Evil Empires II: British Images , 48 political drawings, Berlin 1943


The works of Thuringian graphic artist A. Paul Weber were strongly influenced by the visionary imaginations of Alfred Kubin. In his main work, the graphic cycle “British images”, published in 1941, influences from Gustave Doré´s “London Pilgrimage” can be traced, as well as of those of other French illustrators such as Théophile Steinlen, Charles Léandre and Jean Veber, who all drew for the anarchist caricature magazine “Assiette au beurre”. The “British images” were created on the artist’s own initiative, and they reflect the radical anti-capitalist attitude of its author. Weber belonged to an anti-democratic, right-wing Bolshevik resistance circle who accused Hitler’s Nazism of a fatal entanglement with Western financial capitalism. After a one year imprisonment, he arranged himself with the NS regime, which would then publish the “British images” as welcome propaganda material. In the post-war period, Weber worked for the famous German caricature magazine “Simplicissimus,” and became, with his anti-fascist legend, although admittedly enigmatic and gloomy, one of the foremost graphic artists of a West- German financial capitalist reality.