O vis dėlto juokėmės : gyvenimas pagal DP spaudos karikatūras

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: "dipukai"; DP; Emigrantai (Diaspora); Egzilis; Humoras; Karikatūra; Periodinė spauda; Perkeltųjų asmenų stovykla; Spauda; Vokietija (Germany); Caricature; Cartoon; Diaspora; Displaced persons; Displaced persons camp; Exile; German; Germany; Humor; Humour; Lithuania; Periodical press; Press.

ENPerusing 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 humor-oriented 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 Povilas 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. But from a perspective of visual culture studies it is worth analyzing these pictures as illustrating, and testifying to, phenomena and processes that reveal reality and the history of daily life from a somewhat different angle, as if crying and laughing at the same time.Making allowances for this angle of sight, the question of the meaning of these images and their functioning in exile society became pressing. The cartoon revealed itself as a useful pictorial document fiving witness to displaced persons’ feelings and problems. What spheres of their lives are touched upon in the cartoons? What persons and types are the butts of the exiles’ humor: one’s own people or strangers? What picture do DP men and women present in the humorous images of them? Who are the graphic artists who were able to create funny things? Finally, what were Lithuanians in Germany, the United States, and Soviet-occupied Lithuania able to be funny about (and how?) in a similar period, roughly the early 1950s? These are questions which the article seeks to answer. The humor of the exiles was neither light nor carelessly funny. It disclosed many problems the displaced persons faced. Although the majority of the themes were social (daily life, charity, employment, emigration), the message of the cartoons almost always had a political tinge. They expressed the position not just of one person (the artist) but of a large group of people: the inhabitants of the DP camp, representatives of one nation. Through the art form of a cartoon, the political and social viewpoint of an entire people was revealed, and the most important issues were stated in humorous garb. Thus the cartoons convey part of DP history. [From the publication]