One
of my favorite comic book characters as a kid wasn't a mutant, didn't
have super-powers and didn't wear spandex. He did have weird
hair, though. He was Tintin, the intrepid boy reporter
created by the Belgian cartoonist George Remi, better known by his
pen name, Hergé. Through much of the 20th Century he was an
international super-star with his adventures translated into over a
dozen languages.
Since
the 1960s, some revisionist critics have called Hergé's hero an
apologist for colonialism and a symbol of racist attitudes.
This is largely based on some of his earlier stories and do not take
into account his development as a writer. But what is not as
well-known is that Hergé was actually arrested and imprisoned as a
Nazi collaborator and that the defeat of the Germans in WWII almost
ended his career.
Tintin
a Nazi? Well, not quite. It's a little more
complicated than that.
Hergé
started out working as a draughtsman and jack-of-all-trades for a
Catholic newspaper in Brussels called Le
XXe Siècle (“The Twentieth Century”).
The newspaper's director, Father Norbert Wallez, decided to
begin publishing a supplement to the paper for young people, titled
Le
Petit Vingtième (“The Little Twentieth”) and
commissioned Hergé to create a comic strip for the new magazine.
Hergé named his hero Tintin, and envisioned him as a young
globe-trotting reporter. As a lad, Hergé had been a boy
scout, and he gave Tintin all the best qualities of a scout.
Le
Petit Vingtième
was meant to be educational as well as entertaining, and since
Father Wallez was strongly conservative in his politics, and he told
Hergé to have his boy hero educate children about the evils of
Communism. The first Tintin story,”Tintin
in the Land of the Soviets”,
was largely based on an exposé of Bolshevism entitled “Moscou
sans Voiles”
(“Moscow
Unveiled”).
For
his second adventure, Hergé wanted to send Tintin to America and do
a story with cowboys and Indians; but Father Wallez insisted on
another "educational" storyline. This time Tintin
went to Africa in order to justify the Belgian colony in the Congo.
“Tintin
in the Congo”
was an embarrassment on several levels. For one thing, the
Belgian colony was exploitative and bloody even by the standards of
other European colonies in Africa. For another, Hergé was
familiar with Africa only as it appeared in popular culture, and so
he relied heavily on stereotypes. (The Japanese cartoonist
Osamu Tezuka had the same problem with his early work “Jungle
Emperor”/”Kimba the White Lion”; he only knew African natives
from racist movies and cartoons).
Plus, Hergé wasn't really that interested in the subject
matter, and his lack of enthusiasm shows.
Some
years later, when the strips were reprinted in color albums, Hergé
re-drew much of the art and tried to modify some of the more
offensive bits. For example, in one scene where Tintin is in
a schoolhouse teaching the native children about "de
votre patrie: la Belgique"
("our fatherland, Belgium"), the later version was altered
so that he was giving a less controversial arithmetic lesson.
Didn't help much. The story fell into disgrace during the
de-colonization period of the '50s and '60s and quietly went out of
print for many years.
Hergé
himself later described the story this way:
'For the
Congo
as with Tintin
in the land of the Soviets,
the fact was that I was fed on the prejudices of the bourgeois
society in which I moved ... It was 1930. I only knew things
about these countries that people were relating at the time:
Africans were great big children ... Thank goodness for them that we
were there! Etc. And I portrayed these Africans
according to these criteria, in the purely paternalistic spirit which
existed then in Belgium."
(--
Interviews
with Hergé
by Numa Sadoul)
To
put Congo
in perspective, Tintin's next adventure took him to America where he
finally got to encounter cowboys and Indians and where he battled Al
Capone. Cowboys, Indians and Gangsters; that pretty much
summed up the view of America in European pop culture of that day.
From there he traveled to Egypt in Cigars
of the Pharaoh
where he trailed drug traffickers to India, which was also marred by
some bad stereotypes, (such as a couple Hindu priests trying to
sacrifice Tintin's dog Snowy to the goddess Kali!)
But
here, Tintin came to an important turning point. Hergé had
announced at the end of Cigars
that Tintin's next adventure would be in China. He received
a letter from a priest named Father Gosset, who was chaplain to the
Chinese students at the University of Louvain. He asked Hergé
to be careful about what he said about China and suggested
that he do some research. Father Gosset introduced him to a
young Chinese art student named Chang Chong-Chen, who became close
friends with Hergé and assisted him with the next adventure,
“The
Blue Lotus”.
This story brought a new level of accuracy to Tintin, as well
as respect and understanding of the people and culture of China.
Hergé even wrote Chang into the story as a boy Tintin befriends who
becomes Tintin's -- and by extension the audience's -- guide to
Chinese life.
Another
thing Chang brought to the story was politics. At the time,
China was being invaded by the Japanese; and the Japanese invasion
and occupation is an important element in the story. An
incident in the The
Blue Lotus
where Japanese soldiers blow up a rail line and use it an an excuse
to invade, blaming the attack on bandits, was based on an actual
incident on the Moukden railway. Chang worked anti-Japanese
slogans into many of the signs and bits of Chinese writing seen in
the pages.
Hergé's
next few adventures involved international intrigue as well.
“The
Broken Ear”,
set in a fictitious South American country, used elements taken from
the Gran Chao War, a conflict between Paraguay and Bolivia over oil
rights. “King
Ottokar's Sceptre”,
set in the Ruritainian country of Syldavia was inspired by the
Anschluss,
where Germany annexed Austria.
So
in the 1930s, Tintin fought both the Japanese and expy-Nazis.
How then did he become associated with fascists?
Because
about then, Germany invaded Belgium. “Le
XXe Siècle”
and “Le
Petit Vingtième” were
shut down, and Hergé and Tintin found themselves without a home.
He found refuge in the newspaper “Le
Soir” (“The Evening”).
Working
under Nazi occupation meant a lot of changes in the way Hergé
worked. Most significantly, it meant and end to the type of
politically-inspired adventures he had been writing. He had
to abandon “Tintin
in the Land of Black Gold”,
with its storyline about Mid-East tensions (and especially its German
villain); he did not return to that one until after the War.
Instead, he turned to more fantastic adventures, looking for things
that would not upset the Germans. Whereas in The
Blue Lotus,
the Japanese were depicted as invaders and enemies, “The
Crab with the Golden Claws”
featured a Japanese detective in a minor role as one of the good
guys.
“The
Shooting Star”
is an almost Jules Vernesian science fiction story about an
expedition to find a fallen meteor. The team of scientists
whom Tintin accompanies on the expedition is an international one,
but tellingly, they all come from countries which are either German
allies, like Italy, or neutral, like Sweden. More
significantly, the rival expedition racing against them to the meteor
flies an American flag and is financed by a sinister banker named
Blumenstein, drawn with stereotypical Jewish features. Hergé
later regretted the anti-semitism in the story and changed the
villain's name to "Bohlwinkle", which he hoped would sound
more harmless. It didn't help much.
While
working on “The
Seven Crystal Balls”,
Hergé had a narrow escape. He found an apparently vacant
house on the edge of town which he decided to use as the model for
villa in which the story takes place. He spent the morning
sketching the exterior. Shortly after he and his assistant
finished and left, two cars full of German soldiers pulled up.
The house had been requisitioned by the SS. 'If they had
surprised us a few moments earlier while we were sketching, we would
certainly have been closely questioned,' he later recalled.
Although
he was never arrested by the Germans, after the War he was not so
lucky. Le
Soir
had been a collaborationist newspaper under German control, and once
the Germans were expelled, the Allied High Command issued an order
banning journalists from working who had collaborated in the
production of a newspaper under the Occupation.
Hergé
was arrested after the war no fewer than four times, each time by a
different service; each time having to face the possibility of a
firing squad. He was fortunate; the Military Commissioner trying
collaborationists refused to prosecute Tintin's papa, saying "But
I would make myself ridiculous!"
Nevertheless,
Hergé found himself unable to publish for two years, still under the
ban and tainted by his association with the Occupation. He
spent this time re-drawing and adapting his older stories for reprint
in England. Then in 1946, publisher Raymond Leblanc provided
the financial backing to start a new magazine, called appropriately
enough,”Tintin”,
to showcase the character. Leblanc had been a Resistance
fighter during the War, and so he also had the street cred to restore
Hergé's reputation.
During
the Post-war period Hergé wrote what are arguably some of the best
of the Tintin adventures, “Destination
Moon”,
“The
Calculus Affair”,
and “Tintin
in Tibet”.
He also oversaw revisions to his earlier stories for
publication in color albums for the international market.
Here he cleaned up some of the more offensive elements of the older
adventures. Still, he couldn't always avoid charges of
racism. One of his post-war tales, “Red
Sea Sharks”,
was inspired by reports he read about modern day slave trade in
Africa. Although his intent was to draw attention to a
serious problem, he was criticized for having his native characters
speaking in pidgin, and once again had to make revisions.
Much
of the perceived racism and colonialism that can be found in Tintin's
adventures, especially the early ones, can be blamed on ignorance
rather than malice.
But was Hergé a collaborationist? Strictly speaking, he was working for a Nazi propaganda outlet. Yet apart from the one evil Jewish banker,
I can't think of any points in Tintin's adventures during the
Occupation where he used Tintin as a mouthpiece for Nazi ideology.
It's
true that Tintin's failure to fight the Nazis, as he had the Japanese
in “Blue Lotus” or the fascist Bourdurians in “King Ottokar's
Sceptre” – his failure to mention the existence of the Nazis at
all – can be taken as tacit support. But I'm not sure what
alternatives Hergé had. Being a cartoonist without a publisher is a
rather precarious position. I suppose he could have shut down his
studio, fired his assistants and found honest work. Instead, he
chose the path of least resistance, and I'm not sure if I could have
done differently in his situation.
For
what it's worth, Hergé's defenders argued that continuing to draw
Tintin's adventures brought more joy to the children of Belgium
during the dark days of the Occupation than it gave support to the
Nazi regime.
In
his final published adventure in 1976, Tintin
and the Picaros,
Tintin had traded his traditional knickerbockers for jeans and had a
"Peace" sign on his motorcycle helmet. Even the
ageless boy reporter managed to change with the times.
