Antisemitism in Children’s Literature
What do I see?
What do I not see?
The notices read: “Consulting hours. Quiet please. Medical insurance.”
What are they looking at?
How do you think they’re feeling?
How does this picture make you feel?
The viewpoint is quite deliberately guided by the caption.
The caption reads: “Behind the glasses are sparkling two villainous eyes, and a grin is spreading across two bulging lips.”
The Poisonous Mushroom picture book
The Poisonous Mushroom picture book
The author of Der Giftpilz (published in English as The Poisonous Mushroom) was Ernst Hiemer, who started as a schoolteacher. Even before the Nazi takeover of 1933, he already had a side job as a court reporter for the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer. He became its archive manager in 1935, and later its editor-in-chief from 1938 to 1940 and from 1942 to 1945. Due to his work at Der Stürmer, Hiemer was sentenced in 1945 to three and a half years’ imprisonment, and subsequently banned from teaching.
The Poisonous Mushroom picture book
Illustrated by “Fips” (Philipp Rupprecht), this book was intended for the children of Nazi Germany. Its purpose was to expose six- to nine-year-olds to the antisemitic ideology of the Nazi regime. The book was published by the Stürmer publishing house in 1938. In 1940, Hiemer also published Der Pudelmopsdackelpinscher (“The poodle-pug-dachshund-pinscher”), a book aimed at adolescents aged fourteen and up, which used the same ideological elements.
The caption reads: “Just as poisonous mushrooms are often hard to distinguish from good mushrooms, it is often very difficult to recognize the Jews as crooks and criminals...”