JULIUS USSY ENGELHARD

ANARCHIE. 1918.
48 1/4x36 1/2 inches. Oscar Consee, Munich.
Condition B+: vertical and horizontal folds; restoration in margins and image.
A smoking red bomb in one hand and a knife in the other, a fanged, angry, brown ape-figure is treacherously poised against a yellow background. Both this poster ("Distress and Ruin Follow Anarchy") and another variation (with the caption "Bolshevism brings War, Unemployment and Hunger") were directed against the German Spartacus League, a movement aimed at stirring a Communist revolution within Germany on the basis of the discontentment brought on by the starvation and privation that plagued Germany after the First World War. Ironically, the vicious ape-figure was successfully used by the Allies during the war to depict the Germans and then in the post-war revolutionary period was co-opted by the Germans to depict Bolshevists and Anarchists. IWM p. 23, Paret 178 (var).