The Many Faces of Performative Politics: Satires of Statesman Bernhard von Bülow in Wilhelmine Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT While historical and contemporary thinkers have described politics as theater, this article moves beyond this representation of politics to understand how performance was central to politics around the turn of the twentieth century. It does so through an analysis of a large volume of hitherto unstudied caricatures of the German statesman Bernhard von Bülow. While historians usually describe satire merely in a complementary or illustrative manner, this article analyzes it in a structural manner. This analysis does not serve to understand Bülow personally nor his politics, but constitutes a case study that demonstrates broader changes in the nature of politics. The article argues that caricaturists used metaphors of different types of performances, which built on tradition and played into new lifestyles, to reflect on how mass communication became constitutive of modern politics. Moreover, this metaphorical stage on which politicians performed represented the platform of the mass press in politics itself.