This is, quite possibly, the craziest thing I’ve come across in an archive before. (And that’s saying something, since my work is essentially about the bonkers things people say about bookmobiles.)
This is from a 1952 picturebook compiled by the U.S. Information Agency about a bookmobile program they ran in Giessen, Germany. The book—held by the National Archives—begins with a photo of a flustered bunch of geese, explaining that they were “first to react to the exciting news,” and only gets weirder from there.
This is my favorite photo of the bunch for sheer oddness. One, there’s a dachshund. Two, there are the suspenders and insanely high-waisted pants. And third, there’s a really really strange caption:
“Amerika is a good place to visit—even as a prisoner of war,” says Wilhelm Frischholz, “but”, he adds, “I wouldn’t want to live there”
There’s a lot of fascinating, troubling stuff going on here around U.S. empire, formal and otherwise. (This is only more explicit in other photos of happy German children reading about Buffalo Bill, or devouring a James Fennimore Cooper novel with a cartoon Indian headdress on the cover.) I’m excited to start writing this chapter, but in the meantime I’ll enjoy a helping of archival nuttiness.
