Abstract
Lothar Meggendorfer (1847–1925), the Bavarian illustrator known primarily for creating children’s books with movable images, explored complexities of race and class through humorous pictures and texts in the age of early German nationalism and high European imperialism. He was heavily involved in publishing illustrated comedic and satirical works, although his humor and scope in reaching both youthful and adult audiences have been overlooked by scholars and collectors rightfully impressed with his works’ mobility. Amanda M. Brian examines his movable and non-movable children’s books, as well as magazine illustrations, to parse out his widely circulated caricatures and portraits of central Europeans and non-Europeans, including Ottomans and Africans. In deploying such stock characters as the professional and the dandy, he both enforced and mocked late nineteenth-century entwined hierarchies of race and class for the ready consumption of children and adults. Via humor, he suggested that human foibles often—but not always—trumped human differences.
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Notes
- 1.
A similar figure, complete with robes and long pipe, also appears in the accordion-folded Von Früh bis Spät (ca.1888), depicting life in a small town. Identified as the homeowner, the figure poses smugly in a first-floor window to watch the sidewalk activities.
- 2.
All translations into English in this chapter are my own.
- 3.
Nimm mich mit! is the only one of Meggendorfer’s books that is paginated.
- 4.
Princess Rose-Petal also contains illustrations of two exotically dressed and styled “Mandarins,” who greet the princess during her adventure by simply bowing. They are framed by colorful vases and a black lacquered chest of drawers, which complete the foreign setting. The princess’s visit does not move the plot forward, so the movable illustration acts as a colorful diversion. Meggendorfer simply included his stock Chinese caricature in the fairy tale, implementing Orientalist representations also found in German advertisements and discussions about the German port Kiaochow in China, which the German navy administered as a colony from 1898 to 1914 (Ciarlo 2011). There is still an element of danger, if not visual danger, as the men occupy “the Mantel-piece Park (rather dangerous ground).” Once again, Meggendorfer exposed his audience to foreigners with particular representational force.
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Brian, A.M. (2017). Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer. In: O'Sullivan, E., Immel, A. (eds) Imagining Sameness and Difference in Children's Literature. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-46169-8_5
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