By Sarah Rosen, Jewish Week via JTA
NEW YORK — German-Jewish illustrator Eric Godal first rose to prominence for his anti-Nazi cartoons in 1930s Germany. In the decades that followed, he garnered attention for his political cartoons that forcefully opposed Hitler, fascist regimes, anti-Semitism and bigotry.
This cartoon by Eric Godal depicts State Deptartment indifference to reports of the murder of 100,000 Jews in 1943.
More than 50 pieces by Godal, who died in 1969, are now on display at the Society of Illustrators on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The body of work on view is accompanied by descriptions of Godal’s remarkable life story.
“Cartoonists were an important editorial voice,” Rafael Medoff, one of the exhibit’s curators, said.
Medoff, a professor of Jewish history and the founding director of the Washington-based David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, co-curated the exhibit with Charlotte Bonelli, the director of the library and archives at the American Jewish Committee.
Godal was born in Berlin in 1899, and began his career as a daily political cartoonist for a leading German newspaper.
In 1933, after Hitler’s rise to power, the Gestapo came to arrest Godal, whose cartoons criticizing the Nazis had made him one of the first artists they targeted.
Godal caught wind of the arrest and hailed a taxi that took him to Czechoslovakia.
In Prague, Godal worked with many other German Jewish refugees to publish an anti-fascist satirical magazine.
He continued his cartoonist career after coming to New York City in 1935, eventually replacing Theodore Geisel — yes, Dr. Seuss — as the head political cartoonist for P.M., a New York daily. There, Godal published pro-democracy cartoons that advocated for a more tolerant society.
In the 1940s, Godal participated in an anti-racism project organized by the American Jewish Committee, that sought to combat new hate movements that they feared could develop in America during the postwar years.
Medoff spoke to the Jewish Week about Godal’s extraordinary life, and the lessons we can glean from his work today.
What spoke to you about Eric Godal and his cartoons?
He was not merely a cartoonist commenting on events, he was living through many of the events that moved him to put pen to paper. He was drawing cartoons for the American press about the plight of Jewish refugees, while his elderly mother became one of those refugees.
His widowed mother came from Germany in 1939 to join her son in New York, but she booked passage on the St. Louis [the ship filled with mostly Jewish refugees, denied entry by Cuba and the US].
She was sent back to Europe and was murdered when the Nazis overran Belgium. So here we have a man whose very life reflected this enormous tragedy that was overwhelming the Jewish people.
His cartoons advocated for Jews and others. Was that unique?
Godal was part of the political left. He believed fighting anti-Semitism was part of the struggle against all bigotry or racism. The American Jewish Committee’s goal was to fight all racism, not by ignoring anti-Semitism, but by drawing attention to the fact that people who were prejudiced against African Americans and other minority groups also tended to be hostile to Jews.
These cartoons feel even more relevant now than they were a few weeks ago.
Godal drew an interesting series of anti-Soviet cartoons in 1951. They draw attention to various aspects of Soviet Communist society: the very troubling denial of civil rights, poverty and so on. Godal describes features of Soviet society that have eerie echoes to what we read in today’s papers about Putin suppressing the freedom of the press in Russia.
Then we have Godal’s cartoons from 1951 ridiculing the Soviet suppression of the media — some things have not changed. It’s a reminder of how Putin wants to drag Russia back to an earlier, darker, terrible era when the Russian people were brutally oppressed by their governments; when they were constantly fed lies through the ironically named newspaper Pravda, which means “truth.”
Godal put issues that were not talked about widely into his cartoons. He drew the first known American cartoon depiction of the gas chambers in April, 1944. Why is this important?
Details about the mass murders were not widely known. The news that there was a mass murder of the Jews in Europe began reaching the US in late 1942 and some of those reports did include references to the use of poison gas.
Some segments of the press buried the news in their back pages. The Roosevelt administration played down news of the mass killings. So aspects of the mass murder, like the gas chambers, were not widely known until May, 1944, when the Germans began the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz. Godal’s cartoon appeared several weeks before those articles had appeared in The New York Times.
The appearance of a cartoon like this is a reminder how much actually was known at the time. Information about the mass murder was reaching the general press in the US well before the Holocaust ended, when there was still ample time to have interrupted it or have rescued some of those Jews.
Did his cartoons criticize the American government’s role in the war?
Godal came very close to doing so in a striking cartoon from October, 1943. He drew State Dept. officials who have just received a report about the mass murder of 100,000 Jews being massacred daily; they’re filing it away without taking any interest.
As a general rule, American political cartoonists drawing cartoons about the plight of the Jews did not directly challenge the Roosevelt administration’s policies. There was a wartime attitude that it would be unpatriotic to directly criticize the president in the middle of a World War.
Godal takes direct aim at the Roosevelt administration for turning a deaf ear to the cries of the Jews in Europe. It’s an unusual cartoon in its frankness. It really captures something about the broader problem of indifference to persecution. I’m referring not just to the Holocaust, but to many genocides.
What do you hope people take away from Godal’s work?
The fight against racism, the fight against anti-Semitism, the fight against genocide — these struggles continue.
Every generation of Americans faces the same moral dilemma: to what extent should we as Americans take an interest in human rights violations around the world? Eric Godal teaches us that we all have an obligation to speak out when anybody is oppressed.
