The origins and the course of WW I are a mystery. Why a prosperious continent risked its intellectual and cultural achievements and its wealth in the lottery of a lethal conflict remains a puzzle - even more so since its outcome triggered WW II. It cannot be the purpose of this study to unravel the mystery, but only to point out the parochial ideologies underlying the war machinery.

Different stereotypes, in which various levels of conceptualization coincide, build the ideological foundation in the images of the ennemy nation. Thus an imperialistic and war-mongering German is physically fat, his behaviour is uncouth and impolite, he is an obedient follower of his Emperor and instead of culture he has a Kultur of hatred. There are multiple causal connections, which are most interesting, but at times difficult to disentangle. The imperialistic and war-mongering Brit on the other hand is clumsy, foolish and a Christian bigot.

These images result from three key processes which are used in cartooning, i.e. condensation, combination and domestication. Condensation is totally unlike language and consists of the compression of a complex phenomenon into a single image that is purported to capture its essence graphically. Combination and condensation are comparable to linguistic metaphors. Combination refers to the blending of elements and ideas from different domains into a new composite idea. Domestication is the process by which abstract ideas and distant, unfamiliar persons or events are converted into something close, familiar and concrete. It translates what is novel and hard to understand into the commonplace by highlighting mutual elements and masking unique ones and by focusing on repetitive patterns to minimize novelty and mental adjustment.

The interplay of these three meanings constituting elements results in the humorous, ironical or sarcastic point and an adequate analysis of a cartoon must account for this fact as a criterion of understanding. In the case of the British and German cartoons the point normally also constitutes an invective against the war ennemy. Of course it could as well be directed against a member of the cartoonist's own nation.

The corpus comprises 352 political cartoons from Punch and Simplicissimus published in the war years 1914-1918. They were analysed in detail in order to give answers to the above problems and more precisely to the following questions:

1. How can the meaning of a cartoon be described, i.e. which conceptualizations are used for humorous, ironical and satirical point(s).
2. How does the drawing interact with the linguistic heading and the captions so as to constitute one "text"?
3. In which way do the scenarios presented in the cartoons differ on a scale from naïve-realistic to counterfactual, i.e. eccentric and far-fetched?
4. What are the national differences in humor, irony and sarcasm?
5. What are the main types of invective hurled at the ennemy and were there any critical voices within the cartoonists' own countries?
6. Which mutual stereotypes were used? Are there any relics of these stereotypes to be found today?