CRAACE research fellow Julia Secklehner has been interviewed about interwar Austrian and Czech caricature by the cultural and political internet daily Britské listy, one of several Knowledge Exchange projects operated by Glasgow University.

As part of Britské listy‘s interview shorts series, Julia introduced aspects of her PhD thesis, completed at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2018, which surveyed the German and Czech satirical press in Prague and Vienna between 1918 and 1938. Addressing the lack of a joint history of the central European popular press after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, the interview introduced dominant notions of caricature’s national histories, which have framed the Czech satirical press as progressive and its Austrian counterpart as conservative-racist. In light of caricatures from the magazines Der Kikeriki, Simplicus, Die Muskete and Humoristické listy, both Austrian and Czech magazines ranged across a broad social and political spectrum, however, the more conservative climate in Austria prohibited the development of an avant-garde of caricature as in the work of Czech artists such as František Bidlo, Antonín Pelc and Adolf Hoffmeister.

The interview was conducted in English. Watch it here (with Czech subtitles):