Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht's Berlin

Greed/"Fatherland"

“Fatherland!” was a cartoon printed in March 1929 that appeared in Der Stürmer, an infamous anti-semitic magazine founded by Julius Streicher in 1923. Hermann Beck describes the magazine Der Stürmer as fabricated, sensationalist, almost pornographic, and going for shock value (Beck . This particular cartoon has two frames. The top frame depicts a blonde, German family that includes a father with his arms affectionately around a boy and a mother holding a baby alongside suitcase. Their faces appear concerned as they look off into the distance, and there is a large boat with people filing in. The bottom frame has several men with top hats and Peyot, implying Jewishness, standing in front of stores with typically Jewish last names. These men stand in a circle and their smirks give them an appearance of conspiring.

By juxtaposing these two frames, the artist explicitly blames Jews, particularly the purported economic success of Jews, for the the misery of regular German citizens. The cartoon places, whether grounded in reality or not, the success of one group of people as happening at the expense of another. By using this anti-Semitic caricature, it explains the greed of capitalism as part of a broader Jewish conspiracy.

Bibliography:

Beck, Hermann. “Julius Streicher und ‘Der Stürmer’ 1923–1945.” German History 33, no 2 (2015): 322-324.

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