Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
There is one illustrated paper published in Munich, Simplicissimus,
which deserves more than negligent and passing comment. It has two
artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their
work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in
their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the
weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen.
Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison
with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian;
and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no
wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social
life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work
in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its
power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of
Hogarth, we should have had something not unlike Simplicissimus, and
any German annoyed at the criticisms of his national life from the pen
of a foreigner, may well turn to his own Simplicissimus, and be humbly
grateful that no foreign pen-point can possibly pierce more deeply,
than this domestic pencil, at work in his own country.
The danger for the critic and the wit, which few avoid, is that with
incomparable advantages over his opponent he will not play fair. In
spite of the awful reputation of our so-called "yellow press," which
is often boisterously impudent, and sometimes inclined to indulge in
comments and revelations of the private affairs of individuals which
can only be dubbed coarse and cowardly, there is seldom a descent to
the indescribably indecent caricatures which one finds every week in
the illustrated papers in Germany. As we have noted elsewhere, just as
the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public
places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so
many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one
with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in
a cultivated and well-regulated household.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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