In 1931, a Nazi journal called the Dictatorship complained about the amazing popularity of Mickey Mouse: 'Have we nothing better to do than decorate our garments with dirty animals because American commerce Jews want profit?' That same year in Berlin, Esther Leslie reports, Walter Benjamin was also thinking about Mickey mania. After talking to some friends, including Kurt Weill, Benjamin made a few notes in praise of this insolent, lowlife, magically animated creature. Mickey's cartoons exhibited a commendable disregard for bourgeois propriety. What's more, their sadism, their violence, their very two-dimensionality served as a diagram for the mechanisms of social oppression: 'The public recognises their own lives in them.'

LRB 24 July 2003 | PDF Download