Published: 10 November 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
GERMAN CARTOONIST MIRIAM WURSTER immediately picked up on the mood after the October 2019 far-right attack on a synagogue in the East German city of Halle.
Her cartoon shows a couple sitting on a couch in their living room, watching TV. Since a bloodbath was prevented in the crowded place of worship thanks to a massive wooden door, the woman says: "It took a special door to stop the murderer of Halle!" The man, beer bottle in hand, says: "They have money for things like that!"
With black humour, Miriam Wurster's cartoon refers to the anti-Semitic stereotype linking Jews to wealth.
Wurster's cartoon is just one of about 60 caricatures in a new book titled #Antisemitismus für Anfänger (#Anti-Semitism for Beginners).
Top illustrators from the legendary New Yorker magazine and from France, Germany and the Netherlands contributed to the unusual comic book that also features 17 satirical texts.
In one of them, the journalist Alan Posener, born in London in 1949 the son of a British mother and a German Jewish father, describes the moment before he started school, when his mother tried to explain to him that his father was a German Jew.
"My mother is moody, and this will fade, too," he remembers thinking. "I decided to simply ignore the matter. German Jew! Ridiculous."
FULL STORY Cartoonists take a stance against anti-Semitism (Deutsche Welle)
Cartoon: "What percentage of anti-Semitism is currently okay, do you think?" asks this reporter in Dirk Meissner's cartoon (Dirk Meissner/Ariella Verlag)
