FUCHS, Eduard.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Die Juden in der Karikatur. First edition, first printing, of this compilation of caricatures of Jews, displaying examples across history; from the library of an SS commander.The author Eduard Fuchs (1870-1940) was a collector of caricatures, and published other works including "European Peoples in Caricature" and "Women in Caricature". Curiously he was not himself an anti-Semite: he was a member of the Communist Party and married to a Jew, and had to flee Germany with the coming to power of the Nazis.Fuchs saw caricatures as a way of penetrating to the real essence of those portrayed, and as indicating the mood of society at the time. In reality the book is little more than a compilation of stereotypical features, with the same tropes repeated over the centuries. Its value today is in bringing dispersed historical caricatures together, and as indicating the link between such publications and the growing anti-Semitic movement in Weimar Germany, as evidenced by the SS ownership. "Fuchs's book, intended by him primarily as entertainment, contributed to the distorted stereotype of the Jew" (Cohen, p. 340).The book has the bookplate of Ewald and Margret Zapp to the front free endpaper - Ewald Zapp (born 1897) served in the SS as commander of SS-Reiterabschnitt West (Düsseldorf) from 1933-1936. He gave evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.

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