Judge, 1918-02-09 · page 15 of 36
Judge — February 9, 1918 — page 15: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This is a wartime propaganda piece from Judge magazine (likely WWI-era, given references to "the Kaiser" and "the Huns"). The satire depicts an imaginary twisted pretzel sculpture—a grotesque, mockingly Germanic form—positioned where Bryant Park's statue currently stands in Manhattan. The joke is darkly humorous: if Germany's "Potsdam Gang" (the Kaiser's government) conquered America, they would replace American monuments with absurd German cultural symbols. The pretzel serves as a crude ethnic caricature, suggesting German culture as coarse and ridiculous. The text explicitly frames this as propaganda designed to motivate American readers to support military action ("make every man-jack of us want to go over and wallop the Huns"). It's part of a series titled "special chamber of photographic horrors," using exaggeration and fear-mongering to support the war effort through ridicule of Germans and the conquest scenario.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
If The Kaiser Conquered America—No. 2 HIS is another of our metamorphosed and kulturized public statues as imposed by the Potsdam Gang, if they should manage to lick and enslave us. Wouldn't it be a charming spectacle to sce this glorified pretzel, done in bronze, leering at one from Bryant Park, at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, New York? If this possibility isn't enough to make every man-jack of us want to go over and wallop the Huns, we don’t know what is. But the wurst is yet to come, as you may sce for yourself, in our special chamber of photographic horrors, next week.