Hindenburg: The Cartoon Titan of the Weimar Republic, 1918–1934 Richard Scully ABSTRACT Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), last president of the Weimar Republic (1925–1934), was one of the most caricatured men of his day. Cartoonists of both the left and the right wing of German politics used aspects of his own carefully constructed public image—the “Hindenburg myth”—both to admire and admonish the president; but in taking an essentially uncritical view of the ield-marshal president, even when seeking to subvert this image, Weimar-era cartoonists ultimately failed to destabilize a damaging political discourse that contributed to the stagnation and decline of German democracy. This was despite Weimar Germany being an ideal environment for liberal-democratic caricature. On May 31, 1930, Dr. Joseph Goebbels appeared before the Moabit court in Berlin, charged with libel.1 As Anna von der Goltz has noted, this was a heaven-sent opportunity for Goebbels to generate much-needed publicity for the NSDAP (National­ sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in the run-up to the September elections.2 With just 12 seats in the 491-seat Reichstag, the Nazis were facing an uphill battle to achieve their Führer’s goal of gaining power by peaceful means.3 Owing to the built-in right-wing bias of Judge Schmitz (a phenomenon widespread amongst the Weimar judiciary), Goebbels not only escaped with a mere 800-Reichsmark ine, but also had the opportunity to turn the dock into a soapbox, defending himself with aplomb, and providing his audience with a powerful restatement of the Nazi message.4 Writing in his diary after the proceedings, Goebbels commented on the brilliance of his performance, satisied that the whole thing constituted “brilliant propaganda for us.”5 Central to Goebbels’s trial was a cartoon drawn by Hans Schweitzer (or “Mjölnir,” as he signed himself) that dominated the front page of Der Angriff for December 29, German Studies Review 35.3 (2012): 541–565 © 2012 by The German Studies Association. 542 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 1929.6 “Und der ‘Retter’ sieht zu—” (And the “Savior” watches . . .) showed generations of Germans marching into slavery as a result of the newly promulgated Young Plan, which was designed to settle Germany’s reparations on a fair and achievable basis. The despondent Germans were shown marching past the massive igure of Reichspräsident Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg (1847–1934), wrapped in the lag of the German Republic, wearing a horned helmet, and seated on a throne supported by a stereotypical Jewish igure (ig. 1). This image—lampooning the president as “a pitiless Teutonic god”—and the accompanying article—claiming that the “real” Hindenburg had died—had prompted Hindenburg to take the extraordinary step of suing Goebbels for libel.7 At stake was more than Hindenburg’s dignity, but the very foundations of his extraordinary power and inluence with the German population and its representatives. This was an image that he and his supporters had carefully constructed, ever since Hindenburg’s crushing victory over the Russians at Tannenberg in August 1914. Schweitzer was subverting the image of Hindenburg as a titanic igure, using it ironically rather than as a positive reinforcement of the “Hindenburg myth.” Similarly, the almost Wagnerian Figure 1. Mjölnir [Hans Schweitzer], “Und der ‘Retter’ sieht zu– ,” Der Angriff, December 29, 1929, 1. Image from the author’s own collection. Richard Scully 543 appearance of Schweitzer’s Hindenburg was an attack on the president’s status as an icon of German nationalism; the epitome of the German national tradition and spirit. That a cartoon could be so threatening to Germany’s preeminent statesman of the interwar period deserves close investigation, within the broader contexts of Hindenburg’s representation in Weimar-era cartoons, and the political circumstances affecting the cartoon as a mode of political expression between the collapse of the Kaiserreich and the foundation of the Third Reich. As shown in the small sample of cartoons discussed here (chosen as representative of broader themes), the trope of the heroic, titanic Hindenburg was used throughout the period both to admire and to admonish the president, and quite remarkably for a igure of such nationalist signiicance, admiration and admonition came from both the left and the right of German politics (another basis for the selection of the cartoon sample: papers with afiliations on both sides being discussed). Yet in utilizing an essentially unreconstructed heroic image of the ield marshal–president, Weimar-era cartoonists ultimately failed to destabilize the myth that sustained his power, and which contributed to the stagnation and decline of German democracy. It is ironic, and indeed tragic, that the most effective anti-Hindenburg cartoon of the period—the only one that prompted him to take legal action—was created not by a liberal-democratic author, but one committed to the abolition of free speech in all its forms. There has been no dedicated study of such cartoon depictions of Hindenburg, despite the new centrality of Hindenburg’s image in current scholarship, and despite the acknowledged value of the cartoon for shedding light on past political attitudes and circumstances.8 Cartoons not only relect political circumstances and ideas otherwise unavailable to historians working solely with text-based sources, but in their original context were also important historical shapers of political culture.9 The cartoon has for centuries been a particularly powerful political medium for “delating the pompous and exposing the fraud,” and has therefore been feared for the damage it could do to carefully constructed political myths and identities.10 Because they are primarily visual, and thus require little formal literacy to be understood, elites and authorities have assumed that cartoons pose a far greater threat to their power than the printed word, and in the nineteenth century, regimes of censorship emerged all over Europe to deal speciically with the danger posed by such cartoons.11 In the German context, the emergence of a powerful tradition of caricature and political satire underpinned a nascent liberal-democratic culture that was resisted by successive phases of conservative rule.12 Cartoonists experienced restrictions on freedom of expression similar to those other journalists faced under the Carlsbad Decrees (1819–1848), when dealing with the various press laws of the pre-1871 states, and when confronted by the many archaic censorship mechanisms retained or newly developed under the Kaiserreich.13 The Reich Press Law of 1874 permitted free publication without prior censorship, but the governing elites of Germany retained 544 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 a number of means by which cartoonists could be prosecuted after the fact. During his period of “personal rule” (ca. 1890–1900), Kaiser Wilhelm II frequently levied his laws of lèse­majesté against those deemed to have offended the imperial dignity; the staff of the satirical Berlin weekly Kladderadatsch came in for particular attention over their treatment of the scandals that erupted in 1894, involving Wilhelm’s private circle of friends.14 Though the use of lèse­majesté declined in the twentieth century (such powers were diluted in 1907), other legal means of restricting the content of cartoons—not least the self-censorship that fear of prosecution caused in key satirical papers, and the heavy-handed restrictions of wartime—remained in force until the collapse of the monarchy in 1918.15 Thereafter, the Weimar constitution (Article 118) formally abolished all censorship, with only a 1926 Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund­ und Schmutzschriften (Law for the protection of youth from trash and ilth writings) and the standard laws of libel and defamation (used by Hindenburg against Goebbels in 1930) remaining to block the free expression of cartoonists.16 The very lifting of repressive regimes of censorship, however, coincided with the end of the heroic period of radical German caricature, as “delight in freedom from former constraints was soon dampened by the bitter realities that followed the war,” and even an Ersatzkaiser like Hindenburg represented less a threat to new freedoms than a guarantor of order and stability.17 That this culture emanated not only from the right but also characterized left and liberal politics, makes Hindenburg’s alternating treatment in the chief German satirical organs particularly signiicant. The mass press was one key component that differentiated the new right from the old: a vibrant, aggressive, bourgeois movement that increasingly sought to supplant the Bismarckian-Hohenzollern settlement of 1871 (epitomized by Hindenburg and the politics of notables and aristocracy from which he sprang).18 While seeking this transition via the new politics of the early twentieth century, the new right paradoxically often co-opted as its heroes icons of the old order, of whom Hindenburg was perhaps the most notable.19 That in response the center-left also used Hindenburg relatively uncritically only served to further undermine the value of the political cartoon for a liberal-democratic society. This is characteristic of what Bernhard Fulda has demonstrated concerning the paradoxical antidemocratic potential of the otherwise democratizing force of the mass Weimar press.20 Hindenburg was therefore even more fortunate than his predecessors in his role as guarantor of a conservative order: the radical tradition of caricature was so weakened by the time of his presidency (1925–1934) that rather than destabilize and demolish his self-created titanic image, cartoonists were content to reproduce that same image for various political purposes. He also beneited from having begun his cartoon career as one of the greatest heroes in the pantheon of German nationalism. Wartime cartoons commonly depicted him as “a giant in shining armor, crushing the Russian armies with his ist,” or sweeping them up like toy soldiers.21 Though based Richard Scully 545 on his actual military successes, it is worth noting the other real-world factor that underpinned such a titanic image. As German schoolgirl Piete Kuhr noted in her diary: “Paul von Hindenburg is mighty big and strong; he has a square head with a moustache and many wrinkles in his face. The people here in the East worship him.”22 Over six feet tall, and with a “slow, stolid and careful” manner, Hindenburg indeed appeared to be some kind of mythological giant.23 He dwarfed the Kaiser, whom he also out-grew as igurehead of the nation and wielder of actual power.24 Together with Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), Hindenburg exercised dictatorial power during the period of the Third OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung, or High Command), between August 1916 and the Armistice.25 But his deferral of strategic and operational planning to Ludendorff arguably resulted in Germany’s failure on the western front in 1918.26 It was also due to Hindenburg that the Kaiserreich was transformed into the Weimar Republic, with his divesting himself of responsibility, carefully depicting Ludendorff as the real culprit, and silence during the abdication crisis helping to precipitate the revolution of November 1918.27 Despite his culpability in losing the war and ending the monarchy, Hindenburg was able to preserve his own myth while at the same time establishing another powerful one: the Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back-myth). This was heartily endorsed by cartoonists of the German right, such as Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch. “An die Kurzsichtigen” (To the short-sighted) commemorated what Hindenburg intended to be his last bow in public life (ig. 2).28 The retiring ield marshal was called before the Reichstag commission investigating the causes and outcomes of the war, where he not only defended himself, but launched a scathing attack on the “failure and weakness” of the home front.29 It was not the High Command and the “good core of the army” that had failed the test of 1914–1918, but rather revolutionary and defeatist elements within the government, the Reichstag, the armed forces, and society in general.30 His most inluential pronouncement was the subject of the cartoon: “‘The German army was stabbed in the back’ . . . If it needed more proof, then it would be found in the quoted statement of the English general and in the boundless astonishment of our enemies at their victory.”31 Despite the cartoon’s theatrical setting—and the political theatrics it chronicled— Hahmann’s cartoon has no irony about it. Hindenburg is rendered in as lifelike a form as possible—down to the frock coat he wore to the Reichstag commission hearings—and so too is the idealized German soldier, ruthlessly impaled by a traitorous Medusa. The cartoonist not only sought to feminize and demonize the imagined revolutionary elements on the homefront, but also to racialize them. As Hindenburg arrived at the commission on the morning of November 18, he was greeted with cries of “Long live Hindenburg!” but also “Down with the Jewish government! Down with the Jewish Committee!”32 It is therefore unsurprising that Hahmann’s igure not only wears the balloon cap associated with the working classes and the then-ruling SPD 546 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 Figure 2. Werner Hahmann, “An die Kurzsichtigen,” Kladderadatsch, November 30, 1919, 13. Image courtesy of Rare Books, Matheson Library, Monash University. (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), but has stereotypically Jewish features (possibly modeled on the recently deceased Spartakusbund leader Rosa Luxemburg).33 Following this spectacular performance, Hindenburg departed the public stage for his Neudeck estate. During his second retirement (1919–1925), his heroic aura— “a force of stability, continuity, and tranquility”—was used uncritically by even the Richard Scully 547 left-liberal elements of the Weimar regime to defuse a time of crisis, as well as by antidemocratic forces opposed to the Republic.34 Similarly the Dolchstoßlegende was one of many discourses of national identity supposedly removed from the internecine squabbling of party politics. The image-conscious Hindenburg needed to play no active role in disseminating such images; they were powerful enough on their own to generate support for his abortive presidential candidacy (1920), and he “remained a public igure and a household name.”35 Increasingly, however, the unifying role he had played during the war unraveled, as he permitted his myth to be used by right-wing, antidemocratic agitators (his natural constituency).36 Over the course of the Republic’s life, formerly moderate conservative groups became radicalized, and driven by the new culture of mass politics, the conservative press also drifted further rightward, largely out of disgust with the ascendancy of center-left politicians seemingly beholden to international treaties.37 The press—like the electorate—was deeply polarized by the coming of democracy, and for the majority of newspaper editors, this translated into outright opposition to the Weimar Republic itself.38 This drift was particularly true of the satirical and comic papers like Kladde­ radatsch. If its Wilhelmine readership had largely consisted of “grammar school teachers, voters for the Progressive Party, oficials in the legal service who inclined to a National-Liberal outlook, ofice supervisors, free-thinkers-about-town, doctors, lawyers, artists” and the like, Kladderadatsch’s attitude after 1918 indicates just how far to the right these groups tended in the new political universe.39 Since the Armistice—and particularly since 1923, when Kladderadatsch was purchased by the industrialist Hugo Stinnes—the paper had become extremely antirepublican and nationalist.40 It played a signiicant role in the right-wing hate campaign against Matthias Erzberger that ultimately resulted in his assassination.41 So radical had the paper become by the early 1930s that Gleichschaltung (coordination) by the NSDAP was unnecessary.42 The readership of Simplicissimus—the Vernunftrepublikaner (loyal but unenthusiastic citizens of the Republic)—also drifted rightward, and possessed a “somewhat ambivalent” view of the new state of affairs.43 In this polarized environment, only the openly Social-Democratic papers Der Wahre Jacob, Vorwärts, and Lachen Links maintained steadfast loyalty to the Republic; while the left-liberal Jugend adopted a similar approach to Simplicissimus, opposing radicalism of either political persuasion. The KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) papers Der Knüppel and Die Rote Fahne opposed the Republic from the left; while the emergence of the Nazi satirical press in the later 1920s—including the cartoons of Der Angriff, Der Stürmer, and the satirical journal Die Brennessel—provided a further extreme right-wing source for antirepublican (and antisemitic) readers, characteristic of mass bourgeois politics at its interwar peak.44 By the time Hindenburg reemerged to contest the presidential election of 1925, this right-wing political orientation comprised something like half of the German 548 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 electorate, who knowingly elected a man who had little sympathy for democracy.45 Hindenburg’s victory was therefore greeted with a number of excessively optimistic pronouncements, not least in Kladderadatsch. Arthur Johnson’s “Der Lotse besteigt das Schiff” (The pilot boards the ship) proclaimed Hindenburg to be nothing less than the successor to Bismarck (Johnson composing his cartoon as a deliberate sequel to John Tenniel’s “Dropping the Pilot” of 1890).46 Johnson’s imagined connection between Bismarck and Hindenburg was encouraged more broadly by the conservative press as electoral propaganda, and for some time afterwards.47 The supposedly “Bismarckian” character of Hindenburg’s leadership was underscored in every possible way: such as emphasizing that Hindenburg had been present at Bismarck’s proclamation of the German Reich in 1871, and oficially launching the ield marshal’s presidential campaign beneath the Hamburg Bismarck memorial.48 After Hindenburg’s election victory, celebrations usually centered on those various Bismarck memorials, and in many ways Johnson’s cartoon captured perfectly the jubilation felt on the right, as well as a broader national consensus that Hindenburg’s election brought. As Gerwarth has noted, the left quickly forgot its disappointment, and even briely united behind Hindenburg’s idealized leadership with the radical right.49 That Johnson had Deutscher Michel (German Michael)—the emblematic igure of the German nation—welcome the new president aboard the ship of state is a good indicator of the broader mood, and not merely the imagination of a right-wing cartoonist and his editors. The consensus did not survive for very long, and this was relected in the satirical press. In a matter of months, Hindenburg went from authoritarian icon of the right to a democratic igure lauded by the center and the left. The right-wing parties lost considerable faith in the “new Bismarck” when Hindenburg proved to be more respectful of the republican constitution than they had hoped, and readily signed Gustav Stresemann’s Locarno Treaties into law. Willi Steinert’s front-page cartoon for the social-democratic Lachen Links is a gleeful comment on the dashed hopes of the right, chronicling “Trauriges Schicksal eines deutschnationalen Heimschmuckes” (The sad fate of an ornament in a German nationalist home; ig. 3).50 At Hindenburg’s election, the portrait of the president hangs in the place of honor draped in oak leaves. After he takes the oath of ofice—which many on the right regarded as a betrayal—the portrait is clad in black mourning crape, and has moved down the wall slightly. Finally, after the president’s assent to the Locarno Treaties—which the DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, German National People’s Party) had hoped he would reject—the frame lies on the ground, the glass smashed, and the icon of Hindenburg removed. The mild, almost gentle, satirical style of the self-styled democratic satirical paper (demokratisches Witzblatt) is also notable for what it does not assert directly.51 Steinert not only celebrates the right’s apparent disillusionment with their imagined Richard Scully 549 Figure 3. Willi Steinert, “Trauriges Schicksal eines deutschnationalen Heimschmuckes,” Lachen Links, December 4, 1925, 581. Image from the author’s own collection. 550 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 champion, but also Hindenburg’s unexpected transformation into a democratic icon, who “punctiliously fulilled the constitutional requirements of his ofice.”52 One might imagine that the reverse image of Steinert’s cartoon would chronicle the happy fate of an ornament in a social-democratic home. Similar pro-Hindenburg sentiments were expressed by Simplicissimus following the collapse of Hans Luther’s government, which had lost its coalition partners owing to the Locarno Treaties. Simplicissimus had initially seen Hindenburg as “cause for alarm,” although as Otto M. Nelson has noted, by 1927 Hindenburg was perceived as “having achieved a positive identiication—as having built a bridge—between German traditions on the one hand and the Weimar Republic on the other.”53 In this context, and that of Simplicissimus’s general disillusionment with the political parties’ inability to cooperate, Wilhelm Schulz appropriated the usual image of Hindenburg as a giant to portray the president as the unequivocal national leader.54 The colossal president stands tall on the loor of the Reichstag, above the “seething mass of ighting parliamentarians,” explaining directly to the reader that “If one stands above the parties, one is alone.”55 This impression of Hindenburg became something of an established trope for Simplicissimus, as the instability of Weimar democracy—and the growth of extremist politics—led democrats and socialists to regard the president as a pillar of stability, and even to rail against the state of democracy itself. Following the departure of yet another coalition Reichskanzler in March 1928, Erich Schilling imagined Hindenburg as a grim-faced schoolmaster, asked to write an Abgangszeugnis (graduation report) for the outgoing Wilhelm Marx.56 Chancellors came and went, but thankfully the president remained. Such pro-Hindenburg sentiments were extensive on the left and in the center of Weimar politics. The circulation of Simplicissimus had fallen to 35,000 from its Wilhelmine peak of 85,000, but it is generally estimated that its readership remained in the millions, further underpinning the importance of studying the political messages in political cartoons.57 Beyond the satirical press, Hindenburg was so widely adopted as a symbol of German democracy that even the social-democratic Reichsbanner veterans’ association “claimed ownership” of the president and his myth.58 Yet despite the enthusiasm of Steinert and Schulz, Hindenburg was not entirely lost to the right as a symbol and rallying-point either. As Anna von der Goltz has noted, to a considerable extent the Ersatzkaiser was merely wearing “new republican clothes,” and the man himself maintained signiicant antidemocratic beliefs.59 Despite their earlier disillusionment, the editors of Kladderadatsch were keen enough on Hindenburg’s continued leadership that in 1927 they released an album of their best Hindenburg cartoons.60 Its appearance coincided with the president’s eightieth birthday, only weeks before which he had restated all that made him a suitable focal point for both moderate left- and right-wing politics.61 Thus the contents of the Kladderadatsch album relect the Hindenburg myth’s positive aspects for the right, with the titan depicted throughout in uncritically adoring fashion (that Kladderadatsch’s only other Richard Scully 551 such commemorative album was the Bismarck­Album of 1890 further underscores the parallels between the two national icons).62 By 1929, the intervening years of Hindenburg’s compliance with the Weimar constitution, and strict adherence to his personal notions of duty, had thus had a paradoxical effect on his presentation in political caricature. The right continued to admire his iconic status, while the left and center lauded his stabilizing role in the Republic; each side was content to sustain the Hindenburg myth in uncritical fashion. This held as long as Germany remained relatively free from socioeconomic dificulties, but certain of the president’s actions in 1929 shook his hold on both sides of politics. Continued lirting with elements of militant nationalism eroded the loyalty of the left; while support for the Young Plan shattered his support on the right, and occasioned the cartoon in Der Angriff with which I began this analysis. From the left and center, Hindenburg’s imperious refusal to discontinue his membership of the Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet) veterans’ association prompted a new kind of comment from Karl Holtz at the key social-democratic paper Der Wahre Jacob.63 “Der arme alte Mann” (The poor old man) did not attack Hindenburg’s own politics, but rather lampooned him as a naive octogenarian, unable to see the treachery of organizations like the Stahlhelm.64 Treasonous pronouncements from the organization and its founder, Franz Seldte, are pinned to the back of the president’s coat, in a mockery of not only the man himself, but his role as defender of the Republic. Instead of taking action, Hindenburg had decided that Seldte’s word of honor that the Stahlhelm was not attempting to undermine the constitution was suficient.65 Though Holtz was charging him with naivety, it is likely that Hindenburg was using public impressions of his old-fashioned honorable nature to avoid alienating his true political constituency. Thus even Holtz’s openly critical image tended to underscore, not undermine, the public image of the ield marshal-president. Though he maintained his honorary chairmanship of the Stahlhelm, Hindenburg’s status with the right was signiicantly weakened during the political wrangling over the Young Plan. Again—as with Steinert’s imagining the disillusionment over Hindenburg’s support for the Republic—cartoonists of the center and the left celebrated at the imagined consternation of their counterparts on the right. Erich Wilke’s “Das Volksbegehren” (The citizen-initiated referendum; ig. 4) appeared in Jugend at the height of a campaign by press baron Alfred Hugenberg to pass a Freiheitsgesetz (Freedom Law).66 If passed, this would have made the signing of any agreements based on the Versailles treaty illegal, and would have scuppered the new Young Plan for Germany’s reparations. Section 4 of this proposed law would have authorized prosecution for treason for any “Reich Chancellors, Ministers, and Reich plenipotentiaries” involved in the signing of such treaties.67 Wilke therefore sought to highlight the impossible situation in which Hugenberg, Seldte, and the NSDAP leader Hitler would ind themselves should the bill pass: the trial of Hindenburg himself. The three right-wing leaders appear as ridiculous judges, threatening the massive, 552 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 Figure 4. Erich Wilke, “Das Volksbegehren,” Jugend, October 5, 1929, 664. Image from the author’s own collection. unmistakable silhouette of the president, for his alleged strengthening and stabilizing of the Republic. Given Hindenburg’s status as patron of the Stahlhelm and within the immediate political and journalistic circles that Hugenberg claimed to represent, Wilke was correct to celebrate the foolhardiness of the right in pursuing the Freiheitsgesetz. Richard Scully 553 Hugenberg’s DNVP unraveled as a result of the campaign, with a revolt by key DNVP members assisting in the bill’s defeat in the Reichstag, followed by the defection of a full third of the party’s parliamentary membership.68 That Hindenburg himself had expressed displeasure at the anti–Young Plan movement was a decisive element in shattering the main party of the right, and Der Wahre Jacob celebrated Hindenburg’s political reorientation. Reinhard Pfaehler von Othegraven’s “Zwei Daten aus dem Leben Hindenburgs” (Two dates in the life of Hindenburg) depicts the president as an immovable, rocklike citadel of the German nation, against which neither the Russian Cossacks of 1914 nor the Nazi storm troopers of 1929 can make any headway.69 Notwithstanding Othegraven’s image, ultimately it was to be the Nazis who beneited from the debacle, with an increase in media attention and the effective dissolution of their main competitor for right-wing votes.70 Goebbels was conscious of both these factors, and was particularly pleased by a cartoon of himself that appeared in the SPD newspaper Vorwärts, showing him threatening Hindenburg with Section 4 of the Freiheitsgesetz.71 Despite the critical intent of the cartoonist and the paper’s editors, Goebbels was happy to receive the kind of publicity that such a cartoon could generate. Ironically, despite his own willful disregard for the true message of Vorwärts’s example in, Goebbels held the cartoon in high regard as a means to inluence public opinion, and like those nineteenth-century rulers referred to above, Hitler also shared this belief. During the war, when Goebbels was rereading all the volumes of Kladderadatsch, the two conversed on their content, style, and message, with Hitler delivering one of his usual know-it-all summations of the periodical’s political signiicance, perceiving the same kind of decline in the radical tradition that I identiied earlier.72 By 1941, a special cartoons bureau had been set up within Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.73 Just as in the mass, increasingly visual political culture of the Weimar years, so too in the antiintellectual climate of the NSDAP, with its focus on easily digestible ideas, it was “often easier to express Nazi ideas in a political cartoon than with the written word.”74 This was underscored by Goebbels’s long-standing friendship with Hans Schweitzer, or “Mjölnir,” who was not only chief cartoonist for Der Angriff but the chief exponent of that other quintessentially Weimar-era political form: the propaganda poster.75 Schweitzer later rose to be a major igure in the art world of the Third Reich, and has been called by Russel Lemmons Goebbels’s “closest companion during the Weimar years”; something borne out in descriptions from Goebbels’s diaries: “my trusty comrade”; “the best, most intelligent, most uncompromising of all.”76 So important was Schweitzer to the NSDAP’s propaganda machine, and so pure and long-standing were his ideological credentials that he boasted both Goebbels and the Reichsführer­SS Heinrich Himmler as godparents for his children, and his work often reached the attention of Hitler himself.77 Despite Schweitzer’s complicity in Der Angriff ’s attack on Hindenburg, it was at 554 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 the more obvious and appropriate target, Goebbels (as author and editor), that Hindenburg directed his ire, and his libel suit. Hindenburg was a major consumer of his own image as presented in the right-wing press, and Bernard Fulda has argued that his perceptions of the public mood were largely drawn from reading papers like the Neue Preußische (Kreuz­) Zeitung.78 While the president expected a less-than-favorable reception from papers of the left and center, any attempt to lower his standing with his natural constituency was viewed with deep concern. In an atmosphere where the line between politics and journalism was often blurred, Hindenburg’s enemy in Goebbels was also a political igure, not merely a journalist.79 That there was increasingly little difference between the two may have been lost even on the extremely savvy and image-conscious Hindenburg. In keeping with his essentially nineteenth-century view of political caricature, Hindenburg chose to target the publisher, rather than the cartoonist. Schweitzer therefore escaped the immediate threat of prosecution, and although he never again attacked the president personally, key aspects of Schweitzer’s cartoon were later to be important for the development of Nazi art. Artistically, the noble, square-jawed, but downtrodden Germans that march past the Teutonic god Hindenburg reappeared in the famous poster “Unsere letzte Hoffnung: Hitler” (Our last hope: Hitler) which Schweitzer produced in 1932 for Hitler’s presidential election campaign (an indication of how poster art essentially grew out of the earlier cartoon tradition).80 Schweitzer reproduced this image of the ideal German citizenry—with “jutting jaw-lines and muscular bodies”—innumerable times.81 It was this consistency of message and imagery that made him the most important of all National Socialist poster makers and artists.82 Similarly, Schweitzer’s role in creating the deinitive Nazi image of the Jew can be traced back to the throne on which Hindenburg sits.83 Schweitzer’s patron Goebbels was charged immediately following publication of the offending edition of Der Angriff, but the case had to be postponed until May 1930 because as a member of the Reichstag, Goebbels was immune from prosecution.84 As the parliament did not sit following its dissolution, the authorities were free to prosecute Goebbels; but they did not bank on the judge giving the accused fully one and a half hours in which to grandstand. That the state prosecutor had demanded a nine-month prison sentence, but that Judge Schmitz handed down only a desultory ine, only served to underscore Goebbels’s success.85 He departed the court in a Mercedes to shouts of “Heil Hitler!” from a crowd that the police had dificulty in controlling.86 Goebbels did not end his campaign with the “day of celebration” following his ine.87 In one of the more spectacular examples of hypocrisy in his career, Goebbels went so far as to rail against the court system that had brought the suit, and he claimed the case had been an unjust infringement on his right to free speech.88 One can almost visualize the grin on Goebbels’s face as he penned the words—his belief Richard Scully 555 in free speech was practically nonexistent—claiming the case to have been “a moral acquittal,” and that the whole thing had been masterminded by a scheming cadre of Hindenburg’s advisers, rather than the president himself.89 Partly as a way to guard against future prosecutions, Goebbels increasingly began to differentiate in this way between the “Hindenburg of the Young Plan” and the “Hindenburg of Tannenberg.” He was aided in this by direct approaches from Hindenburg himself, who requested that Der Angriff publish a clariication, refuting any intended attack on him personally, and conirmed that the attack had been owing to a disagreement over policy.90 Though Goebbels was required to appear again on August 14, 1930—the state having appealed against the leniency of his sentence—Hindenburg had by that time written personally to Goebbels assuring him that he regarded the matter closed.91 This seems to have been a means of undercutting a retrial that Hindenburg could not prevent, and proved to be even greater publicity for Goebbels, when he produced the letter as evidence, scuppering the prosecution’s case in spectacular style.92 The rapprochement of sorts between Hindenburg and the Nazi propagandist did not hold for long in the febrile atmosphere of Weimar politics; an attack on the “Hindenburg of the Young Plan” came in February 1932.93 However, it is notable that the “Hindenburg of Tannenberg” remained off limits to criticism, and Schweitzer’s Hindenburg cartoon was omitted from subsequent edited collections that Goebbels published containing the best (or worst) of Der Angriff ’s satirical material.94 This was in keeping with a broader strategy of attacking not the president himself, but rather those surrounding, and supposedly manipulating, him.95 As Goltz has noted, the use of imagery like that in “Unehrliches Spiel hinter ehrlicher Maske” (The dishonest game behind the honest mask) (in the Nazis’ own satirical magazine Die Brennessel) trod a narrow path between criticizing Hindenburg, and seeking to maintain his reputation in order to push his admirers into the Nazi camp.96 The mask of Hindenburg is appropriately massive, and thus underscores continued awe at the achievements of the man, but it hides the real enemy: the socialists, Jews, and capitalists who play with Germany’s fortunes and manipulate the president (ig. 5). It is worth noting that Josef Plank—another key Nazi cartoonist—deliberately avoided depicting Hindenburg’s features directly, thus avoiding any possible grounds for prosecution. This was not an unlikely eventuality. In the deepening socioeconomic crisis, which brought increasing criticism from the press, Hindenburg issued the “Presidential Decree Concerning Defense against Political Excesses,” making it possible, in something of a throwback to the nineteenth century, to ban any periodical that defamed public oficials or the government.97 This was enhanced by further laws passed during 1931 that deined precisely what constituted an offense under the decree: “(1) undermining the constitution, (2) attacking the ‘organs’ of the government, (3) insulting a religious group, or (4) having ‘endangered public security or order.’”98 Joseph Goebbels suffered under this new order, as the propaganda value 556 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 Figure 5. Seppla [Josef Plank], “Unehrliches Spiel hinter ehrlicher Maske,” Die Brennessel, March 9, 1932, n.p. Image from the author’s own collection. of libel trials began to be outweighed by the cost in terms of time and money, as well as the very real risk of a prison sentence.99 Such subtle right-wing attacks on Hindenburg were characteristic of his second presidential election campaign in 1932. As is well documented, in one of the more remarkable turnarounds in voting history, Hindenburg went from being the unanimous candidate of the parties on the right in 1925, to the compromise candidate of Richard Scully 557 the center-left in 1932.100 The press was a key means by which this turnaround was effected, with the right-wing papers excoriating Hindenburg as a tool of the Weimar system and its Jewish inluences, and urging their readers to vote for a new candidate: Hitler.101 In response—again failing to match the best traditions of German caricature—cartoonists of the left imbued their titanic Hindenburg with a kind of populist authoritarianism, and the democratic parties urged their supporters to vote for the incumbent.102 Simplicissimus, among others, openly supported Hindenburg against Hitler, depicting the contest as one between “a massive and venerable protector of German civilization against a noisy upstart.”103 Thomas Theodor Heine imagined Goebbels trying to blow up an inlatable Hitler to match the massive stature of Hindenburg, worrying “O nein, o nein, o nein, o nein! Mein Kandidat muß größer sein!” (Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no! My candidate must be larger).104 Because of his loss of face with the right, Hindenburg only won 49.45% of the vote, and was forced to go to a second ballot on April 10, at which he won the required 52.9% for victory.105 The cartoonists of the left having bolstered the Hindenburg myth, following the election, the right too failed to take the opportunity to mount an effective attack, as cartoonists and editors concentrated on attacking the hidden inluences on the president. Even in the rabidly Nazi paper Der Stürmer, it was not the president himself, but the motley collection of bourgeois and leftwing parties that Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”) ridiculed (ig. 6).106 The increasingly radical Kladderadatsch also sought to balance its message, and this was in part due to the attraction of aspects of both the old and new right to its readers. The ambiguity of cartoons such as Arthur Johnson’s offering of September 11—in which Hindenburg appears as nothing more than an iconic portrait on the wall behind the action—or Oskar Garvens’s “Verfrühte Werbung” (Premature courtship) of September 4, illustrate the increasing convergence of the right; the only stumbling block being a nagging sense of Hitler’s radicalism when compared with the stability and solidity of Hindenburg.107 Despite the repeated failure of political cartoonists to properly destabilize Paul von Hindenburg’s myth, there was one twist still to come in the cartoonists’ treatment of the president, though this was to come too late to have any real political impact. From the 1932 presidential elections on, the man whom the center and left had imagined to be the Republic’s protector was swiftly transformed into its executioner. Hindenburg was not impressed by Reichskanzler Heinrich Brüning’s inability to legislate to extend the presidential term, and thus avoid the need for reelection.108 It seems that his faith in the chancellor was further eroded as Brüning had ever-greater recourse to the use of Article 48 of the constitution to govern without the consent of the Reichstag.109 Persuaded by the camarilla of army oficers and aristocrats that had surrounded him over recent years, Hindenburg eventually withdrew his conidence in Brüning, and appointed the unparliamentary Franz von Papen as chancellor (the chief protagonist 558 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 Figure 6. Fips [Philipp Rupprecht], Untitled, Der Stürmer, 10, no. 17a, April 1932, 1. Image from the author’s own collection. of Johnson’s cartoon, above).110 Following the dissolution of the Reichstag and the calling of new elections in July, Simplicissimus’s chief poet Karl Kinndt lamented the apparent mistake of 1932: the left had elected Hindenburg to protect the Republic, but who was to protect the Republic from Hindenburg?111 Thomas Theodor Heine adorned the cover of the same edition with “Brünings Abschied” (Brüning’s departure), showing a smug-looking chancellor bidding adieu to the president, asking Hindenburg to write him a “postcard from the Third Reich.”112 That Hindenburg’s personal concerns had struck the death knell for German democracy seemed all too Richard Scully 559 apparent to Heine, but produced no effective cartoon response, only resignation. Some hope that Hindenburg would continue to resist the pressure from the political demagogues is evident in Erich Schilling’s “Unter hohem Druck” (Under extreme pressure) of September 1932, in which he deliberately imitated Othegraven’s cartoon of 1929, imagining Hindenburg as a massive stone monument.113 Notably, Schilling included the DNVP, the Zentrumspartei, and the SPD alongside the Nazis as representatives of the parties trying to shift the immovable Hindenburg. The impression is therefore that Simplicissimus holds out little hope for party politics of any kind, and that in fact Hindenburg is no longer a tower of republican strength, but actually a force of inertia. By the end of the month, Olaf Gulbransson imagined Hindenburg to be no longer above politics, but maintained the convention of depicting him as a titan: Gulbransson has a massive Hindenburg, together with Hugenberg, Papen, Schleicher, and Hitler, and igures representative of the SPD and the Zentrum, all grasping at a presidential proclamation.114 That Papen failed to gain the popular support Hindenburg expected of him, and that he in turn was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, only underscored the president’s betrayal of democracy. Schleicher was well known to be one of Hindenburg’s inner circle, and the bizarre nepotism of the President’s camarilla was ridiculed by Heine in his Christmas front cover for Simplicissimus. In that cartoon, a fatherly Hindenburg reveals to his daughter Germania “the most beautiful of all Christmas presents”: an arranged marriage to a real living general.115 Though Nelson has asserted that Heine’s Germania appears to be crying (“whether from sadness, joy, or relief is unclear”), it appears rather that Hindenburg is guiding the girl, who has her eyes closed, and that she has yet to see her “present.”116 The implication is that she, like the readership of Simplicissimus, will be rather nonplussed at Hindenburg’s arrangements. Though Garvens’s similarly themed cartoon of September 1932 had shown the paterfamilias Hindenburg rejecting Hitler’s wooing of his daughter, that image did not equate to an outright rejection: Germania weeps at her father’s intransigence, but Hindenburg is still the reliable pillar of tradition. By January 1933 the potential for an arranged marriage between the Nazi leader and the nation seemed much more promising, though there was no sequel to “Verfrühte Werbung.” In fact, Karl Arnold implied that Hitler would not be the last of the chancellors produced by Hindenburg’s “Deutsche Zauber-Werke AG” (German Magic Factory, Inc.).117 The president is depicted as usual as a massive igure, but one who is a faintly ridiculous magician, pulling chancellor after chancellor from his top hat, and seeks to reassure his audience that there is no need to worry, so long as his irm continues to produce chancellors in such volume (implying a connection between the then all-encompassing industrial and economic crisis and the political situation). Despite Arnold’s apathetic form of optimism, Hitler was not just another chancellor 560 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 in a long line of presidential appointments, but the end of the line. His appointment also marked the end of the brief opportunity to challenge Hindenburg’s image in cartoons and the satirical press. The president’s image as the epitome of a conservative interpretation of the German national spirit was secure under Hitler, and cartoonists never again had the opportunity to treat him in less than worshipful fashion. Indeed, he scarcely appeared at all in the satirical press after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship, as papers critical of the right used their inal weeks of freedom to pour scorn on the NSDAP-DNVP coalition, rather than the president. The freedom of the press was speedily abrogated in the wake of the Reichstag ire and the passage of the Enabling Act, and Hindenburg was complicit in this last campaign against democracy. The president signed the decrees presented to him—including that “For the Protection of the German People,” banning papers publishing “incorrect news” like Vorwärts and Der Wahre Jacob—and steadily withdrew from the public stage, leaving the limelight to Hitler.118 The Nazis did not need to exert too much pressure on the opposition periodicals and press. As noted above, Kladderadatsch was easily “coordinated” by the incoming NSDAP regime, and so too were the democratic and left-wing papers like Simplicissimus, which seemed happy to lapse “into a dreary Nazi propaganda sheet.”119 Though they may have suffered bullying by Julius Streicher—publisher of Der Stürmer and Gauleiter of Unterfranken—it was Simplicissimus’s own editorial staff who coordinated themselves “from below.”120 In addition to sacking Thomas Theodor Heine (a half-Jew), the staff demanded radical change in keeping with the Nazi spirit, fearing that they had become dull and ineffective (as indeed they had).121 Their last comment on the public role of Hindenburg was indeed as dull and old-fashioned as the president himself had become. It commemorated the old man’s death in August 1934, and was a weak offering completely removed from the paper’s great tradition of satire: the godlike Hindenburg appears in ghostly form, hovering over the idealized German rural landscape at harvest time.122 As William Coupe has noted, Erich Schilling’s image seems to owe much to the imagery prescribed by Hitler’s memorial speech to Hindenburg: “Like a mystic arch of light, this igure stretches from the confused revolution of 1848 to the national resurgence of 1933. . . . [I]n dying he now wanders above us, amid the immortals of our people . . . as an eternal patron and protector of our people.”123 Similarly, when Arthur Johnson imagined “Die Stimme aus dem Jenseits” (The voice from the other world)—a ghostly Hindenburg placing his political testament in the ballot box—he was reiterating Hitler’s view for the readers of Kladderadatsch.124 The titanic igure of Hindenburg—used alternately to praise and to rebuke the man himself across a decade or more of satirical art, but never effectively challenged—now stabilized in its most sycophantic form. Hindenburg was “carefully incorporated” into the Nazi pantheon, which prevented any critical imagery from becoming publicly available.125 Richard Scully 561 By 1934, therefore, despite the lack of the same censorship that had limited their predecessors’ freedom—but also made them more radical and effective as cartoonists—Weimar-era cartoonists had never managed to destabilize a dangerous political myth. The mythical Hindenburg could by turns be reinforced in unproblematic fashion by his political supporters; or subverted to attack him as a distant, stone-hearted demigod, or an otherwise noble tool of vested interests. But although they sometimes used the titanic image of Hindenburg ironically, often creatively, and in entertaining form, in this instance the true role of the political cartoonist as an essential cog in a liberal-democratic press culture was not realized. University of New England, Australia Notes 1. Deutsche Zeitung, no. 126b, May 31, 1930. 2. Anna von der Goltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 141. 3. V. R. Berghahn, Modern Germany: Society, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 284 (table 42); Bernhard Fulda, Press and Politics in the Weimar Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165. 4. Goltz, Hindenburg, 141. 5. Joseph Goebbels, diary entry June 1, 1930, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth, vol. 2 (Munich: Piper, 1992), 486–87. 6. Mjölnir [Hans Schweitzer], “Und der ‘Retter’ sieht zu—,” Der Angriff, December 29, 1929, 1. 7. William J. Astore and Dennis E. Showalter, Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2005), 91. 8. The best of the recent Hindenburg scholars are also those who employ cartoons as evidence: Goltz, Hindenburg, 94, 140–43, 155; Robert Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 18, 65, 67, 90–91. Also see Wolfram Pyta, Hindenburg: Herrschaft zwischen Hohenzollern und Hitler (Munich: Siedler), 2007; Jesko von Hoegen, Der Held von Tannenberg: Genese und Funktion des Hindenburg­ Mythos (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag), 2007. 9. Richard Scully and Marian Quartly, “Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence,” in Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence, ed. Richard Scully and Marian Quartly (Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2009), 01.1–01.13. 10. Richard Scully, “The Cartoon Emperor: The Impact of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on European Comic Art, 1848–1870,” European Comic Art 4, no. 2 (December 2011): 150. 11 Robert Justin Goldstein, Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth­Century France (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 2ff. 12. W. A. Coupe, German Political Satires from the Reformation to the Second World War, Part I: 1500–1848, Commentary (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1993), xi. On the press as a “catalyst for democratization,” see: Frank Bösch, “Katalysator der Demokratie? Presse und Politik vor 1914,” in Medialisierung und Demokratie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Frank Bösch and Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 25–47. 13. Robin Lenman, “Germany,” in The War for the Public Mind: Political Censorship in Nineteenth­ Century Europe, ed. Robert Justin Goldstein (London: Praeger, 2000), 35–80. 14. John C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900, trans. Sheila de Bellaigue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 557–58, 598–604; Claudia Bruns, “Masculinity, Censorship, and the German Nation: The Eulenburg Scandals and Kaiser 562 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 Wilhelm II in Political Cartoons,” in Pictorial Cultures and Political Iconographies: Approaches, Perspectives, Case Studies from Europe and America, ed. Udo J. Hebel and Christoph Wagner (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 119–41. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–49. “The Reich Constitution of August 11th 1919 (Weimar Constitution) with Modiication (1),” at: http://www.zum.de/psm/weimar/weimar_vve.php#First Chapter: The Individual; Lenman, “Germany,” 35; Gesetz zur Bewahrung der Jugend vor Schund­ und Schmutzschriften, Reichs­ gesetzblatt, 67, Dezember 24, 1926, 505–506, at http://alex.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/alex?aid=dra &datum=1926&page=539&size=45. Leonard Freedman, The Offensive Art: Political Satire and its Censorship around the World from Beerbohm to Borat (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 91. David Blackbourn, “The Politics of Demagogy in Imperial Germany,” in Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History, ed. David Blackbourn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 217–45; David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 9; Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991). An ironic treatment of this co-opting—of Bismarck—appears in Ernst von Salomon, Die Geächteten (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1929), 49. Bernhard Fulda, “Die Politik der ‘Unpolitischen’: Die Boulevard- und Massenpresse in den zwanziger und dreissiger Jahren,” in Medialisierung und Demokratie im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Frank Bösch and Norbert Frei (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2006), 32–56. Goltz, Hindenburg, 27; German postcard: “G. Feldm. V. Hindenburg zum 17. III. 1915.” Piete Kuhr [Jo Mihaly], diary entry September 12, 1914, in There We’ll Meet Again: The First World War Diary of a Young German Girl, trans. Walter Wright (Gloucester: Walter Wright, 1998), 43. Ronald Pawly, The Kaiser’s Warlords: German Commanders of World War I (Oxford: Osprey, 2003), 45. Isabel V. Hull, “Military Culture, Wilhelm II, and the End of the Monarchy in the First World War,” in The Kaiser: New Research on Wilhelm II’s Role in Imperial Germany, ed. Annika Mombauer and Wilhelm Deist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 236–37. Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1976). Michael B. Barrett, “Hindenburg,” in The Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History, ed. Spencer Tucker and Priscilla Mary Roberts, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 550; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918, second ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 176–80. Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria­Hungary, 1914–1918 (London: Arnold, 1997), 428, 445; Pyta, Hindenburg, 351; Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, Volume 2—Emperor and Exile, 1900–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 285, 291–94. Werner Hahmann, “An die Kurzsichtigen,” Kladderadatsch, November 30, 1919, 13. Paul von Hindenburg, Testimony of November 18, 1919, in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 15. Hindenburg, Testimony, 15. Hindenburg, Testimony, 15. Coupe, German Political Satires, part 3: Commentary, 47. With thanks to my HIST324—Ashes to Ashes: Weimar and Nazi Germany, 1918–1945 class for pointing out the resemblance between the igure and Luxemburg; and to Andrew Bonnell Richard Scully 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 563 regarding the large number of similar caricatures of Luxemburg that combined misogyny and antisemitism, often resulting in Medusa- or serpent-like features. Goltz, Hindenburg, 63–65. Goltz, Hindenburg, 73, 75. Goltz, Hindenburg, 80. For an example—that of the Catholic Zentrum Partei—see Karsten Ruppert, Im Dienst am Staat von Weimar: Das Zentrum als regierende Partei in der Weimarer Demokratie, 1923–1930 (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1992). Fulda, Press and Politics, 19. Klaus Schulz, Kladderadatsch: Eine bürgerliches Witzblatt von der Märzrevolution bis zum Nationalsozialismus 1848–1944 (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1975), 92. Ann Taylor Allen, Satire and Society in Wilhelmine Germany: Kladderadatsch and Simplicissimus, 1890–1914 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 202. Fulda, Press and Politics, 53–54, 59. Coupe, German Political Satires, part 1, Commentary, xv. Allen, Satire and Society, 207. On the KPD press, see Klaus Berghahn and Jost Hermand, Unmasking Hitler: Cultural Rep­ resentations of Hitler from the Weimar Republic to the Present (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 62. Mary Fulbrook, Germany, 1918–1990: The Divided Nation (London: Fontana, 1991), 45–46. Arthur Johnson, “Der Lotse besteigt das Schiff,” Kladderadatsch, May 10, 1925, 1; John Tenniel, “Dropping the Pilot,” Punch, March 29, 1890, 50–51; Richard Scully, “Behind the Lines: Cartoons as Historical Sources,” Agora 45, no. 2 (2010): 11–18, esp. 17. Germans continued to recognize the cartoon’s theme well into the 1980s, when the same imagery was used to depict the split in the governing FDP/SPD coalition, which preceded Helmut Schmidt’s eventual loss of the Bundestag’s conidence and dismissal as chancellor. See “Der Lotse Geht von Bord,” Der Spiegel, September 20, 1982, cover image, at: http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image .cfm?image_id=2452. Goltz, Hindenburg, 104. Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth, 87–88. Gerwarth, The Bismarck Myth, 90. Willi Steinert, “Trauriges Schicksal eines deutschnationalen Heimschmuckes,” Lachen Links, December 4, 1925, 581. W. L. Guttsman, Art for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 105–6. Otto M. Nelson, “Simplicissimus and the Rise of National Socialism,” The Historian 40, no. 3 (May 1978): 447. Nelson, “Simplicissimus,” 447. Wilhelm Schulz, “Führer,” Simplicissimus, January 11, 1926, 592. Coupe, German Political Satires, part 3: Commentary, 131. Erich Schilling, “Marx—der Charakter,” Simplicissimus, March 12, 1928, 684. Franz Schoenberner, Confessions of a European Intellectual (New York: Collier, 1965), 288; Nelson, “Simplicissimus,” 442; Richard Christ, ed., Simplicissimus: Eine Auswahl der Jahrgänge 1896–1914 (East Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1978), 10. Goltz, Hindenburg, 126. Goltz, Hindenburg, 126. Wolfgang Hofmann, ed., Hindenburg­Album des Kladderadatsch (Berlin: Kladderadatsch, 1927). Goltz, Hindenburg, 126–27, 136. Wilhelm Scholz, ed., Bismarck­Album des Kladderadatsch (Berlin: Kladderadatsch, 1890). See http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/klabismarck1890. 564 German Studies Review 35 /3 • 2012 63. On the politics of the paper, see: Ann Robertson, Karikatur im Kontext: zur Entwicklung der sozialdemokratischen illustrierten satirischen Zeitschrift ‘Der Wahre Jacob’ zwischen Kaiserreich und Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992). 64. Karl Holtz, “Der arme alte Mann,” Der Wahre Jacob, April 13, 1929, 9. 65. Coupe, German Political Satires, part 3, Commentary 162. 66. Erich Wilke, “Das Volksbegehren,” Jugend, October 5, 1929, 664. 67. Coupe, German Political Satires, Part 3, Commentary, 169; Fulda, Press and Politics, 150. 68. Fulda, Press and Politics, 150–51. 69. Reinhard Pfaehler von Othegraven, “Zwei Daten aus dem Leben Hindenburgs,” Der Wahre Jacob, October 26, 1929, 2. 70. Fulda, Press and Politics, 151–52. 71. Goebbels, diary entry September 22, 1929, in Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, 1924–1945, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth, vol. 1 (Munich: Piper, 1992), 409. 72. Goebbels, diary entry February 6, 1940, in The Goebbels Diaries: 1939–1941, ed. Fred Taylor (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 114. 73. Coupe, German Political Satires, Part 1, Commentary, xxi. 74. Russel Lemmons, Goebbels and ‘Der Angriff ’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 27; Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 159. 75. Petropoulos, Faustian Bargain, 158–62. Also see Bernhard Fulda, “Die vielen Gesichter des Hans Schweitzer: Politische Karikaturen als historische Quelle,” in Visual History: Die Historiker und die Bilder; Ein Studienbuch, ed. Gerhard Paul (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 206–24. 76. Lemmons, Goebbels and ‘Der Angriff,’ 27; Goebbels, diary entries June 15 and October 6, 1928, in Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Teil I, Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, ed. Anne Munding, Volume 1/III (Munich: Saur, 2004), 235, 273. 77. Peter Paret, “God’s Hammer,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 136, no. 2 (June 1992): 228, 235–36. 78 Fulda, Press and Politics, 198. 79. Fulda, Press and Politics, 19. 80. Mjölnir, “Unsere letzte Hoffnung: Hitler,” 1932, at: http://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/archive /poster-our-last-hope/; Fulda, “Die vielen Gesichter des Hans Schweitzer,” 210–15. 81. Fulda, Press and Politics, 36. 82. Gerhard Paul, Aufstand der Bilder: Die NS­Propaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: Dietz, 1990), 161. 83. On Schweitzer’s antisemitism see Petropoulos, Faustian Bargain, 159–60. 84 Thacker, Joseph Goebbels, 111. 85 Martin Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, trans. V. R. Berghahn (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 19. 86. “Libel on President Hindenburg: German Fascist Fined,” The Times, June 2, 1930, 13. 87. Goebbels, diary entry June 2, 1930, in Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, vol. 2/I (Munich: Saur, 2005), 168. 88. Joseph Goebbels, “Freispruch im Hindenburg-Prozess,” Der Angriff, June 5, 1930. 89. Goebbels, “Freispruch.” 90. Goebbels, diary entries July 5 and 6, 1930, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed. Reuth, vol. 2, 496–98. 91. Goltz, Hindenburg, 141–42. 92. Joseph Goebbels, diary entries August 14 and 15, 1930, in Goebbels Tagebücher, ed. Reuth, vol. 2, 507. 93. Joseph Goebbels, “Wir wählen Hindenburg nicht,” Der Angriff, February 23, 1932; Goltz, Hin­ denburg, 154; Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2005), 459. Richard Scully 565 94. Joseph Goebbels, ed., Knorke: Ein neues Buch Isidor fur Zeitgenossen (Munich: Der Angriff, 1931); Mjölnir and Joseph Goebbels, Das Buch Isidor: Ein Zeitbild voll Lachen und Hass (Munich: Der Angriff, 1931). 95. Goltz, Hindenburg, 154–57. 96. Seppla [Josef Plank], “Unehrliches Spiel hinter ehrlicher Maske,” Die Brennessel, March 9, 1932. 97. Lemmons, Goebbels and “Der Angriff,” 123. 98. Lemmons, Goebbels and “Der Angriff,” 123–24. 99. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany, 19. 100. Jürgen Falter, “The Two Hindenburg Elections of 1925 and 1932: A Total Reversal of Voter Coalitions,” Central European History 23 (1990): 225–41. 101. Fulda, Press and Politics, 191. 102. Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans. Richard Deveson (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987), 264. 103. Nelson, “Simplicissmus,” 453–54. 104. Thomas Theodor Heine, “Goebbels und die Reichspräsidentenwahl,” Simplicissimus, March 6, 1932, 1. 105. Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism, 1919–1945: Volume 1—The Rise to Power, 1919–1934; A Documentary Reader (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 97. 106. “Fips [Philipp Rupprecht]”, Untitled, Der Stürmer, 10, no. 17a, April 1932, 1. 107. Arthur Johnson, Untitled, Kladderadatsch, September 11, 1932, 1; Oskar Garvens, “Verfrühte Werbung,” Kladderadatsch, September 4, 1932, 3. 108. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London: Pan, 2001), 124, 139–140; Fulbrook, Germany, 1918–1990, 58–59. 109. Reich Constitution of August 11, 1919 (Weimar Constitution) with Modiications (1), Third Chapter: the Reich President and Reich Government, Article 48, at: http://www.zum.de/psm /weimar/weimar_vve.php. 110. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Penguin, 2001), 366–67. 111. Karl Kinndt, “Drum,” Simplicissimus, June 19, 1932, 134. 112. Thomas Theodor Heine, “Brünings Abschied,” Simplicissimus, June 19, 1932, 133. 113. Erich Schilling, “Unter hohem Druck,” Simplicissimus, September 11, 1932, 277. 114. Olaf Gulbransson, “Bedenklicher Zustand,” Simplicissimus, September 25, 1932, 301. 115. Thomas Theodor Heine, “Germanias Weihnachtsbescherung,” Simplicissimus, December 25, 1932, 457. 116. Nelson, “Simplicissmus,” 455. 117. Karl Arnold, “Deutsche Zauber-Werke AG,” Simplicissimus, February 12, 1933, 544. 118. Fulda, Press and Politics, 221; Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, 142. 119. Nelson, “Simplicissmus,” 460. 120. Coupe, German Political Satires, part 1, Commentary, xxxi. 121. Patrick Merziger, “Humour in Nazi Germany: Resistance and Propaganda? The Popular Desire for an All-Embracing Laughter,” International Review of Social History 52: Supplement S15 (2007), 282. 122. Erich Schilling, “Hindenburg,” Simplicissimus, August 19, 1934, 241. 123. Adolf Hitler, speech of August 6, 1934, in Coupe, German Political Satires, part 3: Commentary, 237. 124. Arthur Johnson, “Die Stimme aus dem Jenseits,” Kladderadatsch, August 26, 1934, 552. 125. Goltz, Hindenburg, 171.