cover image Heckling Hitler: Caricatures of the Third Reich

Heckling Hitler: Caricatures of the Third Reich

Abynek Zeman, Zbynek Zeman, Z. A. B. Zeman. University Press of New England, $40 (128pp) ISBN 978-0-87451-396-7

Oxford history professor Zeman here collects 178 critical political drawings of Hitler and his henchman. He displays the cartoons chronologically and places them in their historical context, presenting evidence of how public opinion was shaped in part by such artists as George Grosz, David Low and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's David Fitzpatrick. Several artists are featured in capsule biographies, including Josef Capek (who spent most of the war in a concentration camp and died in a 1945 forced march) and the photomontagist John Heartfield (who fled to London, where he became a designer for Penguin Books). Oddly, Zeman ignores a key anti-Nazi cartoonist, Arthur Szyk (18941951), who was born in Lodz and whose savage caricatures were highly visible in Collier's, in British and American newspapers and in his 1941 book, The New Order. (April)