The Kaiser’s Dream [Nazi Reprint]

Repurposing a late 19th-century political cartoon to further the Nazi cause.

This unusual political map of Europe first appeared in the 1890 Christmas issue of the British investigative periodical Truth, edited by Henry Labouchere. It formed part of a larger satirical composition describing a nightmare experienced by Kaiser Wilhelm II, as interpreted by a professor of hypnosis. In the dream, Germany launches a disastrous war against Russia, resulting in the dissolution of Europe’s monarchies and the rise of republicanism across the continent. These imagined political realities are reflected on the map, which depicts Russia as a vast desert and replaces the continent’s monarchies with republican governments. In the upper corner, an iconic Phrygian cap, long associated with liberty and popularized by the French Revolution, radiates over the scene. Nearby, a small vignette shows the former monarchs lining up at the workhouse. Amusing though surprisingly prescient, the image proved popular with Truth’s readership and was later regarded by some as a prediction of the First World War.

This example, however, was circulated under very different circumstances. In the early 1930s, it was republished in Munich by Franz Eher Nachfolger, the official publishing house of the Nazi Party. Stripped of its original satirical context, the map was presented as evidence of a purported British plan to destroy the German Empire and undermine German sovereignty. The accompanying text emphasizes Labouchere’s status as a British parliamentarian and Freemason, drawing upon conspiratorial themes that became central to Nazi propaganda. The republic envisioned as a nightmare in the original 1890 satire had, by the time of this reissue, become a particularly potent political weapon in Nazi representations of the Weimar Republic and its supposed foreign enemies.