‘The Cartoonist Who Helped Win The First World War’
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[this image shows the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V kneeling before the Holy Family to present their gifts of shells, cannon and a bloody scythe]
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The Adoration of the Magi, 1914, plate
I
RAEMAEKERS,
Louis, The Great War: a Neutral’sIndictment: One Hundred Cartoons, pub. Fine Art Press Ltd., London, 1916.
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Recently, we were
searching for a particular book that we knew was housed in the attic archive
store. This search occurred the week
before Australia’s annual commemoration of ANZAC day on the 25th April and in
the way of all serendipitous finds we also discovered this extraordinary Large
Folio edition (H 56.0 x W 35.0 cm) of World War I propaganda cartoons.  |
Louis Raekmaekers, Netherlands (1869–1956)
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His graphic and sinister images depicted German officers and soldiers as barbarians, Kaiser Wilhelm II was shown as an ally of Satan and Death strides through the landscape reaping all before him. In response to his work, the German government pressured the Dutch authorities to put Raemaekers on trial for ‘endangering Dutch neutrality’. He was subsequently acquitted, whereupon the Germans offered a bounty of 12,000 guilders for Raemaekers, dead or alive. Raemaekers was compelled to move to London for a time to keep both himself and his family safe, here he continued his prolific output, with some 1,000 cartoons produced during wartime. His cartoons were published in The Times and 150 of his works toured the United Kingdom and France in a wildly popular exhibit (up to 5,000 people attended a showing in Liverpool in a single afternoon).
The Great War was produced in London in 1916 in a limited edition of 1000. In his introductory appreciation to this volume H. Perry Robinson describes these cartoons as ‘the voice of an enraged and horror-stricken conscience’. The book contains 100 lithographic plates; each has its own title and accompanying page of explanatory text written by the author E. Garnett who quotes from contemporaneous newspaper descriptions of events or from relevant literature. After the war many of these cartoons were collected together and published in various printed formats.
Almost 100 years after they were first published, these visually shocking anti-war cartoons remain a relevant reminder of the grief, horror, destruction and futility of war.
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