Gluttony/"Glutton, Profiteer, Peasant Woman"
Karl Hubbuch’s cartoon "Glutton, Profiteer, Peasant Woman" depicts the anguish of a marketplace exchange at the height of inflation. The titular trio stand in the forefront of the image and are the largest of all the figures. The profiteer physically kneels on the hungry, sick and praying. In the collage style popular during this time, Hubbuch portrays all of the people in different sizes and did not include a central perspective or location. Even the three main characters seem to be only loosely connected by this sketch. The profiteer stands, smirking and smoking a cigarette, as he holds out the luxury goods to the glutton, but only potatoes to the peasant woman. The glutton, an overweight man, rises tall on top of a house, looking up and straight forward, as if he is trying to ignore the less fortunate around him. It is also uncertain whether or not the profiteer is giving or taking from the glutton. The peasant woman strikes the profiteer in the face with a potato, and his position seems almost off-kilter once the strike is noticed. Other people in the frame unsuccessfully reach up to the peasant woman with paper German Marks. Most of those depicted in the sketch are despairing working-class folks, often with paper marks in their hands.
This painful sketch underscores the mass-scale and far-reaching human effects of the two-faced dealings at the market. The the rich, like the glutton, appeared untouched by the panic and uncertainty of economic crisis. For them, hunger and fear were not inextricably linked, their possessions excluded them from the pain and despair that is portrayed in both Kroner’s essay and Hein’s cartoon. These accounts of the inflation crisis demonstrate that the escalation of hunger leads to fear and uncontrollable desire. The innate necessity for food causes panic when resources are limited. Because this fear was foreign to members of the upper-class, they remained plump and content, and as Hubbuch suggests, blissfully ignorant to the problems of those around them.