Louis Raemaekers : “The German Tango” (c. 1916)

The German Tango is a political cartoon by Louis Raemaekers, an outspoken critic of Germany during the First World War. A 1916 collection of his works contains the following commentary by John Buchan:

“A blonde woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided in pigtails like a German backfisch, is whirling in a tango with a skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness. This ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.

“The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from Oreagna’s fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein’s great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have these macabre imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has haunted German art, as it haunted Poe, from Dürer to Boecklin. But the mediaeval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling horror.

“It is the profoundest symbol of the war. In a hot fit of racial pride, Death has been welcomed as an ally. And the dance on which Germany enters is no stately minuet with something of tragic dignity in it. It is a common vulgar shuffle, a thing of ugly gestures and violent motions, the true sport of degenerates. Once begun there is no halting. From East to West and from West to East the dancers move. There is no rest, for Death is a pitiless comrade. From such a partner, lightly and arrogantly summoned, there can be no parting. The traveler seeks a goal, but the dancers move blindly and aimlessly among the points of the compass. Death, when called to the dance, claims eternal possession.”