The German Cartoon and the Revolution of 1848

Abstract

The year 1848 witnessed the first great outburst of German political caricature in modern times. In imitation of more illustrious French and English examples, a host of satirical journals sprang up, most of which sought to spice their collections of anecdotes, topical poems and witticisms with at least one full-page cartoon of political content. The treatment of political topics varied considerably from journal to journal, but generally speaking the tendency is to “play it for the laughs”, and it is not so much to the satirical journal as to the satirical print, which in its frequent anonymity and its lack of editorial restrictions enjoyed a freedom undreamed of by more sophisticated publications, that we must look for really uninhibited political comment. Numerically, these prints far exceeded anything the previous centuries had brought forth and in their numbers and in the opinions they express they provide the historian with valuable insights into the climate of public opinion in the “Year of Revolutions”. Individually, however, referring as they often do to otherwise forgotten events and personalities — who are mostly not named but simply represented — these prints can present the historian with almost insuperable problems of interpretation. Presumably for this reason, they have never, so far as I am aware, been subjected to detailed examination and evaluation. Veit Valentin, one of the few men who would have been fully equal to the task, did promise to give an account of them in the third volume of his Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848/9, but so far as I have been able to ascertain, this promised third volume never appeared, and such information about the cartoons of 1848 as is available is largely restricted to the honourable mentions recorded in general histories of caricature and the two short studies produced by the prolific, but somewhat erratic, Eduard Fuchs, 1848 in der Karikatur (Berlin, n.d. [1898]), and Ein vormärzliches Tanzidyll, Lola Montez in der Karikatur (Munich, n.d. [1904]).

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