[suzygudgeon]

Today we were looking at Low cartoon from 1934 on the supression of the church in Nazi Germany in the new edexcell text books, p53. I'll try to upload it tomorrow (can't find it on the net. It's about Hitler 'contmeplating taking over a yet another high office' - e.g.god. One of my eagle eyed students noticed that mickey mouse was climbing one of the poles holding Hitler up to the heavens - can anyone tell me and a bemused class of yr11s why he is there?

[Ed Waller]

The image is here?

[Dafydd Humphreys]

[Giles Falconer]

I can't give a specific reason for David Low including Mickey Mouse in this cartoon, but Low was a great fan of Walt Disney, calling him the greatest figure in graphic art since Leonardo! (See Colin Seymour-Ure & Jim Schoff "David Low" 1985, page 78). Perhaps the use of the well known Disney character was just another way of poking fun at Hitler?

[j hewson]

It might be that Low thinks that, as Hitler has risen higher up than Mickey Mouse, he is even more of a cartoon character. It's a good image and one which has sparked some discussion amongst my Year 11 classes in the past.

[suzygudgeon]

Thank you all so much, my year 11s will be very impressed that I have an answer for them so quickly! When i said I wasn't sure one response was 'get on your forum miss, someone on there is bound to know'. How right they were!

[johnwayne]

Just a thought but wasn't the usa and disney involved in using propaganda against the nazi regime. It was a way for walt disney himself to show his feelings against the regime in germany.

[JohnDClare]

There is some stuff here from a website - utterly unsubstantiated - on Hitler and Mickey Mouse which, if it is true, I thought was interesting:

Quote

"In 1936, Adolf Hitler declared Mickey Mouse to be an enemy of the state in Nazi Germany."

Sine Hitler is a favourite subject of vandals, I tried to verify this, but as can be imagined google searches for such things return too many spurious results. Can anyone verify this? Tnikkel 06:44, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

On my last trip to Germany about 15 years ago one of the museums in Berlin had an exhibition called something like "In the reich of Mickey Mouse" (In das Reich des Mickey Maus?). The exhibition had posters and other documents giving a chronicle (in German with a bit of English translations here and there) of the rise and fall of Mickey Mouse cartoons in Germany between the two world wars. It noted that Adolf Hitler was enraged at the great popularity of those foreign movies, and was most angry when he was told that members of the Nazi party would sometimes come to assemblies with Mickey Mouse pins on their lapels. This eventually led to a legal ban once he had come to power. It was all part of his campaign against foreign influences. --AlainV 03:47, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Hitler actually enjoyed Disney's shorts. However, when he saw the 1929 Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Barnyard Battle, his opinion quickly changed. The short depicted World War I German soldiers as feline foils for Mickey. This could have been a reason that eventual lead towards the character being banned from Nazi Germany. Actually, I'm not sure if he was completely banned at all. In any case, I added this information to the article. You guys can determine if it's useful or not. - Pietro Shakarian 02:41, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
I have removed the claim that Hitler declared Mickey Mouse an "enemy of the state" in 1936. Documentation for this claim (repeated on many Internet sites, many simply echoing Wikipedia) is lacking. It should be noted that Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on December 22, 1937,

"Ich schenke dem Führer 30 Klassefilme der letzten Jahre und 18 Micky-Maus-Filme. (...) Er freut sich darüber. Ist ganz glücklich über diesen Schatz." ("I am giving the Führer . . . 18 Mickey Mouse films [for Christmas]. He is very excited about it. He is completely happy about this treasure.”)
The exhibition "Als Mickey Mouse Nach Deutschland Kam" (When Mickey Mouse Came to Germany), at the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Museum of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany), which ought to be considered an authoritative source, says,

After Hitler's takeover in 1933, Mickey Mouse initially remained on the German scene; but in 1941, when war was declared on the USA, he was banned in Germany.
The Mickey Mouse cartoon The Barnyard Battle was actually banned in 1930, three years before the Nazi Party came into power; it was permitted in 1931 after the offensive scenes were edited out. — Walloon 04:24, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

However, I would suspect that Lowe was unaware of this??

Surely the simple message is that Hitler is a 'Mickey Mouse' dictator, in the same way that some American newspapers have been mocking Hugo Chavez as a 'Mickey Mouse dictator'?


On a related note, while surfing the web idly, I suspect the blogger who published this unattributed cartoon and noted that Hitler is wearning Mickey Mouse gloves was making the same point:



Hitler and Goebells actively tried to createa German propaganda cartoon industry of Disney quality. (It is particularly worthwhile finding out about Hans Fischerkoesen, a German cartoonist who worked in (and for) the Third Reich, but who produced deeply subversive cartoons). However, since it is hardly likely that Low was aware of this, the inclusion of Mickey Mouse cannot be an allusion to this.

[Dafydd Humphreys]

Was that a reaction to Hitler's antipathy to tobacco?

[Seb Falk]

It's discussed in Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, pp. 130-1. According to Evans:

"The problems that faced foreign films can be illustrated through the unlikely figure of Mickey Mouse, who achieved enormous popularity in Germany in the early 1930s ... So popular was Mickey with the German cinema-going public that Nazi film censors were more or less forced to pass all of Disney's Silly Symphonies for exhibition. Disney's cartoon of The Three Little Pigs had a particular appeal to the censors, since it contained a scene, later excised by Disney, in which the big bad wolf appeared at the door of one of the pigs' houses dressed as a travelling brush salesman, with a cartoon-caricature false nose that the Nazis had no difficulty in interpreting as Jewish. ...

"Yet Disney's cartoons, enormously popular though they were in Germany, soon ran into difficulties all the same. The basic reason was financial ... on 12 November 1934 the German government quadrupled import duties on films ... The government also imposed stringent controls on currency exports, making it virtually impossible for American companies to take any income out of Germany at all. As a result, Universal and Warner Brothers closed their businesses in Germany, while Disney never made a profit from its massive German success. The situation was hardly eased by a change in the regulations on 19 February 1935. From this point, imported films had to be paid for by exchanges with the export of German films; but the Germans no longer made films that foreign distributors wanted to show ... In the autumn of 1937 the Disney contract with UFA ran out, and to make matters worse, Disney's accumulated assets in Germany were written off, partly to cover the bankruptcy of a major distributor ... By 1939 hardly any Disney cartoons were being shown in Germany at all. Adolf Hitler, who was given eighteen Mickey Mouse films by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as a Christmas present in 1937, was a lucky exception to the rule."

I'm not sure what that tells you!