Imagining the World in Bavarian Children’s Books: Place and Other as Engineered by Lothar Meggendorfer

Abstract

Lothar Meggendorfer (1847–1925), the Bavarian illustrator known primarily for creating children’s books with movable images, explored complexities of race and class through humorous pictures and texts in the age of early German nationalism and high European imperialism. He was heavily involved in publishing illustrated comedic and satirical works, although his humor and scope in reaching both youthful and adult audiences have been overlooked by scholars and collectors rightfully impressed with his works’ mobility. Amanda M. Brian examines his movable and non-movable children’s books, as well as magazine illustrations, to parse out his widely circulated caricatures and portraits of central Europeans and non-Europeans, including Ottomans and Africans. In deploying such stock characters as the professional and the dandy, he both enforced and mocked late nineteenth-century entwined hierarchies of race and class for the ready consumption of children and adults. Via humor, he suggested that human foibles often—but not always—trumped human differences.