Abstract
The 24-year-old Vicky at work in his Park Lane studio in November 1937, two years after he arrived in Britain. The portraits on display are of Flora Robson, Jean Harlow and Katharine Hepburn
The great cartoonist Vicky, creator of “Supermac”, began his career lacerating Hitler, a cartoon historian reveals
This year marks both the 80th anniversary of Hitler's coming to power and the centenary of the birth of the political cartoonist and caricaturist Vicky (Victor Weisz). Perhaps best remembered today for his creation of “Supermac”, lampooning the ageing Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (who by coincidence resigned 50 years ago), Vicky also drew powerful anti-Nazi cartoons in his native Germany and later, after his arrival in Britain in 1935, for the News Chronicle and other publications.
Victor Weisz was born in Berlin on April 25, 1913, the third child of Dezso Weisz, a Hungarian Jewish goldsmith and jeweller, and his wife Isabella (née Seitenbach). At the age of 11 he began to study art privately and later attended the Berlin Kunstakademie, but had to leave in August 1928 when his father committed suicide. Then, aged only 15, he began work as a junior in the graphics department of Das 12 Uhr Blatt (a midday paper) but was sent home to change on his first day because he turned up in short trousers.
At first he drew sports caricatures, later contributing theatre and cinema drawings to the arts section run by Hans Tasiemka (later to found the Tasiemka Archive of press-cuttings in London), and was at the first night of Brecht's Dreigroschenoper on August 28, 1928. He signed himself “V Weisz” at this time and drew his first anti-Nazi cartoon the following year.
“Moscow Aftermath” (News Chronicle, December 23, 1941). Goebbels is about to sacrifice the German army as a scapegoat at the altar of Hitler. The German people, depicted as sheep, look on
On January 14, 1933 he published “Cabinet Reshuffle” featuring Otto Meissner (Head of the Office of the President of Germany) as a ballet dancer being fêted with bouquets of flowers by Heinrich Brüning (former Chancellor), Kurt von Schleicher (then Chancellor) and Adolf Hitler. Two weeks later, on January 30, President Hindenburg dismissed Von Schleicher and Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
On February 2, Hitler went to a cinema in Berlin to watch the premiere of Morgenrot (Dawn), a film about a crew trapped in a sunken U-boat in the First World War. At the end of the film, which Hitler greatly enjoyed, the U-boat commander (played by Rudolf Forster) says: “We Germans may not know how to live, but we know how to die fabulously.” Vicky depicted the Führer and his ministers entering the cinema. It was to be his last anti-Nazi cartoon for the paper.
Though Vicky continued to draw political cartoons for 12 Uhr Blatt, such as a comment on the Sino-Japanese War on February 13, the Reichstag Fire on February 27 led to the banning of the free press. As a result the paper was taken over by the Nazis, and Vicky, then aged 20, lost his job. On May 10, 20,000 banned books were burnt in Berlin and soon afterwards 2,500 writers and artists (including George Grosz, whom Vicky greatly admired) left Germany.
After brief periods spent in Budapest and Paris, Vicky followed his brother Oscar to London, arriving on October 9, 1935. Here he shared Oscar's small flat in Gloucester Place and set up a company, Vicky Publications Ltd, in an office at 7 Park Lane. His first UK cartoons (mostly caricatures) were published in February 1936 in the Evening Standard (the paper for which he would later create “Supermac”) and included President Roosevelt, Lloyd George, Anthony Eden and, on Valentine's Day, Adolf Hitler. His first caricature for The Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column, on August 12, 1936, was of another Nazi, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had just been appointed German Ambassador in London. Vicky also contributed to the Daily Mail, Sunday Dispatch, Tatler, Courier, Headway, World Film News and other publications and illustrated books.
By the end of 1937 Vicky was sufficiently well known to hold a solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery near St James's Palace, London. The Sketch ran two pages of caricatures from the show with a comment by the Marquess of Donegall:
“Coming out of Vicky's exhibition in King Street, St James's I ran into Hore-Belisha and Lord Gort, walking to the War Office. So I dragged the Minister and the new Chief of Staff in to have a look at Vicky's exhibited cartoon of Hore-Belisha as one of his own beacons. ‘Very good,’ Hore-Belisha said, ‘is Vicky a man or a woman?’”
On March 14, 1939, the Home Office granted Vicky a work permit to stay in Britain indefinitely and the following month he married Lucie Bolien, a German actress (the first of his four wives), and moved to a small apartment, 136 Grove Hall Court, Hall Road, St John's Wood, near Lord's cricket ground, where he remained throughout the war. How Vicky was able to obtain a work permit so easily is not clear. As an enemy alien he could have been imprisoned on the outbreak of hostilities (as were the cartoonists Walter Goetz, Wooping, Joseph Flatter and Mario Armengol) but as Hungary was neutral at the start of the war his passport seems to have saved him. (On January 31, 1942 a Home Office directive was issued exempting him from internment and from the special restrictions applicable to enemy aliens under the Aliens Order 1920.)
On September 2, 1939 Vicky began a short cartoon series for the Daily Mirror (for which he would later work for four years in the 1950s). Entitled “Nazi Nuggets”, the drawings lampooned true sayings by Nazi leaders and had Vicky billed (even at this early stage in his career) as “Vicky, the famous artist”. A similar idea appeared in his drawing for the weekly Time and Tide on September 9, in which the huge figures of Beethoven, Goethe, Luther and others loom over a tiny Hitler who declares: “I am the greatest German that ever lived.”
Vicky had contributed a popular weekly cartoon strip, Vicky by Vicky (featuring himself), to the Sunday Chronicle from September 1936 to April 1937, and had drawn occasional theatre caricatures for the daily News Chronicle (then edited by Aylmer Vallance) when he first arrived in the UK. By 1939, the Chronicle, a broadsheet Liberal newspaper, had a circulation of about 1.5 million and was the fifth-largest-selling daily in Britain (after the Daily Express, 2.5 million, Daily Herald, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail). The Chronicle did not have a regular staff political cartoonist at the time and instead reprinted drawings from various international publications under the heading: “As They See It Abroad”.
In September 1939 Vicky began submitting political cartoons to the paper, now edited by its former features editor, Gerald Barry. However, due to his bad English and lack of knowledge of the British way of life, it took a while for him to get it right. As Barry later remembered:
“Vicky turned up in my office one day suggesting himself through his agent as cartoonist for the News Chronicle. His English was then almost as funny as the cartoons he brought under his arm … yet with the outstanding talent his drawings revealed it would have been a blunder to turn him away. So we paid him a retainer and started him off on a prolonged, patient process of conditioning.”
This included reading Shakespeare, Dickens, Alice in Wonderland and Punch, as well as visits to the theatre, the House of Commons and even watching cricket. He was a diligent worker and a quick learner. He was also helped out by News Chronicle colleagues such as Richard Winnington, Tom Baistow (foreign editor) and Ralph MacCarthy (features editor), all of whom gave him ideas and, as self-appointed “approvers”, made constructive comments on his cartoons. His first three offerings, published shortly after the outbreak of war, appeared on September 22 and 26 and October 11. All were satirical illustrations of quotations by Hitler. However, though he provided two film drawings and four illustrations for Lionel Hale's Life Goes On column, he did no other political cartoons for the paper that year.
When he wasn't working for the Chronicle Vicky drew joke cartoons for Lilliput, Men Only and other magazines, and produced political cartoons for the weekly Time and Tide. A good example from the latter periodical is “Now Gentlemen, Let's Discuss Peace” (March 16, 1940), in which the heads of the assembled negotiators have been drawn as gun barrels.
“Sabotage in the Netherlands” (Vrij Nederland, October 24, 1940). Nazi ruler of Holland, Artur von Seyss-Inquart, shows his true face in this cartoon drawn for the wartime Dutch expatriate newspaper
“The Smile” (News Chronicle, December 4, 1942). The face of the Mona Lisa, allegedly looted by the Nazis, is transformed into a smiling Stalin after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad
In addition he drew propaganda cartoons such as “Sabotage in the Netherlands” (October 24, 1940), which was published in the Dutch expatriate newspaper Vrij Nederland (Free Holland). It shows Artur von Seyss-Inquart, Nazi ruler of Holland, taking off his smiling mask while holding a proclamation: “Death penalty on grand scale for sabotage”. The caption reads: “Resist my system? Then you will see my real face!”
In May 1941, aged 28, Vicky joined the staff of the News Chronicle as daily political cartoonist at a salary of £20 a week. Despite the fact that the Chronicle, like most British newspapers at the time, had been reduced to six (and later four) pages by the government in order to conserve woodpulp stocks, he quickly established a regular slot on page 2, next to the leader. On August 16 that year he also began a vertical series of four- or five-frame topical jokes for the Saturday edition, entitled Vicky's Weekend Fantasia, which lasted until he left the paper in 1953.
His office was on the corner of Tudor Street and Bouverie Street, running at right angles from London's Fleet Street down towards the Thames and only a short distance from St Paul's Cathedral. During the Blitz, Fleet Street was at the centre of the action. However, the Luftwaffe failed to break the British spirit, as can be seen in Vicky's drawing of May 23, 1941 (“… and when I wanted to lay it out the corpse hit me”) in which Goering, addressing Hitler in the offices of “Undertaker Adolf & Co (Stop Me and Bury One)”, is seen with a black eye given by the supposed corpse of Britannia which has escaped from its coffin.
When Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union also began to go wrong Vicky drew “Moscow Aftermath” (December 23, 1941). In this Goebbels is shown, at the altar to the giant Teutonic god figure of Hitler, about to sacrifice the German army as a scapegoat for the disaster of the battle for Moscow while the German people (depicted as sheep), look on.
A year later he produced “The Smile” (December 4, 1942). Perhaps Vicky's best-known war cartoon, it was drawn after the Germans' defeat at the battle of Stalingrad and shows Hitler falling off his chair in disbelief while gazing at Leonardo's Mona Lisa (which had allegedly been looted by the Nazis from the Louvre) whose face has been transformed into that of Stalin.
On April 25, 1943 Vicky celebrated his 30th birthday by drawing “All My Own Work” (published the following day) attacking Goebbels' complaint that British cartoons featuring the Nazis were insulting. It shows thuggish versions of Goering, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Hitler et al being painted by Goebbels in a very flattering manner, with Hitler sporting a halo, a gagged German worker transformed into a heroic figure and an evil-looking German eagle turned into a dove of peace.
In the summer of 1943 an exhibition of Vicky's work was held at the Modern Art Gallery in Charles II Street, just off St James's Square, with all the proceeds going to the Stalingrad Hospital Fund. While the show was still running Vicky drew “You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Chains” (News Chronicle, July 27, 1943). Addressed to the Italian people after the Allied invasion of Sicily, it shows Italy as a man chained to a stake labelled “Fascism” beneath falling sheets of paper labelled “Honourable Surrender”. This drawing was later translated into Italian and reproduced as an aerial propaganda leaflet (with a proclamation by General Eisenhower on the back) ready to be dropped over the mainland of Italy.
In 1944 Vicky published his first collection of cartoons, Drawn by Vicky: 100 Cartoons from the ‘News Chronicle’, with a foreword by A J Cummings. The cover cartoon shows Field Marshal Model opening the huge fortified door of the Siegfried Line (the last defensive barrier of the Third Reich), in response to a knock from Allied military commanders General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery, backed by the shadows of a mass of Allied tanks. The caption reads: “Military idiots, with junk from the decadent democracies, to see the Fuerhrer [sic].”
“Now Gentlemen, Let's Discuss Peace” (Time and Tide, March 16, 1940)
Another drawing in the book comments on the Gestapo's crackdown after the failed attempt (in July 1944) by a group of senior German officers to assassinate Hitler in a bomb plot at his eastern headquarters (the Wolf's Lair) in Rastenburg, East Prussia. In Vicky's cartoon the Gestapo raid a cellar full of Wehrmacht officers, one of whom declares: “Himmel! We're not
It is always a disappointment to a cartoonist when their subjects retire from public life and they have to begin afresh to create a visual shorthand for new characters. This was especially true for Vicky at the end of the Second World War. In a cartoon from May 3, 1945 he depicts himself as a beggar now that all his wartime personalities have gone. He sits on the pavement with ragged trousers and worn-out shoes and a cap for coins. On either side of him are six of his favourite subjects (each crossed through with black ink): Franco, Goering, Mussolini, Hitler, Ribbentrop and Laval.
At the end of the Second World War Vicky was still only 32 but had already made his mark. Many years later Cassandra (William Connor), the famous columnist of the Daily Mirror, commented on Vicky's war cartoons:
“Had Dr Goebbels only realised the political stiletto so close at hand in Berlin […] he would have given anything for such a glittering propaganda weapon. But Vicky detested the scabrous crew, and his anger and indignation against Nazism and Fascism never left him.” As the News Chronicle's A J Cummings said in Pencil with a Point, his foreword to Drawn by Vicky (1944):
“Politically he is uncompromising. There is a fire in his belly which nothing less than a direct hit from a flying-bomb could quench. That is why his drawings are alive and glowing with heat. He has it in for tyrants wherever they are to be found and in whatever guise. For Vicky, the little giant-killer, there is opening out a career bright with promise of fruitful achievement.”
Vicky would go on to fulfil that promise many times over before his untimely death in 1966.
Footnotes
•
An exhibition of Vicky's original “Supermac” drawings is being planned for October 2013 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Harold Macmillan's resignation as Prime Minister.