Tintin - Nazi Sympathizer

The Financial Times takes a look at Herge and the history of Tintin.

From the piece...

The early Tintins, though flawed, were fantastically successful. By 1932 Le Vingtième Siècle was “selling ten times more copies than normal on Tintin day”, wrote Harry Thompson. During the 1930s Tintins steadily improved. The books acquired good plots and plausibility. Hergé was following current events, and saving newspaper cuttings, albeit more as a source of realistic story ideas than out of any political commitment. He did so much research that some Tintin books read like fictionalised documentaries for children. Their precision gives them the quality of vivid dreams, fairy tales set in the 20th century.

Gradually the prewar books turned into commentary on the “low, dishonest decade”. “Hergé had a great political and satirical dimension,” his admirer Andy Warhol noted later. Many of the villains in these prewar stories are fascists. The Blue Lotus (1936) takes the Chinese side in the Sino-Japanese war. The Black Island (1938) features a German villain, Dr Müller. King Ottokar’s Sceptre (1939) reworks the German-Austrian Anschlüss in a Balkan setting, with the scary fascist leader Müsstler whose name derives from Mussolini and Hitler. And after European war broke out Hergé was publishing Land of Black Gold, in which Dr Müller sabotages global petrol supplies, when in May 1940 the real Germans rudely intervened by invading Belgium. The 1930s Tintins are (to use the jargon of the day) lightly anti-fascist. This is surprising given where Hergé was publishing them, and worth remembering given what happened later.

In war, wrote Harry Thompson, Hergé was no Tintin. He didn’t even seem to aspire to heroism. He had spent the first months of conflict in the Belgian army, mostly requisitioning bicycles, and when the Germans came he fled to France. After Belgium surrendered, King Léopold issued his famous summons to his countrymen: “Tomorrow we will return to work.” Hergé did. He needed money. Because Le Vingtième Siècle had closed down he joined Le Soir, or as Belgians were already calling it, Le Soir volé (The Stolen Soir). Many of its journalists had resigned after the Nazi takeover. But Hergé liked Le Soir’s massive circulation of 300,000, and any pro-Nazi paper could do with a dash of Tintin’s popularity.

The war changed Tintin. From 1940 Hergé was going to write stories that couldn’t get him into trouble. Adventures inspired by current affairs were out. During the occupation he barely drew a picture that even hinted at the war.