O vis dėlto juokėmės: gyvenimas pagal DP spaudos karikatūras

Abstract

Perusing diaspora newspapers and looking through archival photographs makes it clear that war refugees in Germany, even though their life was hard, sometimes had fun, harbored dreams, and created plans for the future. This jocularity is especially evident in articles, cartoons, and lifestyle photographs found in the Lithuanian refugee press devoted to humor. This article is the first in Lithuanian exile research history to focus on humorous Lithuanian drawings and cartoons created in Germany and the United States. In the period from 1946 to 1948 Lithuanians in Germany published about twenty humororiented titles, among which the magazines Dypukas and Dievo paukštelis stood because of the rather high artistic quality of their drawings and polygraphy. The authors of the cartoons included Petras Osmolskis, Mykolas Paškevičius, Vytautas Kasiulis, and Pulgis Andriušis. The latter was both a visual artist and a writer, the guiding spirit of exile humor. That‘s why the first part of this article’s title corresponds to that of Andriušis’s essay collection from 1946 titled: Let’s have some laughs: feuilletons from DP life. This article analyzes cartoons from a perspective of visual culture studies. In traditional histories of visual art drawing cartoons was held to be a secondary activity not worth much attention because these artifacts allegedly lacked masterfulness and aesthetic qualities.[...]