Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writersRaemaekers, Louis
History
Kultur in Cartoons: With accompanying notes by well-known English writers
Raemaekers, Louis
World War, 1914-1918 -- Caricatures and cartoons
What is the view of all informed people to-day? “To Raemaekers the war
is not a topic, or a subject for charity. It is a vivid heartrending
reality,” says the New York “Evening Post,” “and you come away from the
rooms where his cartoons now hang so aware of what war is that mental
neutrality is for you a horror. If you have slackened in your
determination to find out, these cartoons are a slap in the face.
Raemaekers drives home a universal point that concerns not merely
Germans, but every country where royal decrees have supreme power. Shall
one man ever be given the power to seek his ends, using the people as
his pawns? We cannot look at the cartoons and remain in ignorance of
exactly what is the basis of truth on which they are built.”
The “Philadelphia American” likens Raemaekers to a sensitized plate upon
which the spirit which brought on the war has imprinted itself forever,
and adds: “What he gives out on that subject is as pitilessly true as a
photograph. They look down upon us in their naked truth, those pictures
which are to be, before the judgment-seat of history, the last
indictment of the German nation. Of all impressions, there is one which
will hold you in its inexorable grip: it is that Louis Raemaekers has
told you the truth.”
This aspect of his appeal is insisted upon by “Vanity Fair,” thus: “That
each cartoon is a grim, merciless portrayal of the truth will be
apparent to even the meanest intelligence.” The same journal refers to
the almost uncanny power of prophecy suggested by many of the pictures.
“That they are conceived in a mighty brain and drawn by a skilled hand
will be recognized by a sophisticated minority. But only those capable
of deeper probing will see that each one is in itself an elemental drama
of compelling significance and power, heightened in many cases by
prophecy and suggestion.”
The “Philadelphia Public Ledger” refers particularly to Raemaekers’
prophetic instinct. “Here, indeed, is revealed the work not only of one
who has the artistic imagination to pictorialize the savagery of the
Kaiser and his obedient servants, and to caricature in a manner that
leaves nothing unsaid in the way of sinister presentation of evil
things, but the work of one who is distinctly a seer. Moreover, the
cartoons have been verified by subsequent events, though they seemed to
some at the time to be the bitter and ironical casual comment on things
most believed could never happen to modern civilization, and have that
insight that only a special inspiration and inner illumination could
give.”
It is this obvious sincerity, this conviction on the part of the
beholder that Raemaekers is telling the simple truth and telling it
simply that gives his work its greatest value as a revelation of the
German purpose, and as an indictment of German methods of warfare and
the German practice of statecraft.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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