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War, revolution, and the transformation of the German humor magazine, 1914-27
Art Journal, Spring, 1993 by Sherwin Simmons
In 1925 Kurt Tucholsky, Weimar Germany's leading satirical essayist, opened an article with the question: "Why can't one read Simplicissimus |Simplicissimus~ any longer?"(1) Tucholsky's question expressed an opinion, held by many Leftist intellectuals in the early 1920s, that Germany's most famous Witzblatt, or "humor magazine," had abandoned its politically progressive satire of the prewar period and had become an organ of reactionary conservatism. Tucholsky argued that this reversal and the magazine's declining aesthetic quality indicated that the entire genre of the Witzblatt--a mass-circulation publication containing satirical essays, verse, and drawings, often of a topical political nature--had become antiquated. Having emerged during the 1848 revolution and reached commercial and aesthetic prominence in the years before 1914, the humor magazine found its productive apparatus inadequate to the tasks of political satire in the 1920s. Tucholsky proposed that its place as a vehicle for political struggle be taken by a new type of publication that would employ photography in a tendentious manner. Such a magazine in the hands of the Communists (KPD) would move beyond the timid pictorial supplements of the Social Democratic (SPD) press and use montage and text to make the photograph a weapon capable of countering the bourgeois illustrated newspapers, which had become a powerful force in shaping public opinion. Tucholsky's comments seem to anticipate the techniques and rapid growth of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung |Worker illustrated newspaper~ during the years immediately following his essay, but this prescience depended on his knowledge of the previous development of the German humor magazine.
As various political factions searched for ways to reach the masses following the German revolution of November 1918, humor magazines proliferated and became an important means of propaganda for both the Left and the Right. Opposing ideological views about art were argued on their pages, and the practice and theory of Tendenzkunst, an art which responded to and intervened in immediate political issues, developed. Efforts in the first half of the 1920s to convert the humor magazine's apparatus to serve new ideological aims moved toward the type of magazine envisioned by Tucholsky. The following discussion will examine these developments and show how they prepared the way for the mass-circulation illustrated newspapers that became important weapons in the struggle between Left and Right at the end of the Weimar Republic.
World War I brought extraordinary changes to the operations of the German humor magazine. Following the events of August 1914, the satirical attack that liberal and socialist magazines, such as Simplicissimus (1896-1944), Ulk |Joke~ (1871-1933), and Der Wahre Jacob |The true Jacob (The real McCoy)~ (1879-1923; 1927-33), had directed at the militarism and political policies of the Wilhelmine regime quickly ceased. All the magazines began to work closely with the section of the Foreign Office responsible for propaganda in neutral countries, initially sending regular and then special issues to German diplomatic offices for distribution abroad. Humor magazines were also enlisted for domestic propaganda. Caricaturists began to draw humorous broadsheets for popular distribution and to work for military newspapers, resulting in publications such as the Kriegs-Flugblatter |War broadsheets~ (1914-17), which was edited by Simplicissimus artists Karl Arnold and Thomas Theodor Heine. Humor magazines also played a role in the war-bond campaigns. They were intensely involved when the first mass strikes and the Reichstag's peace resolution of July 19, 1917, caused the High Command to initiate an extensive propaganda campaign calling for military victory with substantial annexations. Officials began to make specific suggestions about the content and tone of the illustrations, as in February 1918 when magazines were urged to be particularly fierce in their treatment of Trotsky after he refused to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. Drawings were used to attack the emerging antiwar movement and to appeal to the German people to hold out for victory, closely following the instructions of the Zentrale fur Heimatdienst, the centralized propaganda agency, which was formed during the last months of the war. Simplicissimus strongly supported the war effort; only in the issue immediately before the Kaiser's abdication and the proclamation of the new republic did it finally mute its support for continued fighting. Even then, Eduard Thony's cover for the issue of November 5, 1918, employed the heroic style familiar from earlier war propaganda to celebrate the valiant effort of the German army, which should, as the caption indicates: "Walk upright through the door of peace and not hang its head."
Following the November 1918 revolution, the established humor magazines adopted a largely conservative posture toward political events. The letters of Ludwig Thoma, an important Simplicissimus writer, convey the antirevolutionary attitudes contained in the magazines. In January 1919, he expressed his disdain for the radical members of Kurt Eisner's government in Munich and told Reinhold Geheeb, editor of Simplicissimus, that the bourgeoisie and the peasantry should no longer be the targets of satire; rather, criticism should be directed at the new holders of power.(2) Illustrations in Simplicissimus attacked the Council Movement and warned of the devastating effect of the further spread of Bolshevism in Germany. A drawing by Thony, for example, shows Communists declaiming and reading on an island provided for the realization of their ideas. By portraying Communists as skeletons in a landscape whose ruins and cypresses recall Arnold Bocklin's Isle of the Dead of 1880, Thony confidently predicted the outcome of the Communist Council Republic, which had been proclaimed in Munich by Max Levien and Eugen Levine on April 13, 1919, two days before the publication of his drawing.
