Since the mid-nineteenth century, vegetarianism and veganism have attracted public attention and provoked controversial discussions in Europe. The exhibition traces the development of the discourse on vegetarianism in caricatures, satirical drawings and poems that mock the movement, its worldview, social structures, and eating habits. This is from the German version of “Satirical Glimpses of the Cultural History of Vegetarianism.” For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.

“Satirical Glimpses of the Cultural History of Vegetarianism” was created by Evi Zemanek and Sophia Burgenmeister (2019) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This refers only to the text and does not include image rights. Please click on an image to view its individual rights status. Thumbnails of the following images appear on the exhibition landing page:

Since the mid-nineteenth century, vegetarianism and veganism have attracted public attention and provoked controversial discussions in Europe. The exhibition traces the development of the discourse on vegetarianism in caricatures, satirical drawings and poems that mock the movement, its worldview, social structures, and eating habits.

Baltzer, Eduard. 1867. Die natürliche Lebensweise, der Weg zu Gesundheit und sozialem Heil. Nordhausen: self-published by the author.

———. 1868. Vereinsblatt für Freunde der natürlichen Lebensweise (Vegetarianer), no. 1. Nordhausen: self-published by the author.

Barlösius, Eva. 1997. Naturgemäße Lebensführung. Zur Geschichte der Lebensreform um die Jahrhundertwende. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.

Bollmann, Stefan. 2017. Monte Verità. 1900—Der Traum vom alternativen Leben beginnt. Munich: DVA.

In the early phase of the vegetarian movement, satirists playfully imagined how this diet and worldview affected different aspects of culture. Other cartoons make fun of the fact that vegetarianism quickly became a trend that was seen as sign of the Zeitgeist of the 1880s. Surprisingly, they overlooked the fact that vegetarianism was indeed intended as a sociocultural reform that could contribute to social and gender equality.

Since vegetarian societies began to spread and organize events in Germany, their missionary attitude and their supposed moral superiority have been ridiculed. Caricatures mocked the rigid rules of the vegetarians and their societies, accusing them of hypocrisy or of reinterpreting the self-imposed prohibitions according to their own needs and weaknesses.

In the nineteenth century, there was much debate about the question of which way of living could be regarded as “natural.” Caricatures on vegetarianism mock ideas of the “natural” relationship between animal and man, and draft utopian as well as dystopian visions of a vegetarian future.

While English satire magazines mocked vegetarianism since the 1840s, the first German caricatures appeared some 30 years later. Early drawings often imagined that a vegetarian would gradually transform into a plant. Other recurring topics are the assumed correlation between (meatless) nutrition and (peaceful, fragile) physical appearance and character, as well as the debate over whether a meat-rich or a meat-free diet was better for human health.

Caricatures about vegetarians and vegetarianism were not an absolute rarity in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—yet they take time to find in a flood of cartoons on gender relations, certain professions, and political positions. Thanks to the progressive digitization of magazines, it is increasingly possible to search more specifically for caricatures on vegetarianism; however, many papers are still not available online. Therefore, the total number of vegetarian cartoons can hardly be quantified.