, pp. 75, 102.  On this important topic see: Lars Jockheck, Propaganda im Generalgouvernement: Die NS-Besatzungspresse für Deutsche und Polen 1939 – 1945, Göttingen 2006, pp. 315 – 332 (Einzelveröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts Warschau XV).  Peter Bucher, ‘Goebbels und die deutsche Wochenschau: National-sozialistische Filmpropaganda im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen XL, 1986, pp. 53 – 69, esp. pp. 53 – 54. – David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, London 1993, p. 92.

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men. The newsreels were thus extremely popular and it was estimated in 1940 that around 20 million Germans regularly watched them.⁷ Placing the PK anti-Jewish reporting material and its dissemination within broader events and general propagandistic trends provides new perspectives on the evolution of the propaganda that accompanied the early phases of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the contribution of the Wehrmacht to the antisemitic propaganda of the Nazi regime sheds light on a little-known aspect of the complicity of the military in Nazi crimes.

Early reporting The invasion to Poland was a testing ground for the new wartime military/civilian propaganda complex. During the Polish campaign the eight PKs accompanying the invading forces received through the Department for military propaganda daily directives from the Propaganda Ministry regarding the main propagandistic themes and the materials required for them. Antisemitic propaganda formed right from the start a central pillar of the general anti-Polish propaganda. One of the main propaganda themes the Propaganda Ministry dictated at that time was the presentation of ‘Polish as equivalent to sub-humanity. Poles, Jews and gypsies stand on the same inferior human level…’ ⁸ The ministry elaborated this point further and defined the goals of this argument: ‘We must strive to that the current aversion against everything Polish will remain for years to come. This aversion must turn from latency to consciousness. Poland is sub-humanity. Poles, Jews, Gypsies should be mentioned in the same breath. There are no social and other kinds of relations with Poles. A Pole is something impure, and no one wants to deal with him.’ ⁹ Another German propaganda trend popular at that time was underlining the role of the Jews in other enemy countries, although

 Jörg Echternkamp (ed), Germany and the Second World War. German Wartime Society 1939 – 1945, Oxford 2014, p. 105.  ‘Polentum gleichwertig ist mit Untermenschentum. Polen, Juden und Zigeuner stehen auf der gleichen unterwertigen menschlichen Stufe…’ See Eugeniusz Cezary Krol, ‘Die Propaganda des Dritten Reiches gegenüber Polen und den Polen von 1939 – 1945’, in Danuta Jackiewicz and Eugeniusz Cezary Krol (eds), Im Objektiv des Feindes. Die deutschen Bildberichterstatter im besetzten Warschau, Warsaw 2008, cit. p. 16.  ‘[Es] muss erreicht werden, dass das gegenwärtige Abneigung gegen alles Polnisch für Jahre aufrechterhalten wird. Diese Abneigung muss au seiner latenten zu einer bewussten warden. Polen ist Untermenschtum. Polen, Juden und Zigeuner sind in einem Atemzug zu nennen. Mit den Polen hat man keinen gesellschaftlichen und keine anderen Verkehr. Ein Pole ist etwas unreines, mit dem man sich nicht befasst.’ See ibidem, cit. p. 17.

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the Jewish-Bolshevik connection disappeared after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.¹⁰ PK combat photographers and cameramen were now in position to obtain the images required in order to deliver these messages. On 2 October the Propaganda Ministry sent to all the PKs operating in Poland the following directive: ‘More than before, we need from Warsaw and all the occupied territories, film footage of Jewish types as well as portraits and images of Jews at work. This material is to be used to reinforce our antisemitic propaganda at home and abroad.’ ¹¹ This and other specific orders sent to individual PKs, set the tone for the contemporary and later propagandistic visual depiction of the Jews in occupied Poland. Even before the PKs were able to react to the ministry’s instructions, PK footage was used in an antisemitic newsreel report depicting the beginning of the German occupation. The Ufa Newsreel released on 4 October presented in its 12th topic images of Jews taken in unspecified places in Poland. The commentary explained: ‘Back to Poland: The most difficult problem facing our civilian administration in the occupied areas is the Jewish question… This eastern Jewish sub-humanity has long provided West Europe with criminal riff-raff. The democracies were supplied from here with pick-pockets, pimps, drug dealers, white slavers, international banking profiteers and agitating journalists. These are the same Jews, whose brothers, sons and cousins advocate loudly in London and Paris for humanity and civilization.’ ¹² Earlier, Jews were presented as taking active part in unlawful partisan warfare against the invading German forces. A photo reportage prepared by reporters of the Luftwaffe’s KBK 4 (War Correspondence Company 4 – the term used by the air force instead of PK) at Wieruszow in the Łódź Province was published on 28 September in the Illustrierter Beobachter and depicted Jews being arrested and being transported away under the supervision of Sicherheitsdienst (SD) men. It

 David Cesarani, Final Solution. The Fate of the Jews 1933 – 1949, New York 2016, pp. 238 – 239.  ‘Aus Warschau und aus dem ganzen Gebiet nach Möglichkeit in größerem Umfange als bisher Filmaufnahmen von Judentypen aller Art, und zwar sowohl Charakterstudien als auch Juden beim Arbeitseinsatz. Dieses Material soll zur Verstärkung unserer inner- und außenpolitischen antisemitischen Aufklärung dienen.’ See Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RW4/241.1, Propagandaweisungen des Reichspropagandaministers für den 2.10.1939.  ‘Zurück nach Polen: Das schwierigste Problem, vor das sich unsere Zivilverwaltung in den besetzten Gebieten gestellt sieht, ist die Judenfrage… Dieses ostjüdische Untermenschentum hat seit jeher Westeuropa das internationale Verbrechergesindel geliefert. Von hier aus wurden die Demokratien mit Taschendieben, Zuhältern, Rauschgift- und Mädchenhändlern, internationalen Bankschiebern und Hetzjournalisten versorgt. Das sind dieselben Juden, deren Brüder, Söhne und Vettern in London und Paris für die Humanität und Zivilisation das große Wort führen.’ See Ufa Tonwoche 1939, Week 41, No. 474, 4. 10.

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was stated that ‘they are being suspected for shooting at German soldiers’.¹³ The uppermost and lower photos for this article about the arrest of Jews in Wieruszow were provided by PK photographers [1]. Cameramen also shot on the same occasion a film which was included in an Ufa newsreel with similar commentary.¹⁴ These reports are extraordinary in several ways. First, they demonstrated the importance of PK reporting for the antisemitic propaganda during the early phase of World War II, therefore underlining the contribution of the Wehrmacht to this propaganda. Secondly, the editors of Illustrierter Beobachter took advantage of a current report in order to insert several older anti-Jewish messages. These included a photo of elderly Jew from 1915 printed next to a similar image from 1939 as a proof that the eastern Jews have not changed outwardly. Thirdly, perhaps the most dramatic photo of the series depicted Jews being transported away on a truck under SD supervision with a delivery note saying: ‘German troops were shot at from their dwellings. They are being transported to a detention camp.’ ¹⁵ Interestingly, this specific photo appears to have been copied from the newspaper and disseminated during the war as a visual proof for the German persecution of the Jews in occupied Europe. After the war it became an iconic Holocaust photo that appeared in some publications with different descriptions.¹⁶ Other reports sought to establish the connection between the Jews and the murder of ethnic Germans – one argument the Germans used in order to justify their brutal attack on Poland. The Ufa newsreel released on 14 September included a reportage about the cleansing of Polish settlements and the arrest of people involved in crimes against ethnic Germans. The commentary describing these scenes pointed at one specific hostile group: ‘Polish Jews, who in many cases bear the blame for inciting and instigating the murder of Germans. The profiteers and criminals, who after 1918 overwhelmed defenseless Germany…, were recruited from these circles. Today the brothers and sons of these eastern Jews reside in Eng-

 ‘Verhaftete Juden, die im Verdacht stehen, auf Deutsche [Soldaten] geschossen zu haben.’, Illustrierte Beobachter XIV, 1939, 28. 9., No. 39, cit. p. 1483 (sourced from Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, E39N4: 519/1).  Ufa Tonwoche 1939, Week 38, No. 471, 14. 9.  Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bild 101I-380 – 0069 – 34.  See for example, ‘The Zloczow Community Comemoration Comittee’, in Sefer Zloczow [Hebrew], Tel Aviv 1971, p. 259, with the description ‘Jews transported to Auschwitz’.

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Fig. 1: Illustrierter Beobachter XIV, 1939, No. 39, 28. 9., p. 1483. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, inv. no. E39N4: 519/1. Photo: Daniel Uziel.

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land and France and agitate for a war of extermination against the German people.’ ¹⁷ This and other visual propaganda sought at the same time to confirm the visual stereotypical image of the Jew, as established by the prewar propaganda based on the common image of the eastern Jews. Towards the end of the campaign in Poland the cooperation between the Propaganda Ministry and the Department for military propaganda reached its climax as a special civilian filming team from Berlin, headed by the Reich’s Film Inspector Fritz Hippler and by the head of the anti-Jewish department Eberhard Taubert, traveled to Warsaw and Lodz. Supported by several PKs they filmed Jews for an antisemitic propaganda film project, which later became the notorious film Der ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew]. The film also used raw footage shot by several PK cameramen in 1939. Therefore, PK footage taken in Poland soon after its occupation was used in a film that formed the ‘flagship’ of the Propaganda Ministry’s antisemitic propaganda campaign in 1940 (although it failed in the box-offices).¹⁸ It is clear thus that the invasion to Poland and its occupation offered the Germans a golden opportunity to strengthen and refine their antisemitic propaganda, and not only within the context of the anti-Polish propaganda.

Establishing law and order in occupied Poland Following the division of Poland and the establishment of the German civilian administration most of the Wehrmacht’s PKs moved to other war fronts. Nevertheless, PK reporters continued to operate occasionally in occupied Poland. Among them were members of the SS-PK, which was established in January 1940. Most of these reporters also worked for the SS’ own popular newspaper Das Schwarze Korps,¹⁹ and contributed reports about the Jews in Poland. From late 1939 the German propaganda about occupied Poland sought to depict

 ‘Polnische Juden, die sich in vielen Fällen der Anstiftung und Aufhetzung zum Mord an Deutschen schuldig gemacht haben. Aus diesen Kreisen rekrutierten sich jene Schieber und Verbrecher, die nach 1918 das wehrlose Deutschland überschwemmten… Heute sitzen die Brüder und Söhne dieser Ostjuden in England und Frankreich und hetzen zum Vernichtungskrieg gegen das deutsche Volk.’ See for example, Ufa Tonwoche, 1939, Week 38, No. 471, 14. 9., 1:04.  Shai Hazkani, ‘The Forbidden Movies. Historical Analysis of Antisemitic Propaganda Movies in the Third Reich’, Yalkut Moreshet LXXXIV, November 2007, (Hebrew), pp. 170 – 172.  It was a convenient arrangement, because Günther D’Alquen, the chief editor of Das Schwarze Korps, was also the CO of the new SS-PK.

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how the German administration brings law and order to Poland and to counter hostile atrocity propaganda from abroad.²⁰ It also depicted the Germanization of the annexed parts of Poland. The gradual concentration of the Polish Jews in ghettos made them easier to find for German reporters and propagandists operating in occupied Poland. The easily identifiable communities were highly suitable for propagandistic exploitation because they offered communal images that matched the prevailing Nazi depiction style of Jewish cliques, hordes, riff-raff etc. Reporting about the ghettos and about the Jews formed on one hand a reverse image of the positive Germanization, and on the other hand showed how the Jews are being forced to support the reconstruction effort and to give away to Germanization. In some instances the Jews were mentioned on the fringes of general reports about occupied Poland and its administration. A clear reference to the criminal nature of the Jews and its continuation in the ghettos came in a Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung reportage published towards the end of 1940. It was the only time that a report about Polish Jews appeared on the front page of a German newspaper. The title was Stadt unter der Stadt [City under the city], but the story itself was titled Im Ghetto von Lublin… und… 25 m unter dem Ghetto [In the Ghetto of Lublin… and… 25 meters under the ghetto] [2]. Using photos and text provided by photographer Hilmar Pabel, the report depicted on its first page daily life in the ghetto. On the next two pages it depicted a German police raid into a cellar complex in the ghetto, where the policemen discovered hidden wares and foodstuff.²¹ The narrative of this report is reminiscence of earlier reports from 1939, but since it was longer and extraordinarily included a front page, it was more eye-catching. It is difficult to say what the background for this report was and why it was published as a front-page story. The so called ‘Jews learn how to work’ propaganda continued a trend based on old stereotypes. It sought to prove that under German rule even the lazy Jews are forced to contribute to the rebuilding of occupied Poland.²² This argument appeared for the first time in a Völkischer Beobachter article on 17 September. What started in a radical Nazi newspaper soon became a central leitmotiv of

 Peter Longerich, ‘Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!’ Die Deutsche und die Judenverfolgung 1933 – 1945, Bonn 2006, p. 148.  ‘Im Ghetto von Lublin… und… 25 m unter dem Ghetto’, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung XLIX, 1940, No. 49, 5. 12., pp. 1289 – 1291.  Harriet Scharnberg, ‘‘Juden lernen arbeiten!’ Ein antisemitisches Motiv in der deutschen Bildpresse, 1939 – 1941’, in Michael Nagel and Moshe Zimmermann (eds), Judenfeindschaft und Antisemitismus in der deutschen Presse über fünf Jahrhunderte: Erscheinungsformen, Rezeption, Debatte und Gegenwehr, Bremen 2013, pp. 841– 872.

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Fig. 2: ‘Im Ghetto von Lublin… und… 25 m unter dem Ghetto’ [In the Ghetto of Lublin… and… 25 meters under the ghetto], Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung IL, 1940, No. 49, 5. 12., pp. 1289. Photo: Daniel Uziel.

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the German wartime antisemitic propaganda.²³ Its main arguments appeared in a photo reportage by Fritz Bogner published in the Illustrierter Beobachter in November 1939. In this report three photos of Jews recruited for forced labor were printed next to photos of German soldiers and ‘our lads’ from the Labor Service, creating a sharp contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’.²⁴ A report published in the Illustrierter Beobachter on 10 April 1941 under the title Jews learn how to work for no profit shows the longevity of this argument [3]. Five seemingly harmless photos shot by an SS-PK photographer illustrated this positive report about reconstruction work in occupied Poland.²⁵

Barbarossa The PKs returned to occupied Poland in force in early 1941 as part of the secretive redeployment of German forces for the upcoming invasion to the USSR. Since they were not allowed to expose the massive troop movements, they focused their activities largely on non-military topics, which resulted in numerous visits to ghettos like Warsaw, Lublin and Kutno. Among the reporters were photographers and cameramen who shot large amount of photos and films. It appears though that this sudden interest was motivated by local considerations of secrecy shrouding the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’, and the need to let the PKs do something useful during this quite period. Some of the results of this self-initiated activity went to the archives, and some was used in the press, such as in the Jews learn how to work article.²⁶ Another result of this activity was a newspaper article titled Jews behind walls, illustrated with photos and descriptions provided by photographer Koch of PK689 [4]. It depicted the ghetto of Cracow. The description of the title photo told the readers that ‘they should be completely among themselves. A wall that is still under construction on this spot will keep the Jews away from the city.’ ²⁷

 Scharnberg (note 22), pp. 841– 846.  ‘Das Tagebuch’, Illustrierter Beobachter XIV, 1939, 9. 11., p. 1624.  ‘Juden lernen gemeinnützig zu arbeiten’, Illustrierter Beobachter XVI, 1941, No. 15, 10. 4., p. 471.  Uziel (note 1), pp. 280 – 281. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv, RH20 – 17/274, Tätigkeitsbericht der Gruppe Ic/AO des AOK17 für den Monat Januar 1941.  ‘Sie sollen ganz unter sich sein. Eine Mauer, die an dieser Stelle noch im Bau ist, wird die Juden von der Stadt fernhalten.’ See ‘Juden hinter Mauern’, Illustrierter Beobachter XVI, 1941, No. 24, 12. 6., p. 671.

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Fig. 3: ‘Juden lernen gemeinnützig zu arbeiten‘ [Jews learn how to work for no profit], Illustrierter Beobachter XVI, 1941, No. 15, 10. 4., p. 471. Photo: Daniel Uziel.

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Fig. 4: ‘Juden hinter Mauern’ [Jews behind walls], Illustrierter Beobachter XVI, 1941, No. 24, 12. 6., p. 671. Photo: Daniel Uziel.

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A portion of the material sent to the archives was taken out after the beginning of ‘Barbarossa’ and was used in the context of the renewed anti-Bolshevik propaganda campaign in order to underline the association of the Jews with the Red Peril. The most extravagant example of these publications was an article about the Warsaw Ghetto, published on 24 July 1941 in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. On no less than four pages, and using numerous photos provided by PK689, the newspaper portrayed at least three different antisemitic propaganda arguments. The subtitle exposed two of them in an elaborate formulation: ‘So lives and dwells the people from which the murderers of Bromberg, Lemberg, Dubno, [and] Bialystok came out. A report from the Warsaw Ghetto.’ ²⁸ It was an associative reference to the old argued participation of the Jews in the murder of ethnic Germans in Poland in 1939, and to the recently discovered atrocities of the Soviet regime in the newly occupied Soviet territories. The article also underlined the social injustice prevailing among the Jews locked in the ghettos. Shifting the blame on them for their horrendous living conditions. It was done visually by printing photos showing the contrast between the life of the rich Jews and the dying people in the streets [5]. Nevertheless, as the murder of the Jews picked gigantic dimensions in the second half of 1941, the Jews largely disappeared from the German visual media. Although the PKs continued to contribute images of the Jews here and there, almost none of them were published.

Conclusion Some caution is required when describing the German antisemitic propaganda in World War II. When looking at the whole, antisemitism was of minuscule dimension when compared with other wartime propagandist items. Furthermore, it was surprisingly small when considering the magnitude of the ‘Jewish Question’ and its solution. Some of the media reporting used in this research was presented rather prominently. The newsreel images of Polish Jews were placed either close to the beginning or close to the end, which normally included the highlights of the newsreel. However, when these early reports about Polish Jews were published, they were normally inserted between more dramatic war news items.

 ‘So lebt und haust das Volk, aus dem die Mörder von Bromberg, von Lemberg, Dubno, Bialystok hervorgingen. Ein Bericht aus dem Warschauer Ghetto.’ See ‘Juden unter sich’, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung L, 1941, No. 30, 24. 7., pp. 790 – 793.

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Fig. 5: ‘Juden unter sich‘ [Jews among themselves], Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung L, 1941, No. 30, 24. 7., pp. 790. Photo: Daniel Uziel.

The German public was obviously more interested in these news. Furthermore, reports depicting Polish Jews were relatively sparse and they disappeared com-

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pletely from the newsreels after 4 October 1939. From early 1940 the press also reduced significantly its reports about Polish Jews. As photography historian Klaus Hesse pointed out, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung published on 5 December 1939 a staged PK report about an SD raid on the Jewish community in Warsaw;²⁹ then one year has passed until its next report depicting Polish Jews was published on 5 December 1940. Although the Völkischer Beobachter published at that time larger number of general antisemitic articles, which included articles about Polish Jews, there was a marked reduction in their frequency.³⁰ This was part of a broader trend in which overt war propaganda took center stage and sidelined other topics. Peter Longerich argued that antisemitism became a propaganda topic of limited value between the outbreak of World War II and summer 1941. Hence, it never developed during this period into a general antisemitic propaganda campaign as in 1933, 1935 or 1938.³¹ Nevertheless, the policies, directives and images created by the propaganda units and disseminated by the Propaganda Ministry during the invasion to Poland and the early occupation of the country defined to a large extent the main arguments and images of the German wartime antisemitic propaganda. It took a sharp turn only following the attack on the USSR, when representation of the Jews as an integral part of the Bolshevik enemy became (again) a dominant feature. In general terms, the initial German propaganda sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Polish state through its association with its Jewish population. Beyond that, the German propaganda isolated the Polish Jews and presented them as bitter enemies of the Reich, obstructing rebuilding, sabotaging the economy, a source of subversion and a risk to public health. Most of these arguments were based on prewar antisemitic images. The broad context has changed however with the outbreak of World War II, as the anti-Jewish propaganda was integrated within the general war propaganda of the Reich. In this context the definition of friends and foes became more crucial than ever before. Occupied Poland provided the Germans in this respect a golden opportunity to establish and enhance the image of the Jews as one of Germany’s prime enemies in this new war. Visual material shot by PK reporters and disseminated to the media through the fine mechanism established by the Propaganda Ministry and the Wehrmacht was crucial in this respect. The ‘authenticity’ of images

 ‘Waffen in Gräbern versteckt!’, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung XLVIII, 1939, 14. 12., p. 1876.  Klaus Hesse, ‘Eine Bildreportage Artur Grimms aus dem besetzten Warschau 1939’, in Rainer Rother and Judith Prokasky (eds), Die Kamera als Waffe. Propagandabilder des Zweiten Weltkrieges, Munich 2010, pp. 137– 149, esp. p. 143.  Longerich (note 20), p. 150.

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shot by professionals using state of the art technical equipment gave the old antisemitic images a new life and enhanced their effectiveness. As Christopher Browning pointed out: ‘If Nazi propaganda had not succeeded in turning many Germans into rabid antisemites in Hitler’s own image, Nazi policies had succeeded in isolating German Jewry from the rest of society. The Jews had increasingly become an abstract phenomenon to whose fate Germans could be indifferent, not fellow citizens and human beings with whom Germans could identify and empathize. The German encounter with Poland gave new credibility to the Nazi message.’ ³²

 Browning (note 2), cit. p. 13.

Blanka Soukupová

Visual Depictions of Antisemitism in the Czech Lands after World War II Summary: The text analyses the visualisation of antisemitism in Czechoslovakia from 1945 to 1989. If we understand post-war antisemitism as the revival of a phenomenon which in itself unites leitmotifs from antiquity up to the Protectorate, it is one that works with theories of conspiracies, with a stereotyped vision of the world, with populism. Whereas after the war, the predominant stereotype of the Jew was as a German and an asocial Germaniser, after the February coup the main stereotype of the Jew was as a bourgeois nationalist, capitalist, cosmopolitan or, in synonymous designation, a representative of Zionism. The antisemitic blade was directed primarily at the State of Israel as a vassal of the USA. The figure of Israel as a collective Jew then returned during what was called ‘normalisation’. These propagandist ideas of the Jew found their reflection in the political caricature of the time. The Jew, and therefore the State of Israel, was depicted with the help of antisemitic ideas about Jewish physiognomy and character – a longing for world dominance and property, asocialism, parasitism. The aim of the pictures of the Jew was to distract attention from current social problems and to support a Czechoslovak foreign policy determined by the power-political interests of the Soviet Union. This trend did not vanish even in the ‘golden sixties’, although at this time a gulf opened between civil society and the political representation. Keywords: visualisation, caricature, Jewish threat, Jewish minority, Czechoslovakia 1945 – 1989

The years 1945 – 1948 Although the post-war history of Czechoslovakia was not so dramatic compared with the tragic history of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and the defeated Germany, the country still had to endure a considerable number of traumatic socio-political events, the most significant of which were the political trials at the turn of 1950s, the suppression of the Prague Spring and occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, and the so-called Normalization period that followed in the years 1969 – 1989. Even so, the period immediately after the war was not a time of peace (public opinion was only homogenous in first few posthttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-010

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war months),¹ and some researchers even consider this to have been a time of creeping civil war.² In the atmosphere of the destabilized postwar society, difficult economic and social realities,³ and also repercussions from the periods of the Second Czechoslovak Republic (30 September 1938 – 14– 16 March 1939) and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (16 March 1939 – 9 May 1945), antisemitism was quick to reappear⁴ in the Czech setting, initially in verbal form. Recollections of the Jewish minority from that time contain many bitter memories of never-returned property put into safe keeping with ‘good friends’⁵ before their deportations, and the majority population’s spiteful behaviour towards the Jews who survived.⁶ Moreover, malicious rumours and absurd allegations would soon emerge in Czech society. The one-tenth of Jews of the former Protectorate who survived the Shoah⁷ returned not only to face allegations that more Jews had returned after the war than had been deported and that Jewish soldiers were malingerers,⁸ but, also, as chief rabbi Hanuš Rezek recalls, re-

 Lenka Kalinová, Východiska, očekávání a realita poválečné doby. K dějinám české společnosti v letech 1945 – 1948, Prague 2004, p. 85 (Česká společnost po roce 1945 I).  Jiří Matějček, ‘Co se zločiny komunismu?’, in Jana Machačová and Jiří Matějček, Problémy obecné kultury v českých zemích 1781 – 1989, Kutná Hora and Opava 2008, pp. 377– 386, cit. p. 379. According to the historian Karel Kaplan, society was already structured along the lines of party-political preferences around the end of 1945 and beginning of 1946. Karel Kaplan, Československo v letech 1945 – 1948 I, Prague 1991, pp. 21, 36.  Kalinová (note 1), pp. 85 – 86.  The situation was so serious that at the end of 1945 Karel Kučera, who regarded antisemitism as a social and national complex, proposed that an institution to monitor this phenomenon be established. Karel Kučera, ‘Jak proti antisemitismu’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze VII, 1945, No. 4, 15. 12., p. 30.  Cf., e. g. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941 – 1968, New York 1989, pp. 45 – 47. –Věra Gissingová, Perličky dětství, Prague 1992, p. 15. – Eva Rodenová and Rudolf Roden, Životy ve vypůjčeném čase, Prague 2009, p. 181.  Cf., e. g. Adolf Hermann, Mých prvních pět životů, Prague 2000, p. 191, p. 193, p. 204, p. 205. – Gissingová (note 5), pp. 148 – 149. – Margolius Kovály (note 5), pp. 53 – 54.  According to Eva Hahn, a German political scientist of Czech Jewish origin, 14,000 Protectorate Jews survived the concentration camps and 26,111 presumably survived by emigrating. Eva Schmidtová-Hartmannová, ‘Ztráty československého židovského obyvatelstva 1938 – 1945’, in Milan Šimečka, Milena Janišová et al., Osud židů v protektorátu 1939 – 1945, Prague 2001, p. 81– 116, cit. p. 95. For the number of surviving Jews cf. Blanka Soukupová, Židé v českých zemích po šoa. Identita poraněné paměti, Bratislava 2016, pp. 24, 27– 29, 59.  ‘Hledejte pravdu’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze VII, 1945, No. 3, 28. 10., pp. 20 – 21. See also the well-known statement of Václav Kopecký of 16 March 1947 referring to optants from Subcarpathian Ruthenia who joined the Red Army only when victory was assured. Summary in Soukupová (note 7), pp. 90 – 93.

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marks about holes in gas chambers and the strange range of enemy guns.⁹ Alongside these verbal smears, which were based on the resurrected stereotype of the indestructible Jew, the stereotype of the Jew as German – the enemy of the Czech nation – re-emerged. So-called German Jews¹⁰ (those who in the 1930 census had declared themselves and their children to be German) were included in the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia on the basis of a presidential decree from 2 August 1945 until 10 September 1946. This stereotype of the Jew as ‘Germanizer’ (along with the popular stereotype of the Jew as an asocial element) was fully exploited in cases of restitution,¹¹ especially in the Varnsdorf affair (March 1947), in which the trade unions, in particular, initiated a campaign aimed at nationalizing companies that had not been included in what was known as the great nationalization¹² after the war. At this time, the Communist Party very expediently supported social radicalism, revealing its true totalitarian form of social governance.¹³ Despite this resurgence in antisemitism, official drawings from the time depicted Jews primarily as concentration camp prisoners, whose wartime fate was an indictment of the Nazi regime. In October 1946, the satirical communist newspaper Dikobraz [Porcupine] published a drawing by the painter and cartoonist, Antonín Pelc (1895 – 1967), who had been a concentration camp prisoner during the war, entitled Spravedlnost? [Justice?] It depicted a set of scales with tormented prisoners (men, women, and children) sitting and standing on the right-hand side of it [1]. On the descending left-hand side of the scales were images of Nazi officers and officials contemplating their impending punishment. In the upper half of the background of the collage was a drawing of prisoners with lifeless ex ‘Vzpomínali jsme mučedníků noci z 8. na 9. března’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze IX, 1947, No. 6, 15. 3., p. 92.  Cf. Adrian von Arburg, Tomáš Staněk et al., Vysídlení Němců a proměny českého pohraničí 1945 – 1951. Dokumenty z českých archivů. Duben – srpen/září 1945: ‘Divoký odsun’ a počátky osídlování II/1, Středokluky 2011, pp. 168 – 171. Also, cf. Josef Šebestík and Zdeněk Lukeš, Přehled předpisů o Němcích a osobách považovaných za Němce, Prague 1946, pp. 16, 55 – 57 (Příručky pro národní výbory IX). – ‘Aby pravda zvítězila’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze VIII, 1946, No. 11, 1. 10., p. 90.  Cf. Karel Kučera, ‘Masky antisemitismu’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze VIII, 1946, No. 6, 3. 6., p. 46. The Communist Minister of the Interior Václav Kopecký wrote instructions for lower state administration authorities on how to accuse Jews of Germanization. Šárka Nepalová, ‘Židé v Českých zemích v letech 1945 – 1948’, Dějiny a současnost XXI, 1999, No. 5, pp. 54– 55.  For a summary, see Drahomír Jančík, Eduard Kubů and Jan Kuklík jr., ‘Arizace’ a restituce židovského majetku v českých zemích (1939 – 2000), Prague 2003, pp. 62, 65. For a summary of the case (with references to other academic literature and archive sources), see Soukupová (note 7), pp. 87– 89.  Karel Kaplan, Pět kapitol o Únoru, Brno 1997, pp. 194– 195.

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Fig. 1: Antonín Pelc, ‘Spravedlnost?’ [Justice?], Dikobraz II, 1946, No. 42, 15. 10., p. 1. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

pressions, while the lower half was taken up by a well-known photograph from the Nuremberg trials. It was typical not to distinguish between prisoners of Jewish and non-Jewish origin when depicting concentration camp inmates in com-

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Fig. 2: Josef Molín, ‘Hele, Piková dáma’ [Look, the Queen of Spades], Dikobraz II, 1946, No. 46, 12. 11., p. 5. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

munist periodicals.¹⁴ A somewhat atypical drawing [2] is that of a Jewish female owner of a fashion salon with the German name Picková by J. Mol (Josef Molín?). This carries certain hallmarks of antisemitic cartoons (large hooked nose, dark curly hair, crooked posture). Two men who are passing by point at the lady and exclaim ‘Look, the Queen of Spades’. This might be understood as a reference to the novel The Queen of Spades (1834) by the Romantic Russian writer Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, which gave rise to the opera of the same name by Pyotr

 A similar drawing was published by Dikobraz in March 1946, the main purpose of which was, of course, to support the expulsion of Germans from postwar Czechoslovakia. The drawing is based on the contrast of two population transfers: the evacuation of Auschwitz at the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, where we see the wretched camp inmates, and the expulsion of Germans, who are leaving with suitcases marked with swastikas, drinking and eating sausages with abandon, without ration cards. See the illustration, Jaromír Wišo, ‘Tak to vypadalo’, Dikobraz II, 1946, No. 10, 6. 3., p. 7.

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Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1890), as a reminder of the dead countess (a murdered Jewess, in this case), who appears to the man responsible for her death. However, it is more likely that it is a play on words denigrating German Jews. The ‘German’ Jews were Jews who had declared themselves to be of German nationality in the 1930 census. They preferred to communicate in German in their social and family life, but usually also spoke Czech. In 1921, however, the majority of Jews by faith in the Czech lands had claimed Czech nationality (38.0 % compared to 34.7 % of Jews professing German nationality and 25.9 % of Jews professing Jewish nationality). Czech nationalists regarded German Jews as enemies of the Czech nation and as pioneers of Germanisation.

The years 1948 – 1956 After the February coup of 1948, which communist minister Václav Kopecký described as the defeat of fascist and antisemitic elements,¹⁵ there was a new wave of antisemitism which grew out of a Soviet initiative and was embodied in the form of Soviet advisers arriving in Czechoslovakia.¹⁶ In the early 1950s, with the aid of local Stalinist cadres, they created the concept of anti-Zionist (antisemitic) state propaganda. This was founded on the construct of Zionism as socalled bourgeois nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the construct of the State of Israel, which to the displeasure of Soviet leaders had set out on its democratic path¹⁷ as a US base in the Middle East.¹⁸ While attacks on Zionism appeared in the communist publication Tvorba [Creation] as early as June 1946,¹⁹ the vilification of the Jewish state, the establishment of which the Soviet Union and its Czechoslovak satellite initially supported,²⁰ had been something

 Václav Kopecký, ‘To, co se odehrálo v ČSR, jest také porážka fašizujících, antisemitských živlů’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze X, 1948, No. 11, 12. 3., p. 117. Antisemitic cases from 1948 were perceived as repercussions of fascist reaction. Soukupová (note 7), pp. 112– 113, 115 – 116.  Karel Kaplan, Sovětští poradci v Československu 1949 – 1956, Prague 1993.  Tomáš Pěkný, Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě, Prague 2001, pp. 352– 353. – Arnold Krammer, The Forgotten Friendship. Israel and the Soviet Bloc 1947 – 53, Urbana 1974. – Yaacov Ro’i, Soviet Decision Making in Practice. The USSR and Israel 1947 – 1954, New Brunswick 1980. – Jiří Dufek, Karel Kaplan and Vladimír Šlosar, Československo a Izrael v letech 1947 – 1953, Brno 1993.  Soukupová (note 7), p. 132.  R. Friedl, ‘Sionistická otázka v ‘Tvorbě’’, Věstník Židovské obce náboženské v Praze VIII, 1946, No. 6, 3. 6., p. 46.  For a summary with references to academic literature, see Soukupová (note 7), pp. 128 – 130.

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of a novelty. In the summer of 1948, however, Czech satirical drawings primarily reflected on the issue of the ceasefire of 11 June, by which the United Nations managed to halt the war between the not-yet one-month-old State of Israel and the Arab states.²¹ On the front page of Dikobraz of 1 June 1948, a Jew is standing on one rock offering his hand to an Arab standing on another. Between them is a gnarled tree with the inscription ‘Jaffa’ on it, which needs to be supported so as not to fall.²² Not long after, in a drawing by Jiří Hejna, we see a Jewish family (grandmother, mother, three children and a maid carrying a roasted goose; a bottle of fine cognac stands on the table). ‘And what do you want to be when you grow up, Frankie?’ a little Jewish boy is asked by his uncle. ‘An observer of the ceasefire in Palestine, Uncle’ ²³ is the reply. Thus, the theme of Jewry is now separated from the dominant framework of reflection on World War II, fascism and the consequences for the Czech lands (collaboration, postwar expulsions). Of course, state antisemitism after the communist coup of February 1948 also drew on older sources. Within the framework of issues of postwar reconstruction, it managed to incorporate the modern stereotype of the Jew as a capitalist, asocial, parasitical and stateless cosmopolitan element. In the Slánský trial (1952), which was the culmination of the political trials,²⁴ all these ‘wellknown characteristics’ of Jews were attributed to the communists of Jewish origin²⁵ on trial. The object of this show trial and others was to draw the popula-

 Howard M. Sachar, Dějiny Státu Izrael, Prague 1999, pp. 283 – 284.  The signature beneath the joke is C. and F. Bělský.  Dikobraz IV, 1948, No. 36, 7. 9., p. 1.  For literature on the trial (authors are listed in alphabetical order) cf. e. g. Petr Brod, ‘Židé v poválečném Československu’, in Václav Veber, Židé v novodobých dějinách, Prague 1997, pp. 147– 162, cit. pp. 155 – 156. – Idem, ‘Židé v poválečném Československu’, in Jörg K. Hoensch, Stanislav Biman and Ľubomír Lipták, Emancipácia židov – antisemitizmus – prenasledovanie v Nemecku, Rakúsku-Uhorsku, v českých zemiach a na Slovensku, Bratislava 1999, pp. 177– 189, cit. pp. 183 – 184. – Karel Kaplan, K politickým procesům v Československu 1948 – 1954, Prague 1994, pp. 102– 106, 133 – 141. – Idem, Nekrvavá revoluce, Prague 1993, pp. 345 – 365. – Karel Kaplan and Jiří Paleček, Komunistický režim a politické procesy v Československu, Brno 2001, pp. 125 – 126, 131– 135. – Paul Lendvai, Antisemitismus ohne Juden. Entwicklungen und Tendenzen in Osteuropa, Vienna 1972, pp. 81– 83, 221– 234. – Pěkný (note 17), pp. 353 – 354. – Jiří Pernes and Jan Foitzik, Politické procesy v Československu po roce 1945 a ‘případ Slánský’, Brno 2005, pp. 33 – 35. – Jan Rataj, KSČ a Československo (1945 – 1960) I, Prague 2003, pp. 120 – 121. – Jana Svobodová, Zdroje a projevy antisemitismu v českých zemích 1948 – 1992, Prague 1994, pp. 36 – 42. – Moshe Yegar, Československo, sionismus, Izrael. Historie vzájemných vztahů, Prague 1997, pp. 133 – 163, 163 – 169.  Soukupová (note 7), pp. 135– 136. Cf., e. g. ‘Žaloba proti vedení protistátního spikleneckého centra v čele s Rudolfem Slánským’, Rudé právo XXXIII, 1952, No. 280, 20. 11., p. 6. – Ivan Skála, ‘Zrádce a špion nemá vlast’, Rudé právo XXXIII, 1952, No. 314, 24. 11., p. 7.

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tion’s attention away from a critical analysis of the real economic and social hardships and point the finger at the purported culprits responsible for all the difficulties of post-war development. Yet another conspiracy theory emerged, this time fitted into the framework of the polarized world (the positively perceived East and the negatively enshrouded West). An illustration by Josef Novák from March 1951 [3] shows a fat American bourgeois Jew with characteristic bow tie and cigar sitting at his desk and frowning²⁶ (in the background, skyscrapers can be seen through the window of his office). It is set in the period of the political trials in Czechoslovakia and he is lamenting the loss of imperialist influence in another Central European country: ‘It looks like they’re closing down my branch office in Czechoslovakia…’ On the shelf to his left are files marked with the heading ‘Losses’ for Hungary, Romania and

Fig. 3: Josef Novák, ‘Zdá se, že mi tu filiálku v ČSR zavírají…’ [It looks like they’re closing down my branch office in Czechoslovakia…], Dikobraz VII, 1951, No. 12, 20. 3., p. 5. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

 In the drawing, Josef Novák pays particular attention to the hooked nose and half-closed eyelids.

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Bulgaria, and spread out on the desk are papers with names of democratic Czechoslovak politicians who were removed after February 1948 and the victims of the political trials of the early 1950s. In the period before and after the Slánský trial, we again encounter the medieval depiction of Jews as inhuman in contemporary caricatures. In January 1952, Jiří Žentel drew a cartoon for the communist satirical weekly newspaper Dikobraz depicting the hand of Rudolf Slánský with claws extending towards the Yugoslav president, Josip Broz Tito, which is being blocked by the hand of a worker, thus preventing the friendly handshake.²⁷ The drawing Americký kosmopolista – Žid [American Cosmopolitan – Jew] portraying a Jew in a police uniform with truncheon by Vilém Reichmann (1908 – 1991) was also very expressive. Reichmann was a Brno artist of German origin working under the pseudonym Jappy²⁸ who had served in the German army in World War II. The cover page of Dikobraz from 7 December 1952 was a drawing by Antonín Pelc, depicting a worker carrying a hammer and stamping on a nest of vipers in the service of imperialists [4]. Only two weeks later, Otakar Štembera (1914– 1999), co-founder of Dikobraz and art editor of the trade union newspaper Práce [Work], depicted Rudolf Slánský as the Pied Piper with the word ‘Betrayal’ inscribed on his pipe. There is a leaflet in his coat pocket labelled ‘Espionage’ and he is carrying a placard proclaiming ‘Forwards towards socialism’ on a white background, under which a black banner is visible with the words ‘Towards capitalism’. The rats he is leading to their doom are the treasonous politicians Otto Šling, Rudolf Margolius, Bedřich Reicin, André Simone, and Ludvík Frejka (of the eleven accused communists of Jewish descent only Bedřich Geminder, Artur London, Vavro Hajdů and Evžen Löbl are absent) [5]. Once again, the element of depriving the accused of their human form serves to facilitate their subsequent physical liquidation. Here it should be noted that the depiction of Jews as rats is part of the arsenal of antisemitic comparisons: Wilhelm Marr, who popularized the term antisemitism, compared Jews to golden and red rats. Nevertheless, Štembera also ascribed the form of the treacherous rat to another three of the accused who were not Jews. However, probably the best-known portrait of Slánský was printed in the communist weekly newspaper Tvorba as early as December 1951. Vilém Reichmann depicted the former Communist Party chairman in the form of a poisonous weed being ripped out by a hand inscribed with the letters

 See the cartoon, ‘Podání’, Dikobraz VIII, 1952, No. 2, 13. 1., p. 10.  Dikobraz VIII, 1952, No. 12, 23. 3., p. 2.

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Fig. 4: Antonín Pelc, ‘Po procesu. Jedna rána – dva se po ní svíjí: majitel i jeho klubko zmijí.’ [After the trial. One blow – two writhe after it: the owner and his nest of vipers.], Dikobraz VIII, 1952, No. 49, 7. 12., p. 1. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

KSČ [Communist Party of Czechoslovakia].²⁹ Still, it should be emphasized that in the atmosphere of the Slánský trial, verbal antisemitism was more prevalent than visual depictions of the alleged Jewish traitors.

 See the illustration, Vilém Reichmann, ‘Vytrháme jedovaté býlí zrady i s kořeny!’, Tvorba XX, 1951, No. 52, 27. 12., p. 1246. The drawing of Slánský’s head bears the hallmarks of an antisemitic caricature: hooked nose, large mouth, pointed ears.

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Fig. 5: ‘The Ratcatcher in the old legend wanted to lead the rats beyond the waves. This one however, although he had another aim, was drowned along with the rats.’ Otakar Štembera, ‘Krysař…’ [The Ratcatcher…], Dikobraz VIII, 1952, No. 51, 21. 12., p. 405. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

Of course, the caricature of the Jew as capitalist and arms dealer maintained its popularity with cartoonists not only in that year, but also in the years that were to follow. For instance, in February 1952, Dikobraz reprinted a satirical image from the French publication Le drapeau rouge in response to rising milk prices. In the picture, a fat Jew is drinking milk exclaiming, ‘Wait up, I’m first’.³⁰ Three years later Dikobraz, newly issued by the trade union publisher Práce, printed a drawing by Otakar Mrkvička entitled Na Wall Streetu [On Wall Street]. Capitalists and arms dealers, some of them with ‘Jewish noses’, are sitting at a table and a waiter is bringing them aspirin. Their malaise has been brought on by new Soviet proposals on disarmament.³¹ In a 1956 picture by Karel Vaca (1919 – 1989), a student of Emil Filla and a painter and stage and costume designer, we see a small, fat, crooked, hooked-nosed Jew with bulging eyes and a double chin dressed in a top hat and tails [6]. He is addressing a red Marianne in a Phrygian cap (a reference to France, which at that time had become

 Dikobraz VIII, 1952, No. 8, 24. 2., p. 62.  Dikobraz XI, 1955, No. 22, 26. 5., p. 1.

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Fig. 6: Karel Vaca, ‘No, ty ses mi pěkně vybarvila!’ [Look at you! Now I see your true colours!], Dikobraz XII, 1956, No. 2, 12. 1., p. 1. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

radicalized) with the words ‘Look at you! Now I see your true colours!’ ³² We must add that the colour red (like the red rose and later the red carnation) became the official symbol of the Social Democratic movement in the 1890s. This symbolism was later taken over by the Communist movement, which split away as a radical offshoot of the Social Democrats (the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia was founded in 1921). In August 1956, Dikobraz published a caricature of a hooked-

 In the picture Low tide at Suez, showing the confiscation of the profits of Great Britain and France after the Suez Canal was nationalized, Jaroslav Pop depicted a disappointed French Jew similarly, in a top hat, black suit, and bow tie.

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nosed French Jew with side curls in a top hat standing next to a British man wailing over Egypt’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal [7]. President Nasser had been

Fig. 7: Jaroslav Pop, ‘Suezský odliv’ [Low tide at Suez], Dikobraz XII, 1956, No. 33, 16. 8., p. 260. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

considering it since 1954, but favourable circumstances only arose in June 1956 after the last British soldiers had left Egypt. The profits of the Suez Canal Company are seen being appropriated for the construction of the Aswan Dam on the River Nile.³³ Jaroslav Pop’s drawing from the time was given the mocking title Suezský odliv [Low tide at Suez] (referring to the outflow of money).³⁴

 Sachar (note 21), p. 389.  Some later caricatures are of similar nature. One example is the drawing by Vilém Reichmann entitled The European market from 1957 which depicted deformed hooked-nosed Jews

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The years 1957 – 1968 Antisemitic representations of Jews were not always aimed directly at the Jewish minority. A drawing by Jaroslav Malák from 1957 depicts two orthodox Jews with hunched shoulders, large hooked noses, bulging eyes, long beards and side locks [8]. They are standing by the fabled giant clay Golem as it was portrayed in the popular historical comedy film from that time, Císařův pekař a Pekařův císař [The Emperor and the Golem] (1951) (the Golem figure was modelled by the sculptor Jaroslav Horejc). The film was directed by Martin Frič and starred Jan Werich playing the dual role of Emperor Rudolf II and the baker Matěj. The drawing was not meant to denigrate Jews, but referred to shortcomings in the economy at that time. This kind of satire, which was related to permitted criticism of local politics, is relatively common. Another example of this is a drawing of carnival masks (including that of the devil – a Jew with a big nose and protruding jaw) by František Skála from 1957. The joke was in the form of a riddle which asked what the devil and the teaching of physical education at the apprentice school in Velká Bíteš had in common (the answer was that the devil and physical education at the school existed only in the world of fairy tales).³⁵ A drawing of a Jew with a large hooked nose was demonstrably used by European antisemites in the latter third of the nineteenth century. Jews, at the time, also began to be derisively called ‘noses’. Returning to world politics, there was no let-up in the state’s anti-Zionist campaign, even in the so-called ‘golden 1960s’,³⁶ in spite of the fact that this period is associated with looser political and social constraints.³⁷ Even then, the antisemitism of that time again issued from the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s vassal relationship to the Soviet Union. Because of this, visual depictions of antisemitism primarily took the form of hatred of the State of Israel, whose policies were viewed as symbols of anti-communist and anti-Soviet sentiment.³⁸ One example is a drawing by Jiří Žentel from 1957, portraying the State of Israel as a dwarfish, curly-haired, hooked-nosed Jewish soldier sitting at the bar. He is hold-

with bulging eyes tearing up and eating a map of Europe. See Dikobraz XIII, 1957, No. 8, 21. 2., p. 60.  Dikobraz XIII, 1957, No. 4, 24. 1., p. 32.  Soukupová (note 7), pp. 158, 159 – 160. For minority contacts with the State of Israel cf. summary in ibidem, pp. 168 – 179.  For a summary of the characteristics of this period, see Karel Kaplan, Kronika komunistického Československa. Kořeny reformy 1956 – 1968: společnost a moc, Brno 2008. Czechoslovakia continued to have a vassal relationship with Moscow. Ibidem, pp. 26 – 27.  Summary in Soukupová (note 7), p. 169.

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Fig. 8: ‘The coal that the Peace Defenders’ Mine in Horní Jiřetín supplies to the power station in Komořany contains a high proportion of earth. The earth gets baked on the grids and damages the equipment. / ‘Chaim, run and get another bucket of coal from the Peace Defenders’ Mine so I can finish this Golem!’’ Jaroslav Malák, ‘Důl Obránců míru…’ [The Peace Defenders’ Mine…], Dikobraz XIII, 1957, No. 10, 7. 3., p. 80. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

ing a bloody dagger and is wearing a revolver and an ammunition belt around his waist. The helmet on his head bears the inscription Israel [9]. His aggression is being encouraged by the United States of America (an American in a stars and stripes bow tie who is behind the bar pouring one shot of liquor after another).

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Fig. 9: ‘Watch out for that troublemaker! Instead of trying to get him sober, he keeps pouring him more…’ Jiří Žentel, ‘Pozor na toho výtržníka!’ [Watch out for that troublemaker!], Dikobraz XIII, 1957, No. 20, 16. 5., p. 156. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

‘Watch out for that troublemaker! Instead of trying to get him sober, he keeps pouring him more…’ says an Egyptian to another Arab observing the scene.³⁹ The drawing was entirely in keeping with the spirit of world reaction to the destruc-

 Dikobraz XIII, 1957, No. 20, 16. 5., p. 156.

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tion inflicted on Egypt in the Sinai War.⁴⁰ This drawing also reflected the Soviet Union’s hostile policy towards the State of Israel at the time. There was no deviation from anti-Israeli satire until 1960, around the time of the trial for war crimes of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had masterminded the main phase of the Final Solution to the Jewish question.⁴¹ In this atmosphere, Czechoslovak propaganda, above all, denounced the Federal Republic of Germany (Bonn)⁴² for its alleged protection of war criminals. For example, in a drawing by Jaroslav Pop from 1960 we see neo-Nazis painting swastikas and the slogans Juden raus and Tod den Juden ⁴³ on a synagogue [10]. William Reichman’s caricature depicted a frightened Bonn government at a table over which hovered an axe inscribed with the word Eichmann [11]. The drawing was accompanied by the poem Rafinovaný čin [Cunning Act] by Karel Bradáč.⁴⁴ In the following years, however, the State of Israel was depicted as an ally of West Germany. A drawing by Jiří Žentel from 1965 entitled Chytá už jen na jeden prut [He’s now fishing with only one rod] showed Franz Josef Strauss as a fisherman catching the State of Israel.⁴⁵ State propaganda observed German-Israeli rapprochement, which had been actively supported since the turn of 1960s by Strauss and his Christian Democratic Union,⁴⁶ with great enmity. This hostile attitude towards the Jewish state would remain in the years that followed. It escalated again in June 1967 after the third Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, when the Soviet Union and its satellites broke off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.⁴⁷ The anti-Israeli sentiment of the state also affected Jewish lives within the country.⁴⁸ However, at this time when the whole of society was interested in the Holocaust and Jewish culture, and were sympathetic towards Israel,⁴⁹ journalists and caricaturists quietly distanced themselves from antisemitism.⁵⁰ In the atmosphere surround-

 For a summary on this, see Sachar (note 21), pp. 404– 408.  For a summary on the capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and on the Jerusalem trial in 1961, see ibidem, pp. 432– 437.  See Soukupová (note 7), p. 497.  See the illustration, ‘Udržbáři fy Hitler & nástupci’, Dikobraz XVI, 1960, No. 2, 14. 1., p. 1.  See the illustration, Jappy [Vilém Reichmann], ‘Bonnský přízrak’, Dikobraz XVI, 1960, No. 46, 17. 11., p. 2.  Dikobraz XXI, 1965, No. 13, 1. 4., p. 2.  Sachar (note 21), p. 440.  Cf. Jindřich Dejmek, Československo, jeho sousedé a velmoci ve XX. století (1918 až 1992). Vybrané kapitoly z dějin československé zahraniční politiky, Prague 2002, p. 34. – Sachar (note 21), pp. 470 – 471. – Miloš Pojar, Izrael, Prague 2004, p. 63.  For a summary, see Soukupová (note 7), pp. 174– 179.  Ibidem, pp. 198 – 201.  Journalists refused to write anti-Israel editorials. Sachar (note 21), p. 507.

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Fig. 10: Jaroslav Pop, ‘Udržbáři fy Hitler & nástupci’ [Maintenance workers of Hitler & Co., Ltd., and their successors], Dikobraz XVI, 1960, No. 2, 14. 1., p. 1. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

ing the Six-Day War, the only anti-Israeli caricature is to be found in Dikobraz. In a photo from a session of the United Nations, the Israeli delegate is pondering how to present the Six-Day War so it does not look like an act of aggression by Israel. The anonymous depiction of the collective Jew, i. e. the State of Israel, using the method of photomontage popular at that time, at least did not descend into primitive antisemitic stereotypes [12].⁵¹ In 1965, Otakar Štembera drew a very respectful cartoon to commemorate what would have been the 80th birthday of the ‘raging reporter’ Egon Erwin Kisch seated on a winged fountain pen [13].⁵² In the atmosphere of the ‘golden sixties’, there was very much interest in the Holocaust and Jewish culture in general in Czech society. The Czech intellectual

 Dikobraz XXIII, 1967, No. 24, 15. 6., p. 5.  Dikobraz XXI, 1965, No. 17, 29. 4., p. 3.

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Fig. 11: ‘CUNNING ACT / Karel Bradáč / After years they caught the killer / and now the best advice comes dear. / Fear spreads through the band of killers / ‘Will he speak?’ And, ‘Will he tell?’ / Silence him? With dagger, poison? / That won’t work, they’ll see it’s us. / The band of killers quakes in terror; / let him drop one word – we’re done for. / If he betrays what once was hidden, / we’ve more to lose than just our perks. / Rumbles wrathful a volcanic voice, / leader of Globka Killers Inc. / ‘Poison nor dagger naught avail us, so club together and hire a Defence. / Since still one chance remains to us / defend him in the name of the law! / This advocate, dear gentlemen / Defends not Eichmann – but Bonn (and us!)’’ Jappy [Vilém Reichmann], ‘Bonnský přízrak. Na koho to slovo padne…’ [The Bonn Phantom. Eeny meeny miney mo…], Dikobraz XVI, 1960, No. 46, 17. 11., p. 2. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

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Fig. 12: ‘… A teď jak to navlíknout, že to nebyla agrese?’ [And now how to put on, that it wasn’t aggression?], Dikobraz XXIII, 1967, No. 24, 15. 6., p. 5. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

community had great sympathy for the State of Israel. However, the positive portrayal of E. E. Kisch related more to the journalist’s left-wing orientation. Communist propaganda after World War II applauded communist Jews as role models for the rest of the Jewish population.

The years 1969 – 1989 The period of Normalization began with the binding interpretation of the Prague Spring in the document entitled Lessons from the Crisis Developments in the Party and Society after the XIII Congress of the Communist Party (December 1970). This document also features a paragraph ascribing considerable influence to so-

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Fig. 13: Otakar Štembera, ‘Egon Ervín Kisch’, Dikobraz XXI, 1965, No. 17, 29. 4., p. 3. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

called Zionists in the fight against socialism, as the Prague Spring was characterized.⁵³ As in the 1950s, ‘normalized’ Czechoslovakia again slavishly mimicked the hostile attitude of the Soviet Union towards Israel.⁵⁴ The official interpretation of Israel – as a collective Jew – was based on the revived conspiracy theory of Jews striving for dominion over the world. The press (Rudé právo [Red Law], Život strany [Party life]),⁵⁵ pseudo-academic literature of Soviet and Czech origin (František J. Kolár),⁵⁶ and also contemporary fiction (Alexej Pludek, Josef

 Poučení z krizového vývoje ve straně a společnosti po XIII. sjezdu KSČ. Rezoluce o aktuálních otázkách jednoty strany schválená na plenárním zasedání ÚV KSČ v prosinci 1970, Prague 1970, p. 19.  On the Soviet antisemitic wave, see Yegar (note 24), pp. 184– 185.  Soukupová (note 7), p. 236.  Brod, ‘Židé v poválečném Československu’ (note 24), 1997, pp. 156 – 157. – Svobodová (note 24), pp. 54– 56, 57. – Soukupová (note 7), pp. 244– 248.

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Šebesta) gave voice to this theory.⁵⁷ The regime of Gustav Husák even denounced Zionism, represented by the Jewish bourgeoisie and pseudo-intelligentsia, by equating it to antisemitism and racism.⁵⁸ Thereafter, the State of Israel was depicted by the official propaganda of normalized Czechoslovakia as a military aggressor and occupier.⁵⁹ The notion of Israel as a little David in the service of the Western Goliath of the United States of America was also widely disseminated. According to František J. Kolár, the chief ideologist of Normalization, even the Six-Day War was ‘a dirty war of Western Goliaths striving in vain to hide behind the little Israeli David’.⁶⁰ Visual depictions of antisemitism of that time grew out of the same ideas. One example is a drawing by Jiří Žentel from 1970 that depicted Israel as an implement with which an American caricature wearing gloves stirs up unrest in the Middle East while not getting burnt himself [14].⁶¹ Another caricature from 1977 shows Israel in the form of a six-pointed yellow star with glowing tail at Christmas, lighting the way for imperialist arms manufacturers. The animus of the drawing is intensified by the picture alongside it in which West German neoNazis paint swastikas while singing a popular German Christmas carol [15].⁶² Of course, similar caricatures also appeared in other Soviet satellite countries. For example, in 1975, when the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution equating Zionism to racism,⁶³ Dikobraz reprinted an extremely hostile anti-Israeli Bulgarian drawing, featuring a tank with a Jewish star with a menorah, the symbol of the State of Israel, replacing the barrel of the tank’s gun [16].⁶⁴ In 1978, Jiří Bartoš and Vladimír Pergler (working under the pseudonym BAPE) drew a hooked-nosed Israeli soldier wearing a helmet with a six-pointed star, sitting on a gun [17]. His cloak is in flames. The soldier, with gun barrels in place of

 Svobodová (note 24), pp. 59, 60 – 61. – Soukupová (note 7), pp. 257– 259.  Soukupová (note 7), pp. 245, 247, 248, 254– 256.  Ibidem, p. 247, 248.  František J. Kolár, ‘Antisemitismus a sionismus’, Rudé právo LI, 1970, No. 84, 10. 4., p. 7.  Dikobraz XXVI, 1970, No. 8, 19. 2., p. 2. Rudé právo later published an antisemitic caricature from Moscow’s Pravda. A Jew as ‘candidate for the role of a police officer’ is viewing the naval fleet with a telescope. One can’t help but notice his resemblance to Adolf Hitler and cap with skull and crossbones. See Rudé právo LI, 1970, No. 227, 24. 9., p. 1.  See the caricature, ‘Vánoce ve světě’, Dikobraz XXXIII, 1977, No. 51, 21. 12., p. 11.  Sachar (note 21), p. 655.  See the drawing, Cvetan Cekov (Karandaš), Dikobraz XXXI, 1975, No. 43, 30. 10., p. 7. A year later, another Bulgarian antisemitic drawing appeared in Dikobraz. It depicted a Star of David made of barbed wire and fencing from a concentration camp. See Dikobraz XXXII, 1976, No. 14, 7. 4., p. 12.

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Fig. 14: Jiří Žentel, ‘Takhle si snad prsty nepopálím’ [That way I won’t get my fingers burnt], Dikobraz XXVI, 1970, No. 8, 19. 2., p. 2. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

fingers, is thumbing his nose at a flag of the United Nations.⁶⁵ In the same year a drawing by Jaroslav Pop appeared, entitled Izraelské jarní polní práce [Israel’s spring work in the fields], in which Menachem Begin, the new Israeli prime min-

 See Dikobraz XXXIV, 1978, No. 14, 5. 4., p. 15.

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Fig. 15: BAPE [Jiří Bartoš and Vladimír Pergler], ‘Vánoce ve světě’ [Christmas in the world], Dikobraz XXXIII, 1977, No. 51, 21. 12., p. 11. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

ister and heir to the ideology of Ze’ev Jabotinsky,⁶⁶ is sowing skulls in a field, wearing a tie with a six-pointed star motif [18].⁶⁷ Two years later, in response to Israeli-Egyptian negotiations,⁶⁸ Dikobraz reprinted a drawing by an American caricaturist depicting the Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat as Jesus being crucified on a six-pointed star. Even so, communist propaganda portrayed this ‘martyr of the Middle East’ as an irresolute politician, who was dependent on the United States of America and retreating from Israel [19].⁶⁹

 Sachar (note 21), p. 633.  See the caricature, Jaroslav Pop, ‘Izraelské polní práce’, Dikobraz XXXIV, 1978, No. 15, 12. 4., p. 12.  For a summary, see Sachar (note 21), pp. 634– 648.  See the caricature, ‘Kudy kam, mučedníku?’, Dikobraz XXXVI, 1980, No. 23, 4. 6., p. 15. Sadat was also reproached for undermining the unity of the Arab national liberation movement. See the caricature, Dušan Motyčka, ‘Egyptský mírotvorce’, Dikobraz XXXIII, 1977, No. 49, 7. 12., p. 12. In a 1979 satirical sketch in the Soviet publication Krokodil, an American capitalist marries a strange couple, Sadat and Begin, in sight of the Pentagon. He gives them military equipment as a wedding present. See Dikobraz XXXV, 1979, No. 24, 13. 6., p. 12.

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Fig. 16: Cvetan Cekov (Karandaš), Dikobraz XXXI, 1975, No. 43, 30. 10., p. 7. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

It is possible to observe a certain easing up of anti-Israeli sentiment in Czechoslovak propaganda in relation to the Soviet perestroika and glasnost ⁷⁰ only from the mid-1980s. However, even at this time anti-Israeli caricatures did not vanish. For example, Peter Pazderka depicted a little Israeli boy wearing a military helmet with a Jewish star, who is cradled on the lap of a drowsing American [20]. The Israeli boy is lighting the fuse of a bomb under the American’s chair.⁷¹ An even more bellicose drawing is that of a long-nosed Israeli soldier with his hand in his pocket, wearing a pirate hat with skull and crossbones and a six-

 For a summary, see Vladimír Moulis, Jaroslav Valenta and Jiří P. Vykoukal, Vznik, krize a rozpad sovětského bloku v Evropě 1944 – 1989, Ostrava 1991, p. 267.  Dikobraz XLII, 1986, No. 2120 (12), 26. 3., p. 14.

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Fig. 17: BAPE [Jiří Bartoš and Vladimír Pergler], ‘Izrael’ [Israel], Dikobraz XXXIV, 1978, No. 14, 15. 4., p. 15. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

pointed-star eye patch. On show in the background are state-of-the-art modern aircraft as a display of Israeli military strength [21].⁷²

Conclusion We can conclude that visual depictions of antisemitism after World War II imitated and supported Czechoslovak state propaganda. That is why they are virtually absent immediately after the end of the war, when Jews were generally seen as victims of racist Nazi policies and communist propaganda did not attempt to differentiate between the suffering of Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants of the country. Drawings from this period often justified the necessity of the expulsion

 Dikobraz XLII, 1986, No. 7, 19. 2., p. 2.

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Fig. 18: Jaroslav Pop, ‘Izraelské jarní polní práce’ [Israel’s spring work in the fields], Dikobraz XXXIV, 1978, No. 15, 12. 4., p. 12. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

of the German population from Czechoslovakia. Not long after, antisemitic drawings began to appear (although in isolated instances) which drew on ingrained prejudices towards Jewish physiognomy (large hooked noses, curly hair, large mouths, protruding jaws, crooked legs and posture). Following the February coup, Czechoslovakia closely followed Soviet foreign policy and tried to adjust to it. After Soviet-Israeli relations deteriorated, Czechoslovakia’s relations with the State of Israel also waned. However, the visualisation of antisemitism in the press of the day, which belonged to, or was under the control of, the Communist Party, concerned the State of Israel and the ‘Jewish bourgeoisie’, not Communists of Jewish origin, who were seen as fellow party members and role models for other Jews. In the 1950s, the prevailing depiction of the Jew was that of international capitalist and warmonger, while the Czechoslovak image was one of national traitor and cosmopolitan, often in a non-human form. Official communist propaganda in the 1950s supported the protection of national culture and values. These values were allegedly being destroyed by non-communist Jews, who were to be expelled from national society. The antisemitic caricature was also to be used for this purpose. The attempt to portray Jews as foreign el-

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Fig. 19: ‘MIDEAST PEACE’, Dikobraz XXXVI, 1980, No. 23, 4. 6., p. 15. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

ements remained a common feature in visual depictions of antisemitism. The main source of this antipathy was the country’s subservience to the Soviet Union, which had an anti-Israeli and pro-Arab political stance whose main purpose was to deepen the bipolar division in the world. The trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann (1961), when the Federal Republic of Germany was largely portrayed as protecting Hitler’s former henchmen, also served the same purpose. During the ‘golden 1960s’ and the 1970s period of Normalization, the predominant theme of antisemitic caricatures was the depiction of the State of Israel as the belligerent ally of American imperialism. However, it is unlikely that these caricatures from the world of ideologized foreign policy found much resonance in society. The world of ideology had already grown stale and had been replaced by unconstrained pragmatism in both politics and art.

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Fig. 20: Petr Pazderka, Dikobraz XLII, 1986, No. 2120 (12), 26. 3., p. 14. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

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Fig. 21: Dikobraz XXXXII, 1986, No. 7, 19. 2., p. 2. Photo: Blanka Soukupová.

Zbyněk Tarant

Contemporary Visual Antisemitism in the Czech Republic Summary: Despite the last thirty years of political stability and democratic establishment, antisemitism has not fully disappeared from the Czech Republic. This article aims to deepen our understanding of not only the visual symbols and ideological links, but also of the people who create and disseminate these artworks. Having collected and coded visual antisemitica for the last ten years, the author documents the contrast between traditional depictions of Jews in contemporary Czech folklore (or in what is considered ‘tradition’) and the more esoteric symbolism of the conspiracy theories and political extremism. It is argued that, while the mainstream ‘traditional’ depictions of Jews have retained stereotypical features, the extremist scene has moved forward to a more abstract expression, which pushes our methodological and legal definitions of ‘visual antisemitism’ to, and beyond, their limits. Keywords: antisemitism, conspiracism, folklore, Shrovetide, Czech Republic The year 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, which toppled the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Since then, the Czech nation has been experiencing a period of unprecedented political stability. While not devoid of scandals and crises, the thirty years of the post-Communist era were the longest period of democracy and national independence for the Czech nation. Following the Nazi Holocaust and forty years of official Communist anti-Zionism, the new regime had re-established international relations with Israel and sought to build a new era of respectful collaboration with its domestic Jewish communities. This does not mean, however, that antisemitism disappeared from the public space with the wave of a magic wand. While traditionally less common than in the neighbouring countries,¹ antisemitic attitudes and incidents can be identified. The police record about twelve antisemitic hate-crimes every year, ranging from verbal to physical attacks,² while the Jewish community experiences about

 ‘Global 100’, Antidefamation league, http://global100.adl.org, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Výroční zpráva o extremismu na území České Republiky v roce 2017’, Czech Ministry of Interior, p. 20, https://www.mvcr.cz/clanek/extremismus-vyrocni-zpravy-o-extremismu-a-strategieboje-proti-extremismu.aspx, 20.12. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-011

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three dozen cases of harassment, half a dozen cases of vandalism, and isolated incidents of physical attacks.³ Antisemitism continues to exist in the Czech Republic both in terms of attitudes as well as incidents. What role does visual antisemitism play in all this? There is a wide range of questions that could be theoretically used to build an entire coding system. Outside the obvious focus on an artistic or ideological message conveyed by visual artworks, it may be valuable to ask more questions about the authors of the artworks, the techniques and methods, as well the artistic language they use to deliver their message. The social, gender and age profile of the authors, if known, may be especially revealing in the case of visual antisemitism. Such a combination of an artistic and an anthropological approach may grant us a better understanding of not only what the image says and how, but also, what the image tells about its author. It became clear very early in the process of identification of visual antisemitica in the contemporary Czech Republic that the sample will have to be split into two different subsamples – the first of which covers artworks or incidents related to mainstream tradition, folklore and popular culture, and the second intended for the products of the organized antisemitic scene. The main reason for this division is that while the mainstream cases are more incidental, they appear in the public space and usually without explicit political connotations or motives. As such, they help to reveal the latent stereotypes of the general public outside its extremist elements. In contrast, the organized antisemitic scene, despite its strong dedication and total numbers of artworks created, remains rather isolated in its specific niche. Judging from the election results of the antisemitic political parties (the far-right Worker’s Party prior 2009 and the fascist National Democracy party would fit the description in the Czech context), most of which have never received more than 1.5 % in general elections, as well as the visitor statistics of their websites, the amount of artworks they produce does not directly reflect the amount of influence they have in society. To combine the less frequent yet more influential cases from the mainstream with the produce of small group of highly active extremists would distort the general image. Two sets of conclusions are thus presented to avoid such distortion.

 ‘Výroční zpráva o projevech antisemitismu za rok 2018’, Federace židovských obcí v ČR, https://www.fzo.cz/wp-content/uploads/Výročn%C3 %AD-zpráva-FŽO-o-projevech-anti semitismu-2018.pdf, 20.12. 2019.

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Folklore and other apolitical examples – Jews and usury The common denominator for most of the following stereotypical depictions of Jews in the Czech public mainstream is the identification of Jews with money, typically expressed in the visual characterization of a petty pedlar or money lender dressed in the traditional attire of ultra-orthodox Jews. Such a latent stereotype, which may appear outside any political or ideological context, can be witnessed in both antisemitic and philosemitic associations, often both at the same time. The symbolic connection of Jews and money persists in the Czech popular discourse, expressed by notions of ‘wealthy Jews’ or ‘successful Jews’ as well as in random utterances, such as ‘Jewish prices’ or ‘You Jew’ when somebody is required to hand over his money. Visual expressions of this stereotype in the public discourse, however, are somewhat rare and can be documented only on several isolated cases, forcing the researcher to deal with a small and fragmented sample. It should be also noted that past cases discovered by the mainstream media usually drew a wave of criticism and negative publicity, which usually outweighed the extent of the incident itself. One notorious case was almost fifteen years old at the time of writing of this article. In 2005, the Czech retail chain Mountfield came with an advertisement featuring the popular Czech comic Zdeněk Izer in the role of a Jew, named Izidor Shabeles, who outsmarts the company’s mascot Béďa Trávníček, by playing the game of the wheel of fortune to combine discounts on Mountfield’s products – lawnmowers and other gardening equipment. The main character is characterized by sidelocks and long beard and is dressed in orthodox Jewish attire with a kaftan and black hat. He is constantly hunched, rubbing his hands with a cunning smile as he sees the prizes piling up. He talks in a stereotypical fashion, using a sleazy voice and addressing the company’s mascot in the third person plural to imitate the style of Jewish anecdotes.⁴ The advertisement was withdrawn following complaints from the Jewish community.⁵ In response to the controversy, the company’s CEO Ivan Drbohlav said: ‘The personality of the Jewish

 Johanna Grohová, ‘Mountfield stáhne reklamu parodující Židy’, iDnes.cz, 2005, 3. 2., https:// www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/mountfield-stahne-reklamu-parodujici-zidy.A050202_204018_do maci_sas, 20.12. 2019. The advertisement is available on YouTube. See ‘Zdeněk Izer a cenzurovaná reklama Mountfield (2005)’, YouTube (lebowski86), 2010, 15. 1., https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IWpPUbg2yY4, 20.12. 2019.  Grohová (note 4).

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merchant is exactly the kind of customer we need. He is a person who symbolizes smart purchase, smart sale. He is a smart merchant’.⁶ The second case is a more recent one – it took place at a public event in Prague, where a Jewish character was depicted as a greedy money lender during a sketch at a festival celebrating the centenary of Czech statehood. In the short skit, a police officer removes a man dressed in orthodox-Jewish attire, following an exchange in which the character, named Rosenkranz, demanded money from the event’s host. The police officer arresting the character is heard saying: ‘Ah, Rosenkranz, I remember you! What about that loan-sharking last year?’⁷ The authors and performers of the sketch were surprised by the wave of domestic and international criticism, claiming that the entire skit was meant to be a farce, using all sorts of caricatures and grotesque characters of the 1920s, yet the choice to single out a Jew for portrayal as a usurer was not explained. The critics argued that the choice was rather surprising given the fact that: ‘there were many [Jewish] university professors, journalists, writers, sportsmen/women, composers, social welfare workers and others in Czechoslovakia,’ including: ‘Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Hugo Haas, Joseph Popper, Marie Schmolka, Hana Steiner and many, many others.’⁸ The last example comes from the tradition of Czech glass-ware. A glassworks company based in Jablonec nad Nisou produced a series of various hand-made glass statuettes, depicting diverse moments of Jewish life, such as a dance with the Torah scroll during Simchat Tora, a Jewish boy reading from the scroll for his bar mitzva, as well as a rabbi blessing bread. Two of them, however, aptly named ‘coin purse’ and ‘treasury’, also depicted the same Jewish characters in Hassidic dress holding either a coin purse or a box filled with golden coins [1]. The statuettes are about 15 cm tall, made entirely by hand from clear or chemically coloured glass welded to a clear-glass foundation. The Jews are depicted as happy characters with smiles on their faces. They are dressed in a black kaftan, with traditional hat, beard, sidelocks and prayer shawl (talit gadol). They were sold either online or in countless souvenir shops around the Old City of Prague as a ‘Bohemian souvenir’ for about 50 EUR. In a personal interview, the company’s owner felt surprised to learn that his merchandise could be considered offensive. He explained that having worked in the jewellery busi-

 Jaromír Marek, ‘Izrael protestoval proti televizní reklamě’, Radio Prague International, 2005, 3. 2., https://www.radio.cz/cz/rubrika/udalosti/izrael-protestoval-proti-televizni-reklame, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Jew Portrayed as Money-grubbing at Czech City Festival’, Times of Israel, 2018, 5. 9., https:// www.timesofisrael.com/jew-portrayed-as-money-grubbing-at-czech-city-festival/, 20.12. 2019.  Ibidem.

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Fig. 1: Statuette of a Jew with a coin purse, 2018, glass, 12 x 5 cm. Private collection of Zbyněk Tarant. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

ness, he saw that ‘Nine out of ten people in the business are Jewish’. Similar to the case of Mountfield advertisement, his attitudes were on the verge between antisemitism and philo-Semitism: ‘I have no problem with this, because I worked in Canada and all the big business there is done by Jews. … And they are good at doing business, they have it from the Lord.’ He also claimed that he never experienced any customer complaints: ‘Many Jews are buying this, because this is quality stuff. You can’t get merchandise like this anywhere else.’⁹ Following our interview, he promised that he would stop producing the two offending statues, which were indeed removed from the company’s e-shop. While such cases can be mostly evaluated as isolated incidents, they do share certain common features that may hint at the underlying discursive patterns. In all the cases discussed above, the stereotypical depiction of Jew was intended by its creators as benign humour. Jews are depicted in ultra-orthodox attire, despite the fact that majority of Czech Jews had never worn it and most Czechs have never met an orthodox Jew in their lives. The creators, authors and artists had no proven links to any extremist or antisemitic movement and the mere notion of such link would make them feel genuinely offended. When

 Personal interview in Prague, 27.6. 2019.

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confronted with the concerns over the antisemitic content of their skits or artworks, their reaction was one of surprise mixed with a sincere feeling of disappointment about how people these days do not understand comedy. Traces of the image of a Jew as a merchant, pedlar or usurer can still be witnessed in Czech folklore, such as in the traditional carnival processions, which take place annually during Shrovetide, which falls at beginning of Spring and concludes the time between two Christian fasting periods.¹⁰ At the end of Shrovetide, on Shrove Tuesday, a procession of masks marches through the village or town, visiting houses door-to-door and wishing fertility and good luck. The characters in the procession were often a grotesque reflection of the countryside life, including its popular myths, legends and superstitions. Among the diverse hyperbolic, cartoonish, mythical and stereotypically comical characters such as the Gypsy, Turk, Strawman, Bacchus, Goat, Mare and others, the character or ‘mask’ of a Jew is present in many places up to this day.

Fig. 2: A mask of a Jew, 2016, gauze and elastic, h. 25 cm. Private collection of Zbyněk Tarant. Photo: IAH CAS © Petr Zinke.

The masks themselves can be created from wide variety of materials – from natural materials, such as straw, leather, paper, cotton fabric and fur, up to more

 In Czechia, Shrovetide (in Czech masopust) is traditionally celebrated the day before Ash Wednesday, which comes 46 days before Easter according to Christian tradition. The festival concludes the time between two fasting periods, marked by the day of the Three Wise Men (Epiphany, 6 January) and Ash Wednesday.

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recent versions made of artificial fabrics. Despite diverse aesthetics and materials used, a long nose is a dominant feature in all the masks.¹¹ The feature persists even in masks that are offered for sale today [2]. In the older, more traditional masks, the nose is very often coloured red or created from a red textile fabric. A description of the character on the websites of the National Museum’s folklore collection reads: ‘The Jew is a mask dressed in a ‘ragged’ coat. It does not represent any religion or ethnicity as it is meant to symbolize the masks of pedlars, who offer various things for sale. For amusement, he sells, for example, medicine for male potency, or assorted humorous items. An additional required accessory is a large wooden razor, with which [the mask] shaves the onlookers. He combs their hair with a large wooden hair-comb and applies various perfumes. His customers are of course required to pay for those services. The main attribute of the [mask of the] Jew is his ‘hedgehog cudgel’ [ježovice], to which the skin of an actual hedgehog was attached up until the first half of the twentieth century. Today, it is replaced by a ‘pompom’ of textile fabric, stuffed with cotton wool or other soft materials and to the present day, as in the past, it is a well understood phallic symbol.’¹²

The Jew is not the only character associated with phallic symbolism. After all, the entire carnival is an ancient fertility festival, so many of its rituals and traditions were supposed to promote the fertility of animals and soil by means of sympathetic magic. During the festival, females dance with the mask of a bear and other animals considered magical symbols of male strength and sexual potency.¹³ The relevance of carnival for the contemporary era stems from the fact that many of these processions have been revived, or more precisely re-constructed in a more recent time.¹⁴ While the roots of the carnival tradition itself may reach back as far as thousands of years into the past and exact written documentation of it can be found in eighteenth and nineteenth century sources, some towns organized the carnival processions for the first time no earlier than in the late 2010s in a bid to attract tourism or boost communal life.¹⁵ When reconstructing

 See, for example, ‘Studnický masopust’, Obec studnice, p. 8, https://www.obecstudnice.cz/ file.php?nid=954&oid=669137, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Masky z Národního muzea ožily v masopustním průvodu’, Muzeum 3000, 2013, 14. 2., http:// muzeum3000.nm.cz/aktuality/masky-z-narodniho-muzea-ozily-v-masopustnim-pruvodu, 20.12. 2019.  Jitka Staňková and Ludvík Baran, Masky, Démoni, Šaškové, Pardubice 1998, pp. 21– 22.  Daniela Stavělová and Matěj Kratochvíl, ‘Vymyslet masopust: město, novodobé slavnosti, tradice a imaginace’, Český lid CIII, 2016, No. 4, pp. 537– 596.  ‘Preparations for the first modern carnival in Mnetěš started at the beginning of the year. First, we learned, what the tradition of carnival celebration is and which the traditional carnival masks

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the tradition, they also include the mask of a Jew as it appeared in nineteenth century sources, while failing to notice the older layer of tradition that may have had no connection to the Jews in the first place and referred rather to the spirits of ancestral forefathers (dziad), also represented by a fur mask (charpa) with a long red nose.¹⁶ From 2010, the Shrovetide carnival processions in the Hlinecko area, together with the masks of Jews, are listed and protected by UNESCO as part of the non-material cultural heritage.¹⁷ EU funds and endowment programs are used to preserve and promote the tradition, leading to a paradox in which an EU grant, which often requires the applicants to explain the positive impact on equality in close detail, is used to preserve a stereotypical depiction of Jews [3].¹⁸ Debate about this cultural phenomenon, perhaps reminiscent of the ‘black-face’ phenomenon in the US and Canada, is yet to be opened in the Czech Republic. This debate will have to take place, as UNESCO is sensitive to such cases. In a very similar case, it decided in December 2019 to delist the carnival in the Belgian town of Aalst, also listed as part of non-material cultural heritage, over allegations of racism and antisemitism.¹⁹

Political examples Despite recent negative trends and incidents, some of which will be documented below, antisemitism remains on the fringe of the Czech political life.²⁰ Moreover, only a small portion of antisemitic manifestations are currently expressed visually – be they cartoons, YouTube videos or social media memes – wide circulation of such memes may sometimes obscure the lower variety of the images themselves as well as the limited numbers of their actual producers. Focusing

are…’ See ‘Mnetěšský masopust’, Mnetěš – oficiální web obce, https://www.mnetes.cz/mnetessky-masopust/gs-2470, 20.12. 2019.  Staňková–Baran (note 13), pp. 28 – 29.  ‘Shrovetide door-to-door processions and masks in the villages of the Hlinecko area’, UNESCO, 2019, https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/shrovetide-door-to-door-processions-and-masksin-the-villages-of-the-hlinecko-area-00397, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Dílna k výukovému balíčku ‘Tady straším já’’, Evvoluce – projekt ochrany fauny v ČR, http:// www.evvoluce.cz/dilna/07-tady-strasim-ja.php, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Unesco removes ‘racist’ Belgian carnival from heritage list’, The Guardian, 2019, 13. 12., https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/13/unesco-removes-racist-belgian-carnival-aalstfrom-heritage-list, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Annual Report on Manifestations of antisemitism in the Czech Republic 2018’, Federation of the Jewish Communities, 2019, https://www.fzo.cz/3903/vyrocni-zprava-o-projevech-antisemitismu-v-ceske-republice-za-rok-2018/, 20.12. 2019.

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Fig. 3: Instructions for making a Jewish mask at home. ‘Dílna k výukovému balíčku ‘Tady straším já’’ [Tutorial package workshop ‘I spook here’], Evvoluce – projekt ochrany fauny v ČR.

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solely on visual material narrows the sample down further, which should be kept in mind when trying to generalize the following cases. Contextual information about the possible impact or influence of the following qualitative examples will be provided, where possible. Before dealing with the domestic production, it may be valuable to mention briefly some notable takeovers from abroad. Such takeovers are dependent on the work of translators, who need to edit the images first to make them comprehensible for the target audience. This puts the small group of dedicated translators into the position of gatekeepers. Unlike the original authors, these translators remain anonymous, so only little is known about them. The roles of authors and translators may, indeed, overlap, which would be the case of Ondřej Brož, described further in the text. Popular foreign authors of antisemitic cartoons and memes adopted by the Czech antisemitic scene include some notorious American names, such as the ‘alt-lite’ esoteric artworks by David Dees,²¹ or the drawings and cartoons of Nick Bougas (a.k.a. ‘A. Wyatt Mann’),²² popular among conspiracists and farright White Supremacists. Bougas’s ‘Happy Merchant’ meme especially, depicting a stereotypical Jew with an ugly nose, thick mouth and long beard rubbing his hands with a malicious smile, can be found circulating on the Czech-language Facebook²³ in many different versions, as can his other drawings. Another of Bougas’ infamous artworks – the ‘Holocaust denial comics’ titled The Tales of Holohoax was translated into Czech and distributed by the Holocaust denial website, Národně-vzdělávací institut [National Educational Institute],²⁴ under the title Zázraky švindlkaustu (an inventive translation of The Tales of Holohoax), without giving credit to the original author [4].²⁵

 See David Dees, http://ddees.com, 20.12. 2019.  Joseph Bernstein. ‘The Surprisingly Mainstream History Of The Internet’s Favorite Anti-Semitic Image’, Buzzfeed, 2015, 5. 2., https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/ the-surprisingly-mainstream-history-of-the-internets-favorit, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Za Evropu bez islámu a sionismu’ (Facebook group), post from 30.11. 2015.  Národně-vzdělávací institut first appeared in 2006 in imitation of the American far-right think-tank CODOH (Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust). It gained notoriety for its mailing campaigns, during which it sent Holocaust-denying pamphlets to hundreds of Czech schools. Its website went silent after two years and reappeared in 2010 on a different domain (http://www.vzdelavaci-institut.info). It mostly serves as an online library of Holocaust denial literature. Its personal and financial background remains unclear.  ‘Židovské zločiny neuveřejněné v novinách’, Národně-vzdělávací institut, http://www.vzdelavaci-institut.info/?q=system/files/Zazraky_svindlkaustu-komiks.pdf, 20.12. 2019.

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Fig. 4: ‘Židovské zločiny neuveřejněné v novinách’ [Jewish crimes not covered by the media], Národně-vzdělávací institut.

Images by the Brazilian anti-Zionist cartoonist Carlos Latuff can be occasionally found on pro-Palestinian activists’ websites,²⁶ mostly ignoring other Latuff’s artworks which openly criticize the dictatorships in Sunni Muslim countries. Memes containing the US ‘alt-lite’ character Peppe the Frog with Czech translations started appearing within the niche of culturally conservative Facebook users in Czechia at around 2018, although the majority of those translated to Czech did not appear to have antisemitic connotations. It is currently unclear,

 ISM – Czech Republic, 2019, http://ism-czech.org/?s=latuff, 20.12. 2019.

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whether the meme will be capable of getting significant traction in Czechia in the first place. In 2013, the so-called Workers’ Youth, which is a youth movement of the small far-right Workers’ Party of Social Justice – published an illustrated version of The Fable of the Ducks and the Hens. The rhymed allegory, often dubbed as the ‘neo-Nazi Animal Farm’, was written by the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell in 1952. Multiple illustrated versions circulate in the far-right cyber-space, the most recent one coming from the 2008 illustrated edition, originally published by Junge Nationalisten, which is a youth organization of Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD [German National Democratic Party]. The Czech far-right youth movement edited a Czech translation into a comic-style book and attempted to distribute it in larger quantities among students in schools under their umbrella project dubbed ‘Schoolyard’.²⁷ The project was largely a failure and was quickly abandoned, possibly due to lack of resources, a certain naivety and an almost comically bad translation of the source material. The naive-looking illustrations in unnaturally bright colours contain several references to conspiracy theories about Jewish control over media, alleged abuse of Holocaust memory and the belief that Jews organize mass immigration to Western countries in a bid to destroy the white culture. The politically charged visual antisemitism is not limited to a plain lease of foreign artworks. There are several domestic creators of original antisemitic images in the Czech Republic as well. They seem to recruit mostly from fringe groups, although there are cases connected with the activities of political and economic elites as well. The authors’ profiles cannot be limited to a single age category nor a social class – one can find young students, middle-aged businessmen, working class well in their fifties, as well as retirees. Such a conclusion is made possible by the fact that some produce and distribute or have distributed their artworks openly, under their real names. Along with neo-Nazis, Communists and supporters of neo-Fascist parties, one can find esoterics as well as successful entrepreneurs. Nor are the creators limited to a single specific region of the country. The capital, Prague, is represented as well as some smaller cities. There is a potential bias in the collected sample caused by the fact that some of the few authors are significantly more productive than others, despite their real influence on the scene. That would be the case of the website Česneková devoluce [Garlic Devolution], established by Ondřej Sidor which was possibly the most productive source of politically charged visual antisemitica in the country

 ‘Akce Školní dvůr’, Dělnická mládež, 2013, 13. 4., http://skolnidvur.delnickamladez.cz, 20.12. 2019.

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at the time of the writing of this article, yet a survey of links and citations has shown that rather obscure website,²⁸ which even intentionally blocks access from certain IP addresses or during certain times of the day, seems to be largely ignored by the rest of the scene. On the other hand, the website Protiproud [Countercurrent], where antisemitic artworks accompany articles about conspiracy theories is visited by tens of thousands every day.²⁹ While the available sample is small and potentially biased, it seems that production of visual antisemitica in the contemporary Czech Republic is an enterprise dominated by males, which also happens to influence the contents of their artworks. While women may participate in the dissemination of the artworks on the social media, no authentic female author of antisemitic cartoons or memes was found in the contemporary Czech Republic. Women are often depicted in pornographic contexts, where females appear either as passive subjects or their body is depicted only in parts, sexually objectified as medium for delivering the key message. One case depicts sidelocks growing out of a naked female crotch, being cut by scissors under the slogan: ‘time for a radical cut’. The slogan was supposed to call for cutting out Jewish influence from politics.³⁰ In another instance, the Communist website Prostějovská pravda [Prostějov Truth] came with a cartoon titled V každém je kousek Žida [There is a piece of Jew in all of us] [5], possibly referring to the philosemitic assertion that antisemitism should have no place in Eastern Europe as there is a drop of Jewish blood in the veins of all Eastern Europeans. In reference to this phrase, the cartoon depicted an orthodox Jew in sexual intercourse with an unspecified woman.³¹ More than two thirds of the artworks of the same author had an explicitly pornographic nature and in his case, male intimate parts are frequently objectified as well – they in fact represent the key point of most of his works.³² Domestic creators of politically charged antisemitic artworks are not shy to get inspiration either from historical antisemitic cartoons or from abroad, often blurring the line between domestic and foreign authorship. Historical examples would include the neo-Nazi Workers’ Party election poster created by the photo-shopping of an infamous World War II ‘Der Jude’ Nazi propaganda

 Česneková devoluce, https://www.cd89.cz, 20.12. 2019.  Protiproud, http://www.protiproud.cz, 20.12. 2019.  Ondřej Sidor, ‘Čas na radikální řez’, Česneková devoluce, www.cd89.cz/rozumni-radikalnirez.html, 20.12. 2019.  Tři urny do skla (Facebook page), https://www.facebook.com/triurnydoskla/. – https:// www.flickr.com/photos/148296522@N06/33823404445, 20.12. 2019.  Ibidem.

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Fig. 5: ‘V každém je kousek Žida’ [There is a piece of Jew in all of us], Prostějovská Pravda.

poster.³³ In other example, the website Česneková devoluce photo-shopped the face of the finance minister Andrej Babiš into Karel Rélink’s cartoon from the 1920s.³⁴ Ondřej Brož, who creates social media memes³⁵ by combining existing images from the internet, used an image of Judensau possibly taken as a still-

 The original electronic source is no longer valid. The case is recorded in articles of antiracism activists, such as: ‘Dělnická strana je rétoricko-ideově spjata s nacismem’, Romea, 2010, 14. 1., http://www.romea.cz/cz/zpravy/delnicka-strana-je-retoricko-ideove-spjata-s-na cismem, 20.12. 2019.  Ondřej Sidor, ‘Uzenáři spojte se’, Česneková devoluce, 2017, 11. 9., www.cd89.cz/uzenarispojte-se.html, 20.12. 2019.  The author admits his authorship in the description of image gallery on his website: ‘Here are my artworks, which I share on Facebook to improve people’s consciousness about issues, which are important from the viewpoint of transformation and illumination’: Ondřej Brož, ‘Foto – Facebook’, Iluminace.com, 2019, http://iluminace.com/index.php/fotogalerie? start=50, 20.12. 2019.

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shot from a Russian TV broadcast,³⁶ depicting terrorist organizations and secret services as piglets sucking milk from a large sow named ‘Rothschilds’.³⁷ It is not the only case of zoomorphism in the Czech visual antisemitica. In an article titled Global Shadow Cabinet: How do the Bankers Control the World? an image of an octopus, taken from a nature documentary, is pasted into the image of an international conference, as if the animal was giving a keynote address.³⁸ Another zoomorphic image was used by the Fascist political party National Democracy. The party used the image of a rat with the slogan ‘Deratization is the only way of pest control’ to accompany its rally against non-governmental organizations.³⁹ While the party is notorious for its antisemitism with its leader Adam Bartoš being sentenced twice for antisemitic incitement, it is not clear in this particular case whether the symbol of the rat pointed towards non-governmental organizations in general or to specific ethnic groups in particular. The explicit use of traditional antisemitic visual symbols is somewhat rare in the contemporary Czech Republic, but cases can be found. Stereotypical visual features of Jews were being attributed by conspiracist websites to almost all the presidential candidates of the 2013 presidential elections.⁴⁰ Depiction of non-Jewish politicians with stereotypically Jewish visual attributes is typical of the works of Ondřej Sidor. In a signed cartoon titled Ideální stav české politiky [Ideal Situation of Czech politics] and published at the website Česneková devoluce, Sidor imagines a gallows shaped like a large toilet where hanging the former Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek would lead to flushing down the current Prime Minister, Andrej Babiš. Kalousek is dressed in ultra-orthodox Jewish attire with sidelocks carrying a suitcase labelled with the sign of the New Israeli Shek ‘Russian TV News Item On Rothschild Family Uses Nazi Footage’, Memri.org, 2017, 12. 5., https://www.memri.org/reports/russian-tv-news-item-rothschild-family-uses-nazi-footage, 20.12. 2019.  Ondřej Brož, ‘Foto – Facebook’, Iluminace.com, 2019, http://iluminace.com/index.php/ fotogalerie?start=50, 20.12. 2019.  Vladimír Pavlenko, ‘Globální stínová vláda: Čím finančníci ovládají svět? Brexit a Trump chybami v Matrixu? Čína na páky bez války nedosáhne. Proč přijel šéf ruské rozvědky nečekaně do Washingtonu? Chobotnice, o níž veřejnost nic neví’, Protiproud, 2018, 13. 2., http://www.protiproud.cz/politika/3629-globalni-stinova-vlada-cim-financnici-ovladaji-svet-brexit-a-trump-chybami-v-matrixu-cina-na-paky-bez-valky-nedosahne-proc-prijel-sef-ruske-rozvedky-necekane-dowashingtonu-chobotnice-o-niz-verejnost-nic-nevi.htm, 20.12. 2019.  ‘Nechceme utečence v České republice’ (Facebook group), post from 19.1. 2016, https://www. facebook.com/Nechceme-ute%C4 %8Dence-v-%C4 %8Cesk%C3 %A9-republice1601686280087426/ [defunct]  Zbyněk Tarant, ‘Proti všem – prezidentské volby v roce 2013 pohledem české antisemitské scény’, in Zbyněk Tarant and Věra Tydlitátová, ‘Spiknutí!’ – Úloha antisemitských konspiračních teorií ve veřejném a politickém diskurzu, Plzeň 2014, pp. 75–104.

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el, while Babiš has a Star of David shaved on his head.⁴¹ Reference to blood-libel forms the headline to the notorious blog titled Anežka Hrůzová – věnováno všem obětem judaismu [Anežka Hrůzová – Dedicated to All Victims of Judaism] [6]. The

Fig. 6: ‘Anežka Hrůzová – věnováno všem obětem judaismu’ [Anežka Hrůzová – Dedicated to all victims of Judaism].

small blog, consisting of several articles on blood-libel and historical postcards from the city of Polná, where the alleged ritual murder took place, was created in the late 2000s. The image depicts a cunning Jewish murderer with shining eyes and a vicious smile cutting the throat of an innocent girl, here depicted with facial features associated with the ‘Aryan’ ideal of beauty.⁴² Conspiracist imagery takes a more abstract form – to the extent that the message is conveyed by using a combination of originally benign symbols, which only in the one specific context results in an antisemitic statement. Three examples can be named from the website Protiproud. It is an ‘alt-lite’ website with heavy conspiracist contents and pro-Kremlin geopolitical inclination. Majority of the graphical content on this website is created and signed by Ondřej Höpner, yet the following examples are not signed. In the first example, the image of the Israeli flag, blood stains and a dancing klezmer ensemble are combined into a collage meant to accompany an article criticizing Israeli bombing of Gaza.⁴³ In the second example, the same image of a Klezmer performance is put over the image of burning houses in Gaza accompanied by a clipping of a photograph de-

 Ondřej Sidor, ‘Ideální stav české politiky’, Česneková devoluce, 2015, 6. 10., 2015, http:// www.cd89.cz/idealni-stav.html, 20.12. 2019. The cartoon is signed by ‘Ondra Sidor’.  Anežka Hrůzová, https://hruzovaanezka.wordpress.com, 20.12. 2019.  Patrick Joseph Buchanan, ‘Buchanan: Čtyři milióny Arabů nyní zapomenuto? Bibi je na koni. Zůstane svět v apatii? Historie nás mnohému učí. ‘Když na nás prší, bude na ně bouřit.’ Přijde jednou krutý zvrat?’, Protiproud, 2018, 17. 5., http://www.protiproud.cz/politika/3790-buchananctyri-miliony-arabu-nyni-zapomenuto-bibi-je-na-koni-zustane-svet-v-apatii-historie-nas-mnohemu-uci-kdyz-na-nas-prsi-bude-na-ne-bourit-prijde-jednou-kruty-zvrat.htm, 20.12. 2019.

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picting Western politicians clapping their hands as if giving the rhythm to the orthodox Jews dancing over the burning rubble of Palestinian towns.⁴⁴ In the third example, titled ‘Secret Plan for Subversion of Iran’, chanukkiya is photoshopped with silhouettes of orthodox Jews over a suggestive image of nuclear explosion, making it look as though the Jews were admiring the incoming nuclear holocaust.⁴⁵ Jews were depicted in stereotypical manner – in traditional orthodox clothing, yet the images used were originally taken from innocuous sources, cut and re-contextualized by putting them into the context of blood, war, nuclear explosion, or symbols of Israeli statehood. By doing that, all Jews are presented as collectively responsible for the acts of the Israeli government. Should we focus only on explicit features of antisemitic imagery, such as zoomorphism, long noses, blood-libel, deicide etc., such implicit imagery might well pass unnoticed. When moving forward to even more implicit artworks at the website Protiproud, the definitions of what constitutes antisemitic images becomes more blurred. In one instance, the Star of David, representing the Jewish state, was photoshopped over a dark, misty view of the Capitol in Washington DC, accompanied by the frightening face of Batman’s Joker.⁴⁶ Such implicit symbols attempt to appeal to the subliminal fears and phobias of the audience without using explicit antisemitic imagery. More examples can be found, such as when the face of Benjamin Netanyahu smiling in satisfaction is put over the background of burning

 Petr Hájek, ‘Vraždění v Gaze: Krvavý vykřičník západního pokrytectví. Prezident Zeman na jedné lodi s Kavárnou. Bestiální poprava neozbrojených nikomu nevadí. Proč mlčí i Rusko? Souhlasem jsme udělali krok do tmy’, Protiproud, 2018, 16. 5., http://www.protiproud.cz/politika/3789-vrazdeni-v-gaze-krvavy-vykricnik-zapadniho-pokrytectvi-prezident-zeman-na-jednelodi-s-kavarnou-bestialni-poprava-neozbrojenych-nikomu-nevadi-proc-mlci-i-rusko-souhlasemjsme-udelali-krok-do-tmy.htm, 20.12. 2019.  Radim Lhoták, ‘Tajný plán rozvrácení Íránu: Součást příprav na globální katastrofu? Vulkán ještě dříme, elity už pro jistotu balí kufry. Virtuální hra o trůny a ozvěny starověku. Pozapomenutá realita či konspirace každým coulem?’, Protiproud, 2018, 6. 1., http://www.protiproud.cz/ politika/3560-tajny-plan-rozvraceni-iranu-soucast-priprav-na-globalni-katastrofu-vulkan-jestedrime-elity-uz-pro-jistotu-bali-kufry-virtualni-hra-o-truny-a-ozveny-staroveku-pozapomenuta-realita-ci-konspirace-kazdym-coulem.htm, 20.12. 2019.  Alexandr Nikišin, ‘Izrael: Jednapadesátý stát USA? Bilióny dolarů mizí beze stopy. V Deep State se vládne lobbingem. Symbióza mocností je realitou. Mladý národ upraven do potřebné formy. Pošlete ještě více zbraní pro útočníka’, Protiproud, 2018, 30. 5., http://www.protiproud.cz/politika/3804-izrael-jednapadesaty-stat-usa-biliony-dolaru-mizi-beze-stopy-v-deepstate-se-vladne-lobbingem-symbioza-mocnosti-je-realitou-mlady-narod-upraven-do-potrebneformy-poslete-jeste-vice-zbrani-pro-utocnika.htm, 20.12. 2019.

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and exploding buildings in Gaza blended with two faces, screaming in fear and agony.⁴⁷ From the left-wing positions, one could find such appeals to fears and phobias, for example, during the Prostějov cemetery dispute in 2017 and 2018,⁴⁸ when Prostějovská pravda published a cartoon depicting Jewish zombies rising from their graves and threatening to harm the young children passing by. The cartoon was meant to contribute to the chief argument used by critics of restoration attempts at the Jewish cemetery, that ‘the children’s mental state might be negatively affected by having to pass the cemetery on their way to school’.⁴⁹

Conclusions While the Czech Republic is not a ground zero of antisemitic incitement, traces of visual antisemitism can be found both in the extremist and mainstream environments. The image of the Jewish money-lender remains embedded in the local folklore, often ingenuously perpetuated by communal festivities. The issue of stereotypical depiction of Jews at the traditional Shrovetide carnival brings us to the core debate about ‘tradition’ as a layered phenomenon that is a subject of constant invention and re-invention. In the process of re-invention, stereotypical depictions can be perpetuated as a result of belief about their alleged authenticity. Visual antisemitism may often appear and be perpetuated inadvertently in the context of seemingly harmless jokes or even ‘philo-Semitic’ references to the alleged Jewish success and resourcefulness. At the same time, the society does not lack the ability to recognize and condemn explicit antisemitism.

 Michal Semín, ‘Ponižovaný Írán: Ani jaderná dohoda mír nezaručí. Hrozí další operace pod falešnou vlajkou? Sankcím by měl být vystaven Izrael. Patří naše budoucnost válečným psychopatům?’, Protiproud, 2015, 10. 4., http://www.protiproud.cz/politika/1604-ponizovany-iran-anijaderna-dohoda-mir-nezaruci-hrozi-dalsi-operace-pod-falesnou-vlajkou-sankcim-by-mel-bytvystaven-izrael-patri-nase-budoucnost-valecnym-psychopatum.htm, 20.12. 2019.  In 2017, the Moravian city of Prostějov saw a bitter dispute regarding an attempt to restore an abandoned Jewish cemetery, today located in the city centre, which was largely destroyed by the Nazis. The joint initiative of Czech and American Jewish organizations sparked a public outcry and a petition was filed against the project. Manifestations of antisemitism accompanied the dispute, including anonymous letters and leaflets. The memorial stone at the site was vandalized. The dispute remains unresolved.  Michal Sobecký, ‘Nedovedu si představit děti chodící do školy hřbitovem, říká primátorka’, Prostějovský deník, 2016, 13. 4., https://prostejovsky.denik.cz/zpravy_region/nedovedu-si-predstavit-deti-chodici-do-skoly-hrbitovem-rika-primatorka-20160412.html, 20.12. 2019.

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The most typical cases of politically charged visual antisemitism appears among conspiracists and esoteric individuals, followed by the rather disorganized far-right. Several random pieces from the far-left were connected to local branches of the Communist movement, while the radical pro-BDS activists remain cautious, choosing not to provoke with explicit antisemitic imagery and relying mostly on takeovers of foreign production. More interesting is the gender and age profile of those who produce visual antisemitica. From the limited sample available, it seems that production of such artworks is a male-dominated enterprise in the Czech Republic, which may affect the style of the artworks, many of which have explicitly pornographic nature. Active antisemites also recruit from a wider spectrum of age-groups and social backgrounds. Only some of them have proven links to any established extremist movement and the degree of their activity must not necessarily reflect their actual influence, even within the antisemitic and extremist scene themselves. Looking closely at the contemporary examples of visual antisemitism in the Czech Republic, it is clear that we cannot limit our focus to classical visual elements, such as blood-libel, Jewish Sow and money-lending or facial features like the long nose. These features are more common in popular folklore in the Czech Republic, but the political discourse has a much more complex relationship to these symbols. Quite paradoxically, these traditional visual symbols of ‘Jewishness’ are often applied to persons of non-Jewish origins to make them ‘look Jewish’. We call this phenomenon ‘antisemitism without Jews’. But even in such cases, more modern visual symbols to signify a person as Jewish may be used, such as the Israeli flag in the background or the symbol of Israeli New Shekel. The term ‘new antisemitism’ is sometimes used in Western academic discourse to label such cases in which anti-Zionist symbolism is used for antisemitic purposes. The contemporary cartoons and images with political context also use a broader set of additional visual symbols, many of which are more subtle to the level of abstraction. Antisemitic pictures may often take the form of collages combined from otherwise benign elements, making it almost impossible to formulate a bullet-proof algorithm for their recognition. Antisemitic images and memes often take a form which makes them more eye-catching and legible even at a low pixel density. This is to compensate for the low connection speeds and data caps as well as for the short attention span of contemporary social media users. Many of the memes prefer high contrast, black and white, large font or plain symbolism. Their message has to be simple and straightforward. If there is a text, it needs to be translated into the Czech language for the target audience. Humour or pornography are often used to attract attention or facilitate sharing. The conspiracist scene, which is possibly the most productive environment for antisemitic artworks in Czechia

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today, leans towards abstract symbols, referring not to Jews and Israel as such, but to ‘Zionism’, ‘Globalism’, ‘New World Order’ or ‘Illuminati’. As a form of esotericism, conspiracism believes that the global conspirators leave subtle, hidden symbols, which can be read only by those initiated and tends to express that belief by using the same set of symbols, which may or may not hint at Jews. This is especially the case of zoomorphism, where it may not be exactly clear who is supposed to be the octopus or rat as displayed in the cartoon. This esoteric, if not outright psychedelic nature of conspiracism, also makes evaluation of its antisemitic manifestations more difficult as it may be often not clear if ‘Globalism’ refers to ‘Jewish conspiracy’ in the given particular context, or not. To our misfortune, antisemitism develops more quickly than our scientific and legal definitions of it.

Iwona Kurz

Refugees ‘as Jews’. Travelling Images of Atrocities Summary: During the so-called refugee crisis in 2015, the analogy to Jewish refugees from before World War II was used intensely in public debate. This article, based on the concept of the imaginary (Castoriadis), analyzes the use of this analogy, the presence of the memory of the Holocaust in contemporary discourse, and the use of images and visual clichés associated with this event in contemporary discussions. The theoretical, visual argument is based on the work Positives (2002– 2003) by Zbigniew Libera. The material comes from the Polish debate put in this interpretative context. In 2015 Polish society, like most of its Central European neighbours, took the anti-refugee approach, mostly as the result of propaganda activities by media and right-wing parties. Keywords: visual imaginary, representations of refugees, imaginary of Shoah, travelling images

The analogy During the so-called refugee crisis of 2015, numerous images circulated referring to Holocaust ‘imaginary’.¹ Jewish refugees from Germany and their ships of the late 1930s served as ‘the lesson’ and ‘the illustration’ about the fate of dominantly Muslim refugees nowadays. The message went: ‘We didn’t help them, now we know what happened. Let’s not allow it to be repeated.’ This message was first delivered by people supporting humanitarian efforts to increase the quota for Syrian refugees in the United States. President Barack Obama was actually among the first to make a comparison between contempo-

 The article is a part of my ongoing research on visual after-memory of Auschwitz. After William J. Thomas Mitchell, I here distinguish images from pictures: mental structures in a visual or visualised form from their concretisation in a specific medium, a shared idea from a photograph, a film scene or a picture, for example. See: William J. Thomas Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago 2005, pp. XIII–XIV. Using the term ’imaginary’, I mostly follow Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, Cambridge 1975. ‘Imaginary’ here is a shared complex of norms, images, signifiers, practices that make a historically unique form of social living, both unconscious and self-acknowledged. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110616415-012

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rary Syrian and historical Jewish refugees.² The dominant image of this discussion was the portrait of Anne Frank – often juxtaposed with any given press picture of a child, preferably a girl, suffering from bombing in Damascus.³ According to this repeating version of history, the newcomers were still denied access to a new land [1]. Common attitudes were similar, although under slightly different pretexts. In 2015, the main fear was terrorism; in the 1930s – espionage (on this basis, Anne Frank’s family was not allowed into the USA). One may find this mechanism in other contexts, too: the images of the past do not define the present; they serve instead for the construction of fears for the future. These fears usually refer to what is invisible, hidden, or elusive, and for more substantial effect they require visualisation.

Fig. 1: Anne Frank’s visa application, meme, Facebook.

 On December 15, 2015 Mr. Obama said: ‘In the Syrian seeking refuge today, we should see the Jewish refugee of World War II.’ Remarks by the President at Naturalization Ceremony, official site of the White House, 15.12. 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/ 2015/12/15/remarks-president-naturalization-ceremony, 15. 3. 2020.  See for example: Nicholas Kristof, ‘Anne Frank Today Is a Syrian Girl’, New York Times, 2016, 25 8., https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/25/opinion/anne-frank-today-is-a-syrian-girl.html, 15. 3. 2020. One example of discussion with it: Abraham H. Miller, ‘Nicholas Kristof’s Obscene Comparison: Injured Syrian Girl Is Not Anne Frank’, Observer.com, 2016, 29. 8., https://observer.com/ 2016/08/nicholas-kristofs-obscene-comparison-anne-frank-is-not-an-injured-syrian-girl/, 15. 3. 2020.

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Thus, the images do not serve to make ‘bad’ history never happen again, but precisely the opposite – they repeat it. This is also partly because no analogy, including the one created with the help of images, remains unresponsive. There were various answers to the question of whether we are ready to react negatively to Anne Frank’s call – again. For example: who plays the role of the Nazis in this historic game?⁴ For the most part, however, the commentaries aimed to show the deceptiveness of the analogy tool and emphasised the complexity of historical matter irreducible to simple comparisons. The visual statements were more explicit. Instead of comparing the image of Anne Frank with a ‘Syrian girl’, they juxtaposed it with an Arab young man armed with a smartphone [2]. The found footage, functioning as a cliché and intending to evoke empathy based on a history lesson, collided with the stereotypical ready-made used as a warning for the future. In Europe, the issue became even more complicated. The mass influx of refugees went hand in hand with the mass production of pictures evoking associations with the Holocaust and with the images commonly recognised as part of its ‘imaginary’. They also make the broader ‘imaginary’ of the modernity, the cultural complex of which the Holocaust was the culmination and at the same time the derailment.⁵ These pictures displayed ‘transports’, or trains filled with people; crowds under police supervision; ‘numbers’ written with a felt-tip pen on the forearm (in the Czech Republic) [3]; ‘camps’ where asylum seekers were deployed (Germany); valuables taken from refugees (Denmark); and finally a bulldozer removing debris, especially life jackets, just as metonymic as shoes (Greece). The images that recorded the journey to the extermination (1942– 1944)

Fig. 2: Anne Frank is not a young Syrian man, meme, private Facebook profile.

 Lee Smith, ‘Syrian Refugees Are the New Jews. So, Who Are the Nazis?’, Hudson.org, 2017, 2. 2., https://www.hudson.org/research/13312-syrian-refugees-are-the-new-jews-so-who-are-the-nazis, 15. 3. 2020.  See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca 1989.

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Fig. 3: Holocaust tattoo and 2015 refugee tattoo, private Facebook profile.

overlapped in this context directly with the photos documenting the journey towards the supposed survival (2015).⁶

History Will Repeat Itself ⁷ All these images also appeared in Polish discussion about refugees. Polish society, like most of its Central European neighbours, took a deeply anti-refugee approach, mostly in the form of propaganda activities by the media and the rightwing party Law and Justice, then fighting for the victory in the election.⁸ In the Polish context, this story may have begun on November 18, 2015, a few days after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris. The demonstration organised by the far-right Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny [ONR – National Radical

 See for example, ‘Europe’s migration crisis in 25 photos’, CNN.com, updated 2. 2. 2018, https:// edition.cnn.com/2015/09/03/world/gallery/europes-refugee-crisis/index.html, 15. 3. 2020.  I cite the title of the exhibition History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art, curated by Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, 18.11. 2007 – 13.1. 2008, https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/history-will-repeat-itself-strategies-of-reenactment-in-contemporary-art/, 15. 3. 2020; Centre for Contemporary Arts at Warsaw, 16. 2. 2008 – 13.4. 2008.  According to the Centre for Public Opinion Research (CBOS) surveys, between May 2015 and February 2016, the number of people in Poland declaring support for receiving refugees from countries affected by armed conflicts fell from 72 % to 39 %, of which 35 % only approved temporary assistance. Religious and cultural differences as well as fear of infectious diseases – also part of the Holocaust ‘imaginary’ – were indicated as the main reasons for dislike. See Stosunek Polaków do przyjmowania uchodźców. Komunikat z badań, 2017, No. 1, https://www.cbos.pl/ SPISKOM.POL/2017/K_001_17.PDF, 15. 3. 2020. See also http://uchodzcy.info/infos/stosunek-pola kow-do-uchodzcow/.

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Camp] and Młodzież Wszechpolska [All-Polish Youth]⁹ took place on the Market Square in Wrocław. Dozens of people protested against accepting Islamic refugees, allegedly economic migrants and terrorists, in Poland and Europe. Their banner preached: ‘They are going to change our world, destroy, burn and rape what has been ours for years.’ The demonstration ended with the burning of a Jew puppet and the European flag.¹⁰ Piotr Rybak, the performer of this act and organiser of the protest, was subsequently sentenced to three months of imprisonment. The Wrocław act referred to a much older image, used already in the Middle Ages during the folk celebration of Easter, when Judas was burned in punishment for his betrayal. This event is not the only, though perhaps the most spectacular, example of characteristic xenophobia in contemporary Poland: antisemitism (already) without Jews and islamophobia (yet) without Muslims. Another example, referring directly to the Holocaust ‘imaginary’, comes from August 2015. Thousands of people fleeing the Middle East were heading to the European Union. The police found an abandoned truck on a highway in Austria. When the officers looked inside, they found 71 bodies lying on top of each other. Nobody survived the journey. Internet commentaries in Polish (the event was publicised widely in the press) compared a closed car to a gas chamber – ‘good they died, or we would have had to use the chambers we already have.’ ¹¹ In these comments, the infrastructure of death camps was therefore adopted as ‘our’ (Polish) own – not ‘German’ or ‘Nazi’ at all. And it was ready for use again. In the Polish perspective, the phantasmic ‘closely watched trains carrying Jews’¹² (carrying refugees) went not to ‘European’ (or German), but straight to ‘Polish death camps’. A similar mechanism on a large scale occurred in Poland in 2018 during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of March 1968. This name covers several months of the rebellion of students and workers, but also a growing wave of antisemitism inspired by state leaders. It led to the expulsion of 13,000 Polish Jews,  Both organizations with roots in the interwar period. For basic information check Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Polish_Youth; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ Radical_Camp.  [mat], ‘Spalili kukłę Żyda na rynku. ‘Takiej Europy chcecie?’, Gazeta Wyborcza, local supplement for Wrocław, 2015, 18. 11., https://wroclaw.wyborcza.pl/wroclaw/1,35771,19210427,j-c-arabai-ole-islam-pier-e-przed-wroclawskim-ratuszem.html, 15. 3. 2020.  In the death camps in Chełmno at Ner, Bełżec and Treblinka Jews were murdered with exhaust fumes. In Chełmno – literally in closed vans.  Closely Watched Trains, in Czech Ostře sledované vlaky, is the title of a short story by Bohumil Hrabal (1965) and its film adaptation by Jiří Menzel (1966). The film is set during World War II at a small railway station.

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who left for Israel, Denmark, Sweden and the USA. Antisemitism suppressed after World War II found a violent outlet. Importantly, both then and in the later artistic and journalistic responses to the event, associations with the Holocaust returned: isolation, rail transports, suitcases, individual surviving objects. In 2018, mediation – or repetition – was therefore double. Just like the slogan on the rightist sticker: ‘1968. We remember – we’ll repeat it.’ [4] The discussion started unexpectedly as early as in January 2018, with the conflict around the proposed amendment to the Law on the Institute of National Remembrance. It introduced the Article 55a, penalising attribution to ‘the Polish nation or the Polish State’ of responsibility or co-responsibility for crimes committed by the Third German Reich or for other crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes or for grossly trivialising the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes. As a result, no one was supposed to ever again to talk about ‘Polish death camps’ with impunity. The legislative change led to criticism of the Polish government by, among others, Israel and the United States. Obviously, in the Polish and international public debate, the term ‘Polish Death Camps’ appeared many times and more often than before. The heated debate in the wake of a strong political response from the USA made the 1968 anniversary a historical reconstruction – as very similar arguments and images, often directly antisemitic appeared in it. As Wojciech Maziarski, journalist of Gazeta Wyborcza wrote, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of March ’68, PiS (Law and Justice) or-

Fig. 4: March 1968: ‘We remember, we’ll repeat it’, sticker, private Facebook profile.

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ganised the reconstruction of the antisemitic campaign ‘and thanks to the efforts of the reconstructors it managed to build a model of Poland from 1960 on the scale of 1:1.’ ¹³ The ‘reconstruction’ involved all possible forms, including street performances (for example, a manifestation calling the Polish President to sign the amendment with the words: ‘Take off the yarmulke, sign the bill!’) and visual and verbal images (like the term ‘fifth column’ used by Władysław Gomułka in 1967). A number of such statements found a place in the anniversary exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Estranged. March ’68 and Its Aftermath,¹⁴ the last part of which showed the latest examples of antisemitism in the public debate.

Phantasmatic life of ‘bloodlands’ Any questions about the scope of similar actions or comments would seem reasonable. The subject here, however, is not statistics, but the dangerous life of images. Both the media events mentioned¹⁵ and the process I called ‘1968 reconstruction’, had their visibility and caused various reactions. They provoked not only other comments and media activities [5],¹⁶ but also political and legal acts. Still, they were legible and brought to mind recognisable associations. In essence, they were conceivable (imaginable) and representable (pictured) in the public sphere. In this sense, therefore, they belonged to the social ‘imaginary’, even if they may seem marginal in quantity terms.

 ‘Dzięki wysiłkom rekonstruktorów udało się zbudować w skali 1:1 makietę Polski sprzed 50 lat.’ See Wojciech Maziarski, ‘Udana rekonstrukcja marca ’68. Rekonstrukcja Gomułki – też’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 2018, 8. 2., https://wyborcza.pl/7,75968,22995886,udana-rekonstrukcja-marca68-rekonstrukcja-gomulki-tez.html, 15. 3. 2020.  See description at Museum website: https://www.polin.pl/en/march68, 15. 3. 2020.  Media events are historic events experienced through the media, mostly television, and often already organized with view on live broadcasting. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of History, Princeton 1994.  See for example Tumblr Freikorps Polen, which compiled photographs of Nazi German officers with comments found in Polish internet discussions about refugees. Blog authors wrote: ‘The statements presented, despite all similarities to the rhetoric of the Third Reich, belong to Poles, were placed on social media and concern refugees from war-torn Middle East countries seeking shelter in Europe.’ The blog at https://freikorpspolen.tumblr.com/ ceased to exist, but one still may find some reprints from it, e. g. https://hiro.pl/freikorps-polen-wstrzasajacyblog/, 15. 3. 2020. See also many satirical drawings by Andrzej Rysuje, Jan Koza, Marek Raczkowski – all referring to Holocaust clichés brought into contemporary context.

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Fig. 5: ‘Freikorps Polen’ Tumblr blog.

This ‘imaginary’ has a unique spatial dimension in Poland. As the second example proves, the references to the Holocaust are especially meaningful there as a site of the extermination, a vast ‘cemetery’ of European Jewry, or part of the ‘bloodlands’.¹⁷ The background of the debate is, therefore, the complex issue of the Polish memory of the Holocaust, which has been changing rapidly since 1989. It was subjected to the Communist ‘freezer’, which only sometimes – as in 1968 – failed and indulged in memory convulsions. As a result of the transformation, it opened itself to new narratives, both local and external. After 1989 the disputes regarding World War II focused on topics previously absent or ill-presented in public debate, such as the Warsaw Uprising, the fate of Poles in the East (Volhynia and the Gulag) and the Holocaust. There was a significant dynamic in the Holocaust memory. First, as a result of the so-called war of crosses at Auschwitz,¹⁸ the knowledge of the significance of this place for Jews reached the pub Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York 2010.  The ‘War of crosses’ is the general name for a series of conflicts: one over the Carmelite convent founded in 1984 on the site of the former camp and then over the so-called papal cross (culmination 1998 – 1999) placed on the gravel pit, where prisoners of various nationalities, mainly Poles, were shot. Between 1989 and 1998 there were a lot of protests at the site: first, Jewish ones

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lic, and Poles ceased to be the primary victims of the camp. Then, mainly as a result of the book Sąsiedzi [Neighbors] (2000) by Jan Tomasz Gross and the discussion about it, the topic of the complicity of Polish individuals and groups in extermination appeared. This discussion continues today. The dispute over crosses, and more broadly about the Polish and Jewish symbolism of Auschwitz also brought an increase in antisemitic sentiment. In total, these disputes brought a change in the consciousness of Polish society, but also the polarisation of attitudes.¹⁹ However, it is essential to note the significant shifts in this debate. After the war, the message of the living memory of the participants (victims, witnesses, accomplices, bystanders or onlookers) was blocked by official memory mechanisms, selectively indicating events and attitudes that could find expression or description in the public sphere. Thus, the memory of the Holocaust remained a sphere of understatement, whispers, hidden or ‘aphasia’ stories. At the same time, it was involved in the pre-war past, in historical ideas about Jewish life, antisemitism and anti-Judaism (which one may quickly reveal in the Wrocław event described). The next shift concerns the very balance of forces. During the war, Jews were to be stigmatised, then isolated or excluded, deported and, finally, murdered. All this was done with German hands, but with Polish society in an ambiguous position. In 1968, the mechanism was similar – the others were identified, excluded, and then forced to leave. The perpetrators remain unspecified: the state, ‘them,’ society? The ‘atmosphere’ was like that. Importantly, while the theme of recognising one’s own or someone else’s Jewishness is repeated in many personal stories from that time, the official language was instead calling the enemy ‘Zionists’ or the ‘fifth column’ already mentioned. Satirical drawings pointed to a parallel between the German army and politics during World War II and the Israeli army and politics of 1967.²⁰ Finally, some contemporary practices – whether

against the cross there, then Polish defending its presence. In the summer of 1998, at the climax of the war for the papal cross, several thousand people participated in the protests in Auschwitz, and 3/4 of Poland’s inhabitants supported the presence of the cross on the gravel pit. See: Marek Kucia, Auschwitz jako fakt społeczny. Historia, współczesność i świadomość społeczna KL Auschwitz w Polsce, Kraków 2005. – Geneviève Zubrzycki, The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland, Chicago and London 2006.  Marek Kucia, ‘The Meanings of Auschwitz in Poland, 1945 to the Present’, Holocaust Studies XXV, 2019, No. 3, pp. 220 – 247.  On 1968 public sphere see Piotr Osęka, Syjoniści, inspiratorzy, wichrzyciele. Obraz wroga w propagandzie Marca 1968, Warsaw 1999. – Agnieszka Skalska, Obraz wroga w antysemickich rysunkach prasowych Marca 68’, Warsaw 2011.

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in 2015 or 2018 – reveal ‘hidden Jews,’ but also refugees or LGBTQ people treated ‘as Jews’ and seek exclusion for them. How real is the threat of violence now? The difference in comparison with the Polish People’s Republic period, resulting from the openness of public life and the lack of censorship, is that today one does not have to read between the lines. Alt-Right is proud to fight political correctness and speak out with content previously anonymised, metaphorised or hidden. Still, the announcements such as ‘send all the Muslims to be gassed’ probably express one more shift that is taking place. As Andrzej Leder argued, a revolution took place in Poland in 1944– 1945.²¹ It was, however, a dreamt-of revolution, as the masses were not a subject in it, but rather a trans-passive subject which took advantage of other forces and violence: the effects of the Nazi regime that exterminated the Jews and of the Communist order that liquidated the class of landowners. It seems that this passive mass subject demands violence today. The most extreme manifestations of this will – like the burning of the Jew puppet – even if they are incidents, indicate, first, this readiness for violence, and secondly, the durability of its forms.

Positives This brief presentation of the dynamics of Polish memory seems necessary to understand the dynamics of repeated images. How do they work? In his work Pozytywy [Positives] (2002– 2003) Zbigniew Libera²² showed the mechanism of distinguishing the primary coordinates of the image. It makes an excellent commentary on the complex of beliefs, rhetorical practices and images described here. The artist restaged and remade eight widely known photographs of atrocities, from both Polish and international history, commonly circulated in his childhood and youth. Ewa Domańska called them ‘memory markers’,²³ as they belong to the media files repeated any time the given event needs mentioning. They point out two mechanisms. First, that media use only archives of their own. They eternally recirculate photographs and film footage they showed once. Thus, media-made history is not pluralistic, complex or told from the various perspectives – it is usually reduced to one picture that becomes the shared image of the event. Sec Andrzej Leder, Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej, Warsaw 2014.  See Raster Gallery website: http://en.rastergallery.com/prace/pozytywy/, 15. 3. 2020.  Ewa Domańska, ‘Czy Libera mógłby nas jeszcze uratować?’, Obieg.pl, 2006, 23. 12., https:// archiwum-obieg.u-jazdowski.pl/artmix/4159, 15. 3. 2020.

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ond, as Susan Sontag observed, we don’t remember facts, but the photographs.²⁴ If so, then the social imaginary is filled with images, often isolated, detached from the context of other representations, and even from the event itself, which consequently becomes a generalised concept.²⁵ These mechanisms are also an easy first explanation for the repetition of ‘old’ images in new historical circumstances: we need something we know. Probably the most frequently cited picture from Libera’s series is the one entitled Mieszkancy [Residents] [6]. It refers to the photograph from the Auschwitz

Fig. 6: Zbigniew Libera, Residents (from the series Positives), 2003. Courtesy of the Artist and Raster Gallery Warsaw.

 ‘To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture.’ See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York 2003, cit. p. 70.  Similarly, Barbie Zelizer tracked how post-war images from liberated concentration camps lost their role as evidence for the symbolic status of the accusation of Germany, becoming image-memory instead of image-record. Barbie Zelizer, ‘From the Image of Record to the Image of Memory. Holocaust Photography, Then and Now’, in Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (eds), Picturing the Past. Media, History and Photography, Chicago 1999, pp. 98 – 121.

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Liberation Chronicle taken in 1945 by Red Army operators. Looking at Libera’s restaging one may recognise the very composition of the ‘original’ chronicle frame: people standing quietly, striped costumes, lines separating the group from the operator and the viewer. Then comes a recognition. As the artist wanted: the allegedly idyllic picture triggers a flashback of a brutal past. He demonstrates how memory works, operating at the level of the afterimage. This notion combines, following Władysław Strzemiński, a physiological association connected with image retention on the retina, with the cultural duration of the performance.²⁶ Aby Warburg would propose in this context the term ‘Nachleben’ – life after life, or life outside their proper cultural context.²⁷ In Libera’s work, it is an aesthetic trace only, the very contour of perception: it preserves the arrangement of figures and light spots. And it is a trace of an affect, as it retains an impression at the level of simple recognition: bad – good, unpleasant – nice. It does not preserve significant or symbolic cultural values, so it does not show life after life as much as life without life. Libera showed that we could not see. At the same time, he suggested that the cultural space in which we live was full of images, annihilating the burden of the problematic and bloody past. If he wanted to work with the notion of trauma, we need to notice that trauma actually disappears. The flashback moves the viewer toward the brutal past, but we still remain in the imaginary realm, as in a child at play: compare the two pictures. Positives, as I mentioned, explain somehow the uses of the Holocaust ‘imaginary’ in the context of the contemporary conflict about refugees and other possibly excluded groups. The primary coordinates of these images – depicting plunder and murder – are permanent, durable. They create a ‘character armour’ of Polish society.²⁸ These historical sub-images hidden in contemporary messages and constructing their meanings can be called de-fact images. They have an indifferent attitude to facts (they are in a way apart from them), and they provoke an affect, but somehow damaged, or shifted. Here I go after Gilles Deleuze’s term ‘affect-image’.²⁹ He was looking for a film image form that would go beyond the mimetic reference to reality and, at the same time, escape from the abstraction of

 Władysław Strzemiński, Teoria widzenia, Łódź 2016. See also Władysław Strzemiński. Readability of Images. Proceedings of the International Conference Devoted to the Work of Władysław Strzemiński, Łódź 2015.  See Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, University Park 2018.  After Wilhelm Reich, Charakterpanzer is a functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and tension in the body. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, New York 1945.  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II. Time-Image, Minneapolis 1989.

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pure visuality. De-fact images seem to refer to real events, but they do not provide information about them. They are not a record, but an appeal. Their subject is different from the historical one. They are based on memory (repetition). Still, their only function is to allow for recognition of basic emotions that come from the contemporary context and fear of the future (the refugees or gay people ‘WILL harm our children’). And they do not create new attitudes, but, according to the diagnosis of Susan Sontag, strengthen existing ones. And even more: ‘In the real world, something is happening and no one knows what is going to happen. In the image-world, it has happened, and it will forever happen in that way.’ ³⁰ Can this process of image repetition make its way to the real world? The question seems rhetorical as we know that postmodernity is the reality that comes after the image. ‘The future of threat is forever,’ ³¹ writes Brian Massumi in the context of the September 11. He argues that today events primarily consist of ‘an iterative series of allied events whose boundaries are indefinite.’³² Massumi refers here to the presence of various types of alerts, calls, prophecies that construct facts in the media sphere, instead of commenting on them. He points out that the event that drives modern imagination is what is about to happen: ‘We live in times when what has not happened qualifies as front-page news.’ ³³ Libera made us think about the pop-circulation of images and a possible positive version of memory. Some years and many pictures after, one can sharply see that he also showed how pictures transfer the fundamental structures of imagination and make them familiar, safe, disarmed; allegedly, because they exist just in perception. When used against the Others, they will do their harm. During a 2015 discussion about refugees the positive photo of ‘residents’ could have served as a picture of the inverted world, the one in which we try to avoid wars, killings and totalitarianism, and to which we don’t want to invite anyone; ineffectively, and on the price of authoritarianism on this side of the barbed wire. The ambiguity of the photos and memes, gif-s and photocollages composed on the basis of Holocaust clichés clearly shows that the wires not only protect us from the world – but also on the opposite: they protect the world from us. The images make the (media) event – they co-create the refugee crisis too. All these representations referring to the Holocaust – on both sides of the con-

 Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York 2007, p. 131.  Brian Massumi, ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact. The Political Ontology of Threat’, in Antony Bryant and Griselda Pollock (eds), Digital and Other Virtualities. Renegotiating the Image, London and New York 2010, pp. 79 – 92, cit. p. 80.  Ibidem, p. 86.  Ibidem, p. 79.

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flict – come as a warning after the historical event and announce the possible consequences of a contemporary event/situation. Pictures are contagious, like viruses, and tell you to respond with pictures. They even carry past diseases. Still, as I argue, they also carry the potential to provoke acts. ‘The worst is yet to come,’ ³⁴ as wrote one of the Polish publicists in 2015, arguing against refugees (today constantly called migrants). He was foreseeing that we, Poles (and Europeans), would prepare a new Holocaust – for refugees. It is starting just now – now as well – in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, on the TurkishGreek border where refugees are stopped by barbed wire and tear gas from entering Europe.

 Piotr Nowak, ‘Czy zgotujemy imigrantom holocaust’, Plus Minus, 2015, 2. 10., http://www.rp. pl/Plus-Mi-nus/310029990-Czy-zgotujemy-imigrantom-holokaust.html, 15. 3. 2020.

Index of Names Ábrányi, Lajos 39 Adalheid of Wallsee 9 Adámek, Rudolf 156, 158, 160 – 162 Alciato, Andrea 25, 27 f., 32 f. Altenberg, Peter 130 Angelus (apothecary in Prague) 8 Babiš, Andrej 264 – 266 Bartoš, Adam 265 Bartoš, Jiří 242, 244, 246 Baštýř, Alfréd 186 Bechyně, Rudolf 164 Begin, Menachem 243 Beneš, Edvard 156, 164, 174, 177, 184, 187, 191 f., 197 Beneš, Karel Josef 174 Benešová, Hana 187 Beran, Rudolf 177 Beránek, Jan 3 Bettauer, Hugo 136 f. Bettelheim, Bruno 49 Bidlo, František 147 f., 177 Biliánová, Popelka (Marie) 172 Bogner, Fritz 213 Bonhomme, Macé 27 Bougas, Nick (A. Wyatt Mann) 260 Brabec, Jiří 148 Bradáč, Karel 237, 239 Brod, Max 254 Browning, Christopher 219 Brož, Ondřej 260, 264 Brunner, Vratislav Hugo 147 Buquoy, Ludwig Ernst 66 Butler, Judith 134 Campbell, William 75 Castoriadis, Cornelius 271 Cekov, Cvetan (Karandaš) 245 Charles IV (Holy Roman Emperor) 9 Churchill, Winston 184, 196, 198 Clemenceau, Georges 89 Cresswell, Tim 103 Csörgey, Zoltán 39, 41

Dees, David 260 Deleuze, Gilles 282 Domańska, Ewa 280 Dreyfus, Alfred 89 Ebersberg, Ottokar Franz 124 Edel, Edmund 89 f. Eichmann, Adolf 237, 239, 248 Erdélyi, József 55 Ermers, Max 136 Farkas, Júlia 51 Feininger, Lyonel 131 Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Emperor) 31 Feytl, Isaac 31 f. Feytl, Solomon 31 f. Feytl (merchant in Telč) 31 f. Filla, Emil 231 Frank, Anne 272 f. Frejka, Ludvík (Freund, Ludwig) 229 Frič, Martin 234 Gáthy, Zoltán 50 Gause, Wilhelm 88 Geminder, Bedřich 229 Gilman, Sander 104 Gislebert (reeve of Kolín) 3 Goebbels, Joseph 179 Gomułka, Władysław 277 Gross, Jan Tomasz 279 Gütersloh, Albert Paris von 130 Haas, Hugo 186, 191, 254 Háj, Felix (Černá, Marie) 172 Hajdů, Vavro 229 Hall, Stuart 128 Haney, Wolfgang 61 Harlan, Veit 180 Haut, Dobroslav 152 f., 159, 161 – 165, 168 f., 171, 181 – 183, 188, 194 – 196, 199 – 201 Heemskerck, Maerten van 25 f. Heerbrand, Jakob 29

286

Index of Names

Hejna, Jiří 227 Heller, Otta 191 Henry of Leipa 8 Hesse, Klaus 218 Heydrich, Reinhard 197 Hilsner, Leopold 43, 58, 91, 189 Hippler, Fritz 210 Hitler, Adolf 178, 198, 200, 219, 238, 248 Hoffmeister, Adolf 147 f. Hofmeister, Rudolf Richard 91 Höpner, Ondřej 266 Horejc, Jaroslav 234 Horník-Lánský, František 153 f. Hrůzová, Anežka 43, 266 Husák, Gustáv 242 Ilger, Annie (née Ebersberg) Ilger, Friedrich 124 Izer, Zdeněk 253 Jabotinsky, Ze’ev

124

244

Kafka, Franz 254 Kalousek, Miroslav 265 Kaulbach, Friedrich August von 89 Keil, Emil 83 Kisch, Egon Erwin 238, 240 f. Klitzing, Dietrich von 16 f., 34 Kočí, Josef 156, 158 f., 161, 166 f. Kolár, František Jaromír 241 f. Kopecký, Václav 226 Kožíšek, Antonín Jaromil 181 Kratochvíl, Zdeněk 147 Krejčík, Karel 90, 100 f., 105, 107 f., 110 – 112, 115 – 120 Lábler, Ludvík 4 Lada, Josef 147, 156 Langerman, Arthur 61 Latuff, Carlos 261 Leder, Andrzej 280 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (Ulyanov) 160 Lessing, Theodor 61 Letto, Jenny 75 Libera, Zbigniew 271, 280 – 283 Löbl, Evžen 229 London, Artur 229

Longerich, Peter 218 Lucemburk, František 201 Luckhardt, Ulrich 131 Lueger, Karl 125 Luther, Martin 1, 28 – 30, 32 Malák, Jaroslav 234 f. Mařatka, Josef 163 Margolius, Rudolf 229 Marr, Wilhelm 229 Masaryk, Jan 187 Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue 172, 186, 193 Masaryková, Alice 187, 197 Massumi, Brian 283 Master E. S. 14 Matthew (illuminator in Prague) 14, 18 f., 21, 24 Maziarski, Wojciech 276 Meckenem, Israhel van 14, 19 Meissner, Emil 186 Merzinger, Patrick 129 Mocker, Josef 3 Molín, Josef 225 Moravec, Emanuel 196 Moser, Koloman 130 Moszkowski, Alexander 131 Mrkvička, Otakar 231 Mudra, Aleš 8 – 10, 12 Munkácsy, Mihály 38, 40, 42 – 45 Murawska-Mathesius, Katarzyna 128 Musil, Robert 130 Nasser, Gamal Abdel 233 Neurath, Konstantin von 179 Nicholas (dean in Lipnice) 8 Novak, Ernest (Ernő / Josip / Giuseppe) 38, 41 f., 45 f. Novák, Josef 228 Obama, Barack 271 Oișteanu, Andrei 104 Opluštil, Josef 199 Ottokar II (Bohemian King) Pabel, Hilmar 211 Parler, Peter 3, 5 Patočka, Harry (Jindřich)

3

156 f., 161

Index of Names

Patrný, Michal 3 Pazderka, Petr 245, 249 Pelc, Antonín 147 f., 223 f., 229 f. Pergler, Vladimír 242, 244, 246 Peter (chaplain in Lipnice) 8 Pflanz, Ernst 85 f. Pludek, Alexej 241 Pop, Jaroslav 233, 237 f., 243, 247 Popper, Joseph 254 Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich 225 Reichmann, Vilém (Jappy) 229, 239 Reicin, Bedřich 229 Reimann, Arnold 186 Rejthar, Josef 187, 193 f. Rélink, Karel 148, 171 – 176, 181, 196, 200 f., 264 Rezek, Hanuš 222 Robitsek, Karl 130 Rockwell, George Lincoln 262 Rohling, August 173 f. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 182, 184, 189, 196, 198 Rouille, Guillaume 27 Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor) 234 Rutte, Eugen Miroslav 67 Rybak, Piotr 275 Sadat, Anwar 244 Scheiner, Artuš 153, 155 Schlaff, Martin 61 Schlör, Joachim 103 Schmelkes, Emil 191 Schmolka, Marie 254 Schneider, Ernst 115 Schoeps, Julius Hans 103 Schönpflug, Fritz 73 f., 88, 131 Šebesta, Josef 241 f. Secklehner, Julia 149 Sezima, Karel 154 Sidor, Ondřej 262, 265 Siemiradzki, Henryk 44 f. Silverman, Lisa 133 f. Simon of Trent 34 Simone, André (Katz, Otto) 229 Skácelík, František 154 Skála, František 234

287

Slánský, Rudolf 227, 229 f. Šling, Otto 229 Smatek, František (Smeták) 91 f., 161 Smíšek of Vrchoviště, Jan 14 Solymosi, Eszter 36 – 43, 45, 48 – 50, 55 Solymosi (Eszter’s mother) 49 Sontag, Susan 281, 283 Spira, Chaim Elazar (rabbi in Mukachevo) 91 Šrámek, Jan 164 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (Jughashvili) 196, 198 Štapfer, Karel 67 Steiner, Hana 254 Štembera, Otakar 229, 231, 238, 241 Strasser, Roland 134 f. Strauss, Franz Josef 237 Strauss, Johann 138 Stříbrný, Jiří 156 Stroff, Karel 161, 172 Strzemiński, Władysław 282 Taubert, Eberhard 210 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 226 Tiso, Jozef 151 Tito, Josip Broz 229 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 89 Trotsky, Leon (Bronstein, Lev Davidovich) 157 f., 162 Tulla, Jan 177 f., 201 Vaca, Karel 231 f. Velinský, Václav 177 f. Vilímek, Josef Richard jr. 145 f., 149, 154, 156, 160 f., 163, 169, 172 Vilímek, Josef Richard sr. 145 f., 149, 151 – 153, 160 f., 163, 169, 172 Vincent III of Leipa 9, 12 Vítek, Karel 158 f., 163 – 165 Voborský, František 171, 181 f., 184 f., 189 – 191, 193 – 195, 197, 201 Voskovec, Jiří 186, 191 Vuković, Svetislav 156, 159 Warburg, Aby 20, 282 Weil, Leopold 76, 87 Weininger, Otto 78, 133 f.

288

Index of Names

Weixler, Viktor 131 – 133, 141, 143 Werich, Jan 186, 191, 234 William of Landštejn 8 Wodak, Ruth 126, 128 Wolmar, Wolfgang Wolfram von 180 f., 185 Zacharias of Hradec

24, 30, 32

Ženíšek, František 159 Žentel, Jiří 229, 234, 236 f., 242 f. Zieher, Ottmar 81, 85 Zmilelý of Písek, Janíček 21, 23 Zweig, Stefan 130

List of Contributors Jan Dienstbier works as a researcher at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and in recent years taught at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University. His research is mainly dedicated to medieval wall paintings and book illumination as well as general problems of medieval iconography. Currently, he is finishing a book about secular wall paintings in late medieval Bohemia and Moravia. He is an editor of the leading Czech art-historical journal Umění/Art. Michal Frankl focuses on the history of modern antisemitism, refugee policy, and the Holocaust. He authored monographs on the history of Czech antisemitism and Czechoslovak refugee policy, as well as numerous articles. He is a senior researcher at the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Unlikely Refuge? Refugees and Citizens in East-Central Europe in the 20th Century. Jakub Hauser works currently as a curator of the art collections of the Museum of Czech Literature, where he prepared an exhibition of the work of the caricaturist František Bidlo (2015). He is also working on the long term theme of the art of post-revolutionary Russia in emigration, and is editor of the book The Experience of Exile (Prague, 2017) and co-editor of the associated publication Stories of Exile (Prague, 2018). Eva Janáčová is an art historian working at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. She focuses on research into Jewish art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on the visuality of the Zionist movement in the Czech Lands, and on the work of Israeli artists of Czech origin. She has been concerned long-term with the research phenomenon of visual antisemitism and is the main investigator of the grant project NAKI with the title Image of the Enemy. Visual Manifestations of Antisemitism in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. She is also a lecturer at Charles University in Prague. Petr Karlíček is the director of the Archive of the City of Ústí nad Labem and an external lecturer in the department of history of the J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. He specialises in the history of political caricature, Czech-German relationships, the history of towns and parishes in the border zones and the history of the Czech-Saxon border. He recently published the following books: Napínavá doba. Politické karikatury (a satira) Čechů, Slováků a českých Němců [A Thrilling Time. Political Caricatures (and Satire) of the Czechs, Slovaks, and Bohemian Germans] (Prague, 2018) and Obsazování Chebska i Ašska československou armádou na konci roku 1918 [The Occupation of the Cheb and Aš Regions by the Czechoslovak Army at the End of 1918] (Aš, 2018). Iwona Kurz works as an assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. Her fields of interest are visual history of modern culture, visual memory of the Shoah, anthropology of body and gender. She is co-author of the two volumes of the book Visual Culture in Poland (Warsaw, 2017), co-editor of The Traces of the Holocaust in Imagina-

290

List of Contributors

ry of Polish Culture (Warsaw, 2017) and is co-editor of the academic journal View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture. Julia Secklehner is a research fellow in the department of art history at Masaryk University, Brno. As part of the European Research Council-funded project Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918 – 1939 (CRAACE), she researches the role of regionalism, folk art, and the vernacular in modern central European art after 1918. Her recent research includes the topic of antisemitism in Viennese popular magazines. Blanka Soukupová is an ethnologist and historian working at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University in Prague. She deals with the issue of the central European town, national and minority identities including antisemitism and the history of the discipline of ethnology in a timescale from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. She is the author of these books: Česká společnost před sto lety: Identita, stereotyp, mýtus [Czech society a hundred years ago: Identity, stereotype, myth] (Prague, 2000), Velké a malé českožidovské příběhy z doby intenzivní naděje [Large and small Czech-Jewish stories from a time of intense hope] (Bratislava, 2005) and Židé v českých zemích po šoa: Identita poraněné paměti [Jews in the Bohemian Lands after Shoah: Identity of a wounded memory] (Bratislava, 2016). Zbyněk Tarant is the vice-chairman of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. His research focuses on Israel Studies, Holocaust memory, Czech-Jewish and Czech-Zionist relations as well as contemporary antisemitism. He has published books such as Faces of Hatred: Contemporary Antisemitism in its Historical Context (Pilsen, 2012) and Diaspora paměti: židovská paměť a reflexe holocaustu v Izraeli a Spojených státech [Diaspora of Memory: Jewish memory and reflection of the holocaust in Israel and the United States] (Pilsen, 2013). Daniel Uziel works as a senior researcher in Yad Vashem and lecturer in political science and military history at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Areas of his interest include modern German history, especially military history and culinary history. He has published the following books: The Propaganda Warriors. The Wehrmacht and the Consolidation of the German Home Front (Oxford, 2008) and Arming the Luftwaffe. The German Aviation Industry in WWII (Jefferson, 2011). Daniel Véri is an art and cultural historian, head of scientific affairs at the Ferenczy Museum Center in Szentendre, Hungary, and also a member of the research group Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History (UCL, 2019 – 2020). His research interests include Central European art of the 1945 – 1989 period, especially the artistic reception of Jewish identity and the Holocaust, as well as the cultural history of blood libels. He has published the following books: ‘Leading the Dead’. The World of János Major (Budapest, 2013) and, with Mária Árvai, The Great Book Theft. French Book Exhibition Behind the Iron Curtain (Szentendre, 2020).