Skullduggery: Happy Howl-O-Ween from The Wolf

Halloween enthusiasts living in or visiting Miami Beach, Florida are invited to don a costume and join us this coming Sunday, October 22, 2023, for a Howl-O-Ween Day of Dreadful Fun at The Wolfsonian–FIU museum. All afternoon the museum will be offering a variety of spooky experiences for visitors of all ages. Activities include: craft-making, live music, dramatic readings of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, an eerie photo-op, and a display of creepy historical items from our Rare Book and Special Collections Library—all designed to set your spine tingling.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

There is even something for those vampires and ghouls rendered dead to the waking world by late night SoBe socializing. Those of you unable to rouse yourselves before the rays of the sun start setting can wait until early evening to crack your crypts and drag your corpses across the street to the O Cinema South Beach to view the German expressionist film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The 5:30 pm screening of the iconic silent horror film will be introduced by Dr. Francis Luca, Wolfsonian Chief Librarian and FIU Adjunct Professor of History, who will provide some historical context for better appreciating the movie.

Today’s post provides our “early bird” virtual visitors with a glimpse of some of the rare materials that will be on display in the library Sunday afternoon. Our historical Halloween selection will feature some of the more macabre visual materials in the collection, ranging from illustrations of skeletons and skulls to demons and devils. This post will focus on just a couple of illustrated books and window display posters dating from the First World War; the former created by the Dutch cartoonist, Louis Raemaekers (1869–1956) and the latter by American propagandist and Florida land developer, Barron Gift Collier (1873–1939).

Images courtesy of the Library of Congress

Louis Raemaekers was so outraged by the German invasion of neighboring Belgium at the start of the Great War that despite his own nation’s declaration of neutrality, the editorial cartoonist felt impelled to publish scathing satires of the German Kaiser and the atrocities committed by his occupying army. Raemaekers rendered his cartoons with an underlying sensitivity and humanity uncommon for the typical propagandist. While his cartoons and caricatures are uncompromisingly harsh in their attacks on the German Emperor and Military Command, they are more restrained and sympathetic in their treatment of the German people and soldiers drafted into military service. The cartoonist frequently includes skeletal images in his work as an allegorical representation of death and recognition of the war’s costly toll in bodies and souls in the trenches stretching across both sides of “No man’s Land.”

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Many of Raemaekers’ cartoons, including “It’s Fattening Work,” “The Harvest Is Ripe,” and “To Your Health, Civilization,” personified death in the form of a skeleton and had that ghastly figure providing bitter commentary regarding the bloody and costly nature of industrialized war.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

In another couple of cartoons, “A Spring-Song” and “The German Tango,” Raemaekers evokes the imagery of the “Dance Macabre” to represent a German maiden and the German crown as irrepressibly drawn into a dance with death.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Leaving little doubt as to whom Raemaekers blamed for the carnage, in a cartoon titled “The Bill,” a skeleton dressed as a waiter brings the tab directly to the Kaiser’s table.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Raemaekers’s cartoons did not endear him to the German Military Command, and after the latter put a price on his head, the artist fled his native Netherlands to England where he carried on with his campaign. His cartoons proved so popular and influential that he was invited to tour the United States after President Wilson declared war on Germany and entered the fray. Not only were his cartoons widely disseminated in newspapers with millions of subscribers, but many were reproduced as postcards, cigarette collecting cards, and were later reprinted once America entered the fray and at the war’s end in oversized “editions de luxe” and “victory volumes.”

After the U.S. Government resolved to intervene in the war, American propagandists began producing all manner of images designed to whip up hatred for the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Barron Collier contributed a series of window display posters to the cause that paired caricatures of the German Emperor with the Devil to imply that the former was as evil as the latter. The posters use only black, red, and white—colors associated with the German flag—and employ skulls and bones to demonstrate the enemy leader’s supposed bloodlust. Titling one such poster, “Über Alles” (the German slogan for Fatherland “above all others”), the imagery places the demonic Kaiser on a throne made of bones atop a pyramid of human skulls.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

Another, titled “Morning prayers,” has the Devil and his minions bowing down before the evil Kaiser.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

After the war’s end, the American advertising entrepreneur turned his attention towards real estate. His wartime propaganda being largely forgotten, he is most remembered today for becoming the largest private landowner and developer in the state of Florida in the 1920s, for investing millions of dollars to drain swamp lands and build the Tamiami Trail, and for the county in Southwest Florida named in his honor.

The WWI-era cartoons of Raemaekers and Collier are only a few of the illustrated works that will be on display in The Wolfsonian Library, so we dare those of stout heart and constitution to visit us and be treated to a wide range of horrifying imagery to set the mood for Halloween.

The Wolfsonian–FIU, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection

~ by "The Chief" on October 16, 2023.