Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture

2. Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the “Hun” in Britain, North America, Australia, and Beyond

NICOLETTA F. GULLACE Barbaric Anti-Modernism: Representations of the “Hun” in Britain, North America, Australia, and Beyond T he use of the word Hun as a derogatory term for “German ” can be traced back to a speech given by Kaiser Wilhelm II at Bremerhaven in July 1900. During the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese nationalists murdered the German envoy to Peking and several German missionaries, prompting a punitive imperial expedition to reassert European commercial authority. “No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken,” fulminated the kaiser. “Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago . . . so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.”1 The kaiser’s speech was widely reported in the European press, establishing the trope that would be so deftly used against Germany during World War I. Wilhelm II imagined this imperial moment as a sort of barbarian invasion in reverse, where victory would fall to the European aggressors exacting revenge millennia after the original barbarian invasions shook the West. Despite attempts at damage control by the German government, the Germans would soon become the victims of their own bombastic rhetoric.2 The term Hun—long used to denote those engaged in savage or brutal behavior—emerged as a popular and even casual 62 NICOLETTA F. GULLACE epithet for the Germans during World War I. While the term could be used either facetiously or ominously, it became iconographic shorthand, evoking themes of racial “otherness” and primitive atavism that recast a modern European adversary as something far more menacing. In the Punch cartoon “Injured Innocence” we see the “German Ogre” dressed as primitive man (fig. 10).3 The cartoon offers a vivid rendition of one of the most powerful propaganda motifs used during the Great War—that of an enemy bent on destroying European civilization and repudiating modern humanitarianism. The German Ogre’s foot tramples the treaty securing Belgian neutrality while his bloody hands, primitive weapons, and the dead women and children strewn at his feet illustrate his barbaric indifference to the restraints of civilized warfare. Such values as international law, the sanctity of culture, and respect for “family honor”—all learned values that distinguished modern man from the primitive and the bestial—seemed to be swallowed up in the primal fury of an enemy able to harness modern technology to the objectives of savagery. One pamphleteer described the Germans as “barbarians grosser and more criminal than the Huns or Visigoths, or the hordes led by Yengis Khan [sic] or Tamerlane the Great.”4 The Huns of propaganda were savage, Asiatic, backward, and brutal—a European enemy metaphorically cast from the annals of the West.5 The poster functioned in conjunction with a variety of other media to render World War I as a war against the primitive, where heroic modern man battled to save European civilization from a return to savagery. Despite its imposing visual presence , the atavistic conceptualization of the enemy has enjoyed far less scholarly attention than the murderous implications of modern war. As Sandra Gilbert notes, “World War I was not just the war to end wars; it was also the war of wars, a paradigm of technological combat, which with its trenches and zeppelins , its gases and mines, has become a diabolical summary of the idea of modern warfare—Western science bent to the service of Western imperialism, the murderous face of Galileo revealed at last.”6 While Gilbert shows that this bleak view of World War I had very different implications for women, she never questions the basic thesis that for the men who fought it, the Great War was murderous, ironic, and above all modern .7 Contemporary artists, writers, and jurists, however, represented the war not as an exercise in modern annihilation but as a crusade against a foe who was the antithesis of modernity itself. The image of the Hun in British, American, and Australian war posters reveals the complex juxtaposition of Fig. 10. “Injured Innocence,” Punch, Or the London Charivari , May 31, 1916. The German ogre emerges from a door bearing the militaristic slogan “Weltmacht oder Niedergang” (World power or decline), yet insists he has acted in selfdefense . Note the torn treaty underfoot, blood seeping from the door, and bodies of women and children. “Fee, Fi, Fo...