Today, racism is more thought of as a system of oppression against people from other continents who are different from us (whoever “us” is) in skin pigmentation or some shallow physical, psychological and cultural specifics. Institutional racism in Europe of the 20th century mostly targeted other European nations, whose similarity to the supposed masters presented a far greater danger than distant peoples – like the Jews, the Slavs could infiltrate and corrupt your society. Slovenians, as Slavs, were considered inferior by the Fascists and Untermenschen by the Nazis. The Italian and German (and English) words for slaves (sciavi, Sklaven) are relics of the time around 10th century AD, when the Swedish Vikings were capturing Slavs along the banks of Dnieper River and selling them as slaves to the Byzantines and the Arabs. Both Fascists and Nazis would spare the acceptable racial fragments that could be assimilated, while the rest would, in time, share the fate of other peoples, especially the Jews.

Gangster methods, later used by Hitler, and the abuse of anti-Bolshevism to achieve his own dictatorial ambitions were honed by Il Duce, who dreamt of restoring the Roman Empire and in due course carved out territory along the eastern Adriatic coast, home to many Italians, or rather the descendants of the Venetian Republic. In 1929, Mussolini’s Italy and the Vatican signed the Lateran Treaty, thus settling the fate of the Papal State, and prepared the ground for other compromises between the Roman Catholic Church and totalitarian, but God-fearing countries.

The main enemy of the right was the (mostly Slavic) Soviet Union, officially an atheist revolutionary state that strove to export its anti-capitalist ideology across the world. The clash of capital and communism is the theme of Smrekar’s first drawing in the cycle (Dumping), where a ghastly centipede holding sickles and hammers in its innumerable hands is attacking the greedy mogul buried underneath his riches. In the drawing Capital and the Soviets (Fighting over the Proletarian) we see the fight between a representative of cynical communism, with a five-pointed star on his uniform and a hammer-sickle in his hand and a soldier with a modified helmet of the Roman centurion, who has his behind kissed by a man in a hat reminiscent of the papal tiara. The figure of Capital (a fat sinister man wearing the sign of the British pound – the preeminent international currency of its time) has been in Smrekar’s repertoire for decades and the artist blamed most of the world’s woes on Man’s lust for profit.

God of Our Age builds on this thesis; the gigantic pharaoh-robot (a derivation of a Central-European word for a serf) is controlled by some sort of demonic alien and worshiped by the citizens of a futuristic metropolis. Smrekar paid attention to film production (he drew himself as Charlie Chaplin and also depicted Marlene Dietrich) and the drawing is reminiscent of the scenes from the movie Metropolis, which premiered in 1927. The Fascists worshipped speed, technology and weapons – they saw it as a way to regain threatened manhood – and the Angel of Peace presents the god of war, surrounded by tanks and with a gas mask on his face, waiting for the diplomats behind the table to trigger the bomb.

The great game and the perversion of (international) law are addressed by Justice, whose eyes are not covered and who has, despite the Christian imagery surrounding her, taken the side of the powerful and in the name of money crushed the weak. Two men drink from her hefty breasts; one in an eastern fez hat and another in that of a western admiral – a reminder of the realpolitik games in the Mediterranean.

Commentary on the total polarisation of society is evident in the drawing Politics Above All, where the populace is enthralled by two speakers with their right hand extended before them. Both are dressed as the harbingers of freedom: the woman is the Roman Libertas, the man the proponent of manumission in a Phrygian hat. The era between 1919 and 1941 was a time when charismatic leaders used their hypnotic speeches to channel the yearnings of the common people for stability, security, dignity and prosperity and proposed ethnic, moral and parliamentary cleansing as a tool to achieve this. It began with the Italian poet and proto-fascist thinker Gabriele D’Annunzio (1963–1938), who at the end of the First World War and just a few kilometres from Slovenian lands established a short-lived totalitarian-corporatist city state in the port city of Rijeka (Italian Fiume), on the Croatian coast.

Smrekar believed that the problems stemmed from the crisis of values – for decades, he was sensitive to materialism and the neglect of spiritual culture. In the drawing Fortuna, the ancient personification of welfare, spouting money and coins from her horn of plenty, is chased by a horde of parvenus on motorbikes. Biceps and Brains, on the other hand, comments on the baleful transition from the society of the mind, represented by the rickety artists, to the society of brute force, personified by the menacing athletes. In the 1930s democracy finally lost its crucial element – introducing changes through cultural persuasion. The argument-making was taken over by militias, paramilitary organisations, hooligans – presented as “the voice of ordinary working people”. Like the Fascist blackshirts a decade earlier, the Hitlerite brownshirts spread terror in the early thirties and Slovenian newspapers documented the Nazi militia led by Ernst Röhm and their crimes.

In the years that Slovenians experienced horrible pressure from all sides, Smrekar did not pay much attention to the troubles of other marginalised groups and often depicted them as servants of the great colonisers. American aborigines, Africans and the Jews remained at the edges of his drawings, caricatured as grotesquely as the Europeans and reduced to the widespread racist stereotypes that Smrekar uncritically gleaned from Viennese magazines: submissive Indians, primitive blacks and sinister Jews. Just as he showed no restraint with male politicians, he was coarse towards women who were either corpulent madames of the Church and Capital or svelte degenerate prostitutes (The Supreme Goddess, Morals of Fashion). Today, we see such parallels as unacceptable, of course, but the images reveal three intertwined processes: one was the general attitude towards certain topics, the other is the mental reflex that makes denigrated people bring down their bullies by equating them with even “worse” Others and the last is the fact that the victims of chauvinism have their own chauvinistic prejudices.

Smrekar’s sexual purism developed through the years, maybe as a response to his chronic bachelorhood, unorthodox public behaviour, and intensive friendships with male artists. When he was 21, Smrekar illustrated the sexual escapades of his clique and with the signature “Svinko Sifla” alluded to syphilis. We do not know if Smrekar was actually infected, but an untreated disease in its latent phase would definitely explain at least some of his later physical and mental health problems. In any case, allusions to prostitution, abortion, zoophilia (woman holding a lapdog with a long tongue), cuckolding and same-sex relations were present in his cycle as much as criticism of the Catholic Church and the traditionalists. The sexual practices of the ruling elite have been used as a cudgel by the opposition since the times of the Ancient Greeks and the leader of the Hitlerite bandits Röhm and his circle were also outed as homosexuals by the liberal press.

The drawing that most personifies Smrekar’s cynicism and the indictment of the entire system is TheIdealist and the Realist. The former, with angel wings and a thorny rose instead of a tail, is a halfwit distracted by the blooming tree, while the latter, a hybrid between human and animal wearing rags, is chewing on bones on the ground.

Morals of Fashion and Miss Sensation (Hollywood) once again equate modern trends with (female) prostitution. Miss, most readily comparable to Advertising, is accompanied by two fantastic creatures, similar to the ones Smrekar drew two decades earlier in Delirium and inspired by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), a Renaissance painter who also condemned his society and time.

Doctors in a book-filled room (Progress of Medicine) conduct bizarre operations, while the artists (Science and Art) draw dinosaurs and aliens, clearly inspired by contemporary discoveries and hypotheses. Palaeontology grew exponentially since the 19th century, while belief before the First World War that canals on Mars point to civilisation on the red planet, influenced popular culture such as radio plays, novels and comics. The Mystics, the new-age pagan priests, are searching for ways to control the uncontrollable. Some of them look to heaven, others into cards, while their flock bows now to child-king, then to wizard-druid or just to a sack of flour.

Parvenu and Art and Business address Smrekar’s perennial worry: the rich and the influential have no taste, so they support vulgar art. Prior to the First World War Smrekar, dressed the director of the Ljubljana theatre in coquettish woman’s undergarments and put him on a stage in front of an audience of swine, while here we see the nouveau riche picking an erotic artwork. Smrekar, who himself was often accused of lewdness, was friends with Matej Sternen, a Slovenian Impressionist who is mostly known today for his female nudes and who owned a collection of erotic works, which he also drew himself.

Art Nouveau showcases changes in the visual arts, music and architecture; a Dictaphone enabling hyper-production, jazz saxophone, spontaneous painting created by a baby, and changes of counterpoint in classical music. In the middle we see a representative of Bauhaus, who slightly resembles the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik, presenting his models, while on the left and the right we see Picasso-like works.

On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler finally became German chancellor with the help of scheming conservative politicians. On 5 March 1933, about a week after the burning of the Reichstag, which was the work of a lone Dutch communist, Germany held more parliamentary elections and the Nazis won a relative majority. On 11 March, the newspapers were already reporting on “the inauguration of Hitler’s Third Reich”. Other political parties were either broken apart, outlawed or imploded on their own. In the middle of July 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party was the only legal party in the country. Like Mussolini a decade earlier, Hitler was fast, ruthless and completely cynical.

On 1 August 1934, Slovenec, a political daily, published a brief at the bottom of its front page that the “President of the Reich” Hindenburg was ill, but stable. That Hindenburg’s health was gravely deteriorating was known for weeks, but the consequence of events was shocking regardless. A day later it was apparent that Hindenburg was dying and on 3 August the newspapers did not report just the President’s death a day earlier but Hitler’s final complete takeover of Germany. The chancellor became the Führer.

The dramatic events surrounding Hindenburg’s death managed to push from the headlines the failed putsch in Austria, where Hitlerites managed to assassinate the Fascist prime minister Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934) in Vienna, who had rejected unification with Germany. The rivalry between the Führer and Il Duce misled Western politicians, who constantly appeased Italy. The Little Entente – a defence alliance between Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia – could not encourage Yugoslavia for long. The alliance’s institutional framework was agreed in May 1933, but was irreparably damaged in October 1934, when the Yugoslavian dictator Alexander Karađorđević was assassinated in Marseilles by a Bulgarian extremist, probably with the blessing of Italian and Croatian fascists. The West had no intention to escalate the conflict with Italy (or Germany, for that matter) and together in the following years they trampled on the rights of Eastern Europe in the name of peace. Thus, the totalitarians and their eternal companion, the Capital, were given ample time to prepare.