Art: I Do Not Hate the Germans

“It has been-my one aim since the breaking out of the war to accentuate the brutish character of the Germans. The brute is in them and I have tried to bring it out, but try as hard as I can I cannot depict it strong enough. I cannot make my pictures as brutish as the actual truth.”

The mild-mannered, chin-bearded little man who said those words in 1917 was Cartoonist Louis Raemaekers (rhymes with ma-mockers). A half-German Dutchman, Cartoonist Raemaekers “wrote” (his own word) charcoal drawings which stirred the world to fury against the brut ish Hun. He just didn’t like Germans. When he arrived in Manhattan in 1917 to propagandize and work for Hearstpapers, Raemaekers said quietly: “It would be better — I know it is impossible, but still it would be better— if all the Germans could be wiped off the face of the earth.”

Last week Louis Raemaekers, now grey, bespectacled and tuft-bearded at 71, was once more in Manhattan. He had arrived in June, a refugee via England from Brus sels, where he made his home for 20 years. He liked Germans even less than in World War I. Said he on arriving: “The ideas that the old German aristocrats had were not as bad as those of the rogues now in power.” Last week, when a show of Raemaekers’ drawings, old & new, was opened in Manhattan’s Holland House gallery, he said: “People say I hate the Germans. I do not hate the Germans, I know them. You can trust them just so long as there is nothing they can grab from you; so soon as you have something they want and the opportunity comes for them, then it is all over. When you [the U. S.] wait until the English are beaten, then it is too late for you.”

The years between two wars showed in Raemaekers’ charcoal stick, if not in his words. Where once he drew blood, desolation, barbed wire, ravished women, a demoniacal Kaiser, he now pictured the forces of the world in abstract, often obvious, images. Churchill was a bluff skipper, Stalin a leering Satan, Hitler a skeleton, the U. S. Isolationist something like a village idiot. A devout Roman Catholic, Raemaekers seemed increasingly preoccupied with the lonely, grave figure of Jesus wandering through the world.

Louis Raemaekers lives modestly in Manhattan with a few of his possessions. He had sent to the U. S. some 600 cartoons—he contributed about 350 a year to the Amsterdam Telegraaf — forwarded for safekeeping to Herbert Hoover’s war library at Stanford University. For two months during the summer Raemaekers drew a cartoon a week for the New York Herald Tribune. Now he works for the afternoon tabloid PM. During World War I, Raemaekers made two cartoons a day, saw his work blown up in posters as big as 15 by 20 yards, was so powerful that he could portray his employer, Mr. Hearst, as an evil-looking dispenser of “seedition” (sowing seeds marked “cowardice” and “treason”). An obvious likeness of Hearst, although it did not bear his name, the cartoon appeared in Hearstpapers. Last week Louis Raemaekers hoped to shape U. S. opinion in World War II as he had in World War I.