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Meat commercialisation

In representing meat’s commercialisation, [Fascist] propaganda relied on the old prejudice that ‘Jews were only motivated by money’ (Welch, 2002[1993]: 103), and represented the Jews mostly in two settings, the bovine market and the butcher’s. As with the slaughterhouses, even the bovine market becomes a symbol in order to demonise the Jews metaphorically. This happens in Der Stürmer, in a drawing (1929, issue 39: 1), in which a German farmer is selling his cow to two men, one clearly Jewish and the other non-Jewish but somehow allied with him.

As in other images, here colours serve the purpose of separating the two worlds. Again, the two men are totally dressed in black, while the blond, German farmer is in white. The caption below reads: ‘The Last Cow’, and again underlines the fact that the Jews are getting rich by taking advantage of the German farmers, sometimes with the complicity of German traitors. This point is reinforced by the system of gazes among the four subjects of the drawing.

In fact, on the one hand, the German farmer is selling his last cow and looks at the non-Jewish man in black, begging him for something. The non-Jewish man looks at him firmly, while writing something on his notepad. On the other hand, the Jewish trader is totally uninterested in them and looks at the cow greedily while counting. Therefore, the magazine denounces the lack of collaboration between Germans, which favours the rise of the Jews.

Another figure that the [Fascist] propaganda represented as the quintessential Jew was the Jewish butcher, whom the propaganda saw as the bearer of all the characteristics that marked out the Jews. As has been demonstrated so far, in the propagandistic aims, Jewish meat is obtained from animals slaughtered cruelly. At the butcher’s, it is usually sold to German people by a dirty, stingy, dishonest Jewish butcher, and in the end in many of these representations the butcher becomes the quintessence of the impurity theorised by Bauman.

All the prejudices surrounding the Jewish butcher are present in a Der Stürmer drawing (1935, issue 7: 1). In this drawing, a fat, Jewish couple run their butcher-shop among dead hanging animals, blood-stained aprons and a mouse used to make minced meat. Everything confers a revolting atmosphere. The caption simulates a dialogue in which the two Jews say that they prepare meat for the roast using mouse meat because of its cheapness. This is clearly a case of fabrication, the invention of reality in order to demonise an entire people.

An axe, on the right side of the image, reminds the viewer of the violence of the Jews doing this job. Semiotically, the axe is a very relevant sign. In these images, in fact, it is not only a symbol of violence in general. Actually, for readers who have already viewed the many propagandistic images of kosher slaughter in magazines and books, the axe here is also an index of the ferocity of this rite. Moreover, the axe as a sign is frequently associated with blood, the colour red and the butcher to form the code of violence which is often associated with the Jews.

As in the case of the slaughterhouse, propagandistic children’s books represented the butcher’s in a similar way to that of the other propagandistic publications. In fact, in Trau Keinem … there is a representation of the butcher’s (1936: 20) that has a lot in common with the one described above. In this drawing, in fact, dirtiness is again highlighted more than any other element.

The butcher wears trousers and an apron that are bloodstained, a dead pig hangs in the shop and a cat is devouring its bleeding, inner organs. The butcher, positioned in the centre of the scene, is cutting a piece of meat for his two customers, a woman and her son who are visibly non-Jewish. Moreover, the butcher is smoking, and the smoke of his cigarette wraps around his customers and the shop in general ([the Third Reich] also created a [supposedly] strong anti-smoking law). As in the other analysed representations of the butcher’s, an axe (and here also a knife on the floor) reminds the viewer of the violent nature of the Jew and links this scene to those representing kosher slaughter.

Again, Gambrill’s terms of technique and message help to better understand the construction of this distortion. Technically, the image is split into two parts, the right side being bigger and relating to the butcher and somehow to Jewish elements, and the left side, which refers to the customers, who are visibly German. Blood plays an interesting role in this image too.

The colour red, here, is part of a code that involves many of the elements of the anti-Jewish message of [Fascist] propaganda. Not only are the butcher’s shirt and nose red, but also the abundance of blood represented in the shop, bleeding from the dead animals and from the meat, the sausages and the stains on the butcher’s apron and trousers. What is generally considered a colour that is synonymous with life and energy here becomes a symbol of dirtiness and death.

The blood represented, in fact, is the blood of dead animals, and the entire red portion of the picture links to death, violence and dirt. In its technical separation of the red portion of the picture from ‘the rest of the world’ (as with the black stain in the first image analysed), the picture conveys the ultimate message of [the Third Reich’s] propaganda, the desire to separate the Jews from the rest of society. To adopt Bauman’s terms, here the impurity of the Jewish butcher threatens the purity of the German customers and of ‘the rest of the world’.

What the author overlooks is that in effect, even if somehow not in intention, this harmed Jewish competition. The Third Reich’s propaganda did more than simply encourage antisemitism. It also drove customers away from Jews’ shops and redirected those customers to White goyim’s shops instead. Long-time readers should quickly recognize the hypocrisy in the Fascists accusing Jews of animal abuse, which reinforces my point that the real motives here were economic, not moral.

Further reading: ‘1919–1944: Meat Propaganda’ in From Body Fuel to Universal Poison Cultural History of Meat: 1900–The Present

(Tagged as NSFW for the sensitive subject matter.)