Der Stürmer was something of an unofficial paper for the Nazi party during their rise to power in the thirties. Founded in 1928, they specialized in producing crude caricatures of Jews, Catholics, Africans and leftists, playing a supporting role in demonizing all of these groups throughout the steady collapse of the doomed Weimar Republic. Though not strictly a Nazi organ, many of their subscribers were members of the Sturmabteilung or SA, the original Nazi paramilitary organization which formed the working class muscle of the party. Der Stürmer came to seen by the Nazi leadership as something of an embarrassment for them, at least when they were in front of their wealthier friends. As historian Claudia Koons describes it:
A frequent slur in their literature was an emphasis on how racial minorities were sexual deviants, a threat to women and children. A 1942 headline, for instance, called for a Jewish man accused of having sex with a German woman to be put to death. Children’s books from the era depict cartoons of Jewish men leering sexually at German children, with one famously captioned “he’d best leave German girls alone”. Much of this content was very similar in tone and content to the anti-black imagery of post-Reconstruction America, in which much of the Jim Crow era propaganda depicted black men raping white women.
Another aspect of Der Stürmer output about Jews, which was widely disseminated throughout society by their large readership, was that they were inherently incapable of being anything other than a Jew. In 1934, they printed this cartoon:
It reads: “The curse in their blood – every little Jewish baby grows up to be a Jew.” The shapes of their faces are in keeping with the widespread racial craniometry of the era, not just with hooked noses and sagging jowls but also the calculating sneer that Jews were so commonly stereotyped with at the time. In conjunction with the rest of their output, the message is hardly difficult to decipher.
On January 13 2016, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo caused a stir on the Internet when it published this cartoon:
The drowned child in the top left is Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee who featured on front pages across the world last Spring in the now-famous photo of his corpse washed up on a beach, at three years old. The text in the Hebdo cartoon reads: “what would Aylan have become if he’d grown up? A groper in Germany.”
The move by the far right to smear immigrants as rapists is only about about protecting women from rape by those people, not about protecting women from rape.
The New Years Eve sexual assaults in Cologne have inflamed the already acrimonious debate across Europe and America about refugees. With this and the Paris attacks in November, the far right have been pressing their advantage in demonizing Syrian refugees and other migrants arriving to Europe, painting them as a threat to European women. Several cases have been reported over the past year of Syrian refugees allegedly committing rape throughout Europe, but there is no evidence at all to suggest that crime rates have proportionally increased across the European Union, and German officials have found that migrants do not commit any more crime per capita than German citizens.
The move by the far right to smear immigrants as rapists is only about about protecting women from rape by those people, not about protecting women from rape. The inconsistency lets white European rapists off the hook by its insinuation that Europe does not already have a thriving rape culture – if that were the case, perhaps the approximate fifth of women in Western Europe who are victims of sexual violence would have a different story to tell.
So the imagery in the Charlie Hebdo cartoon reflects with remarkable similarity the ‘sexual other’ fears that have been historically stoked up in white supremacist colonial states. When one compares the imagery, there is nothing about the Hebdo cartoon that is inherently less unpleasant than the Stürmer one depicted above. When taken by itself, the imagery comes across as unmistakably fascistic.
A former Charlie Hebdo journalist wrote in 2013 that an ‘Islamophobic neurosis gradually took hold’ of the publication after 9/11.
Supporters of Charlie Hebdo have pointed out in this case, and in others, that their game is in fact to satirize the racist argument, not to merely regurgitate it. A Vox article came to their defense, arguing that “this sort of two-step satire — portraying a ridiculous idea not to endorse it but rather to mock the people who hold it — is both a long-held theme of Charlie Hebdo‘s work and a common trope within French satire broadly.”
If this is the case, which in all fairness is likely given Hebdo‘s long history of tasteless but nonetheless middle-of-the-road social liberalism, then what separates their cartoon from Der Stürmer‘s is the intention. This does matter: that they’re not out to convince people that all refugees are actually rapists is a very different arrangement of power than fascist caricature, and calling Charlie Hebdo a fascist publication would be a mistake.
The problem here is that one does not become anti-racist simply because they declare themselves to be so.
A former Charlie Hebdo journalist wrote in 2013 that an ‘Islamophobic neurosis gradually took hold’ of the publication after 9/11. This alone might be cause for concern, but even if we put that aside and examine them according to their own claims of anti-racism, they fall short of actually helping.
This is not solidarity.
Black and Arab French citizens and newcomers are practically invisible in the public imaginary, in several ways. Their level of media representation is negligible. Their free speech is crushed when banlieu hip hop artists are censored. Their places of social and religious assembly are placed under disproportionate surveillance. Beauty standards are overwhelmingly white. Using people of color as a canvas for your ‘anti-racist’ satire to make your comfortable white readers chuckle might annoy the fascists a little bit, but it does precisely nothing to help the sordid depiction of France’s non-white citizens and residents. In fact it makes their situation worse, that the only way Charlie chooses to stick up for them is to represent them exclusively with a simulacrum of non-white bodies that was invented by fascists.
This is not solidarity. This is, at best, masturbation.
Both magazines fired off an endless barrage of this imagery to a white populace whose history of pogroms and holocausts is not as dead as they might like to tell themselves
And the stereotypes being played on are picked up uncritically by ordinary people. For all the insistence that their two-layered humor is a quintessentially French way to structure a joke, it’s quite plain that there are plenty of French people who don’t get it. Simply creating the image of an exotic other and placing it in a plainly negative context is enough to confirm people’s real prejudices, and is just as likely to do so than to make them laugh at fascists – always at the expense of the ‘other’. The expectation that the people of Europe are intelligent or nice enough not to read into it the wrong way is willfully ignorant of the nastiness and stupidity that Europeans are regularly capable of. They might not intend to do so, but with output like this Charlie Hebdo are contributing nevertheless to the primordial slime of far right groupthink.
It’s hard to imagine that during the Civil Rights Movement, a supporting media outlet would firstly publish joke cartoons about black men raping white people on the grounds that they’re ironic, and secondly expect praise from the movement for having done so. In much the same way, it’s hard to imagine that in the 1930s it would have been considered helpful to Jews if the racist content of Der Stürmer were published ironically by antifascists. So much of the actual cognition of white supremacy lies in the passive reception of racialized imagery – it is not a rational ‘marketplace of ideas’ but a swirling pool of instinct, reflex, unconscious bigotry, accidental profiling. Challenging it requires an entirely different imagery, that does not feed that ugly collective subconscious.
What Charlie Hebdo and Der Stürmer have in common, despite their difference in intention and intellectual direction, is that they both fired off an endless barrage of this imagery to a white populace whose history of pogroms and holocausts is not as dead as they might like to tell themselves, and whose ability to reason their way out of institutional racism is far from proven. The difference between Charlie Hebdo and Der Stürmer is like the difference between manslaughter and murder: in the end, there is still a body.
