Caricatures and the Occupation of Public Space
“Fips”, the Nazi Cartoonist
Known under the pen name of “Fips”, Philipp Rupprecht (1900–75) was the Nazi regime’s most important propaganda illustrator. He began his career in 1925 as a cartoonist for a Social Democratic newspaper in Franconia. That same year, he had his first cartoon published in Der Stürmer, the weekly Nazi hate sheet. He continued to illustrate the paper’s front page until 1945. His visual style would help shape the Nazi regime’s entire programme of antisemitic visual propaganda, with some of his stylistic elements actually based on historical precedents.
What would be a “Jewish body”?
For a long time, the main way to differentiate Jews from non-Jews in visual imagery was through the clothing depicted. But when Jews became equal citizens, there was a new need to ascribe particular bodily features to Jewishness. In constructing the stereotype of “the Jewish body”, it was always in contrast to the society’s prevailing ideals of physical beauty. By 1872, Wilhelm Busch was already depicting Jews as having flat feet. Nazi propaganda further showed Jews as being short, fat, and hunched over.
Where does the “Jewish nose” come from?
The stereotype of the Jew with a large hooked nose had become widespread by the end of the nineteenth century. This helped provide an easily visible marker for distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. There was also an urge to associate Jews with black people, with imagery that frequently combined a big nose with portruding lips. The hooked nose was based on earlier depictions of Jews with bent noses.
Where does the idea of the “dirty Jew” come from?
By the late nineteenth century, antisemitic propaganda was already associating Jews with bad hygiene. There developed a kind of “resort antisemitism” in which Jews were considered unclean spreaders of disease and thus forbidden from visiting spas and other bathing facilities. Furthermore, this myth of the dirty unkempt Jew with a hairy body and a constant five o’clock shadow was often combined with the stereotype of the lecherous Jew. As a result, his alleged advances were represented as particularly repellent.
The Occupation of Public Space
The Occupation of Public Space
These two figures were taken from a book published by the Stürmer publishing house, entitled “Jews introduce themselves, twenty-four drawings by the Stürmer illustrator Fips, with a foreword by Julius Streicher”, published in Nuremberg in 1934.
The photo concretely exemplifies the antisemitic imagery deployed by the Nazi regime against its chosen enemy. While the left-hand banner defames “Jewish types” in the form of two supposedly typical professionals (here labelled “physician” and “lawyer”), the right-hand banner calls for a change of behaviour in support of the regime’s “Jewish policy”, declaring that “whoever buys from the Jews is a traitor!” The Nazis (including various Nazi Party organizations, and above all the antisemitic tabloid Der Stürmer) used a wide range of media (such as posters, banners, warning signs, and the “Stürmer cases” that publicly displayed pages from the current issue) and campaigns (such as the boycott of Jewish-owned businesses) in order to popularize its anti-Jewish measures and prime the populace for even more.
The Occupation of Public Space
The stamp on the back of this photo (with the name and address of a local branch of the Nazi Party) presumably refers to the group behind not only this antisemitic action on the streets of Dresden, but also its photographic documentation. The editors of Der Stürmer regularly called upon readers to submit antisemitic photos, caricatures, and other “works of art” to its “Stürmer archive”, whose extensive holdings are now kept at the Nuremberg City Archive (name stamped in black).