Abstract

Lothar Meggendorfer (1847–1925), an innovator in the field of children’s books, found colonial themes useful to teach and to entertain children about being civilized. Given the representations of colonialism in the visual culture of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Europe, this is not surprising. Yet his books have long been admired for their mechanics, while their content has been both excised and ignored. Nonetheless, Meggendorfer extensively used animals to represent colonial hierarchies, and while his books tell us little about animals or others associated with animals, they reveal the colonial thinking in Wilhelmine Germany in the age of so-called new imperialism.

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