Lust/Der Sturmer
This cartoon from the Nazi paper Der Sturmer is an example of how Nazi propaganda depicted the relationship between Jews and sex. The left panel features a blonde woman, naked and bound, representing the truth. Behind her is a censored copy of Der Stürmer. The hands binding her with rope are those of the state prosecutor and the police, and the caption below her reads “Down with the truth!” In the right panel, a stereotypical rich, Jewish man stands in front of a poster reading “Leave the Church,” “Free Love,” “Fight against paragraph 175 (criminalization of homosexuality),” and “Kill the fruit in the mother’s body.” The caption reads “Thank you, gentlemen!”
During the Weimar era, Jews were often stereotyped as pimps and so-called “white slave traders,” and were imagined to be exploiting German women through sex trafficking. The image of Truth as a naked blonde woman bound up by the accomplices of a Jewish elite draws on these stereotypes sub-textually, associating the Jewish man depicted with sexual exploitation. The phrase “Kill the fruit in the mother’s body” is a reference to the fight around the legalization of abortion, which peaked in the late Weimar period (see the paragraph 218 object in this exhibition). In discussing abortion, the cartoonist links progressive sexual politics with both sexual exploitation and Judaism.