German Cartoons of the First World War
Pictures worth a thousand words - William Coupe traces, via cartoons, the changes in attitudes and public opinion in the Kaiser's Germany towards the First World War.
Criticism of the German 'establishment' had constituted the stock-in-trade of the satirical journals (Simplicissimus, Kladderadatsch, Lustige Blatter, UIk, etc.) that flourished in Imperial Germany. In innumerable cartoons, fatuous lieutenants and Junkers, effete aristocrats and narrow-minded lawyers, even the emperor himself, were ridiculed and reviled as typifying the arrogance, ineptitude and repressive bullying that – it was alleged – had alienated the mass of right-thinking Germans at home, and abroad had made Germany a pariah amongst the nations of Europe.
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