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LIPS, Julius E. - The Savage Hits Back or the White Man Through Native Eyes.

Title: The Savage Hits Back or the White Man Through Native Eyes.
Description: Yale University Press 1937. Small quarto publisher's cloth with paper title label, dustwrapper (a touch chipped at the tips) ; xxxi,254pp, 213 photo illustrations and line drawings. Endpapers a bit browned, a rather good copy. ¶ The dustwrapper of the English edition is more arresting but the dustwrapper of this is more political. First American edition, using the English sheets, published more or less concurrently - and uncommon in such good shape - of this remarkable book with a history that, if half of what Lips tells us is true, makes it even more remarkable. In March 1933 Lips resigned his directorship of the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in protest against the edicts of the new Nazi regime and found he "was the only 'Aryan' ethnologist to do so." What followed over the next year is the stuff of every nightmarish thriller about that period; threat, persecution and false accusation by a former student and a former assistant - now in control of the museum - the mayor of Cologne and the secret police in pursuit of his manuscript and photographs. "An uproar was produced by the simple fact that a Cologne professor had lying in his house a manuscript the theme of which was the criticism of the white race by their coloured brethren. In addition there were among the illustrations portraits of high German military and Government officials which were the work of blacks, one of the 'lower races'. The mere possession of the pictures was a crime against the State, how much more criminal the attempt to publish them!" The "idea of the illustrations had become a semi official mania; although only the students had seen them, it was now the State, i.e. the Nazi party, that wanted them." The mayor "had cultivated a feverish curiosity about the vanished pictures, which were supposed to be lurid with "nigger atrocities" and "insults to Hitler"." Finally a moonlight flit with his pictures and manuscript on the eve of his arrest was his only option. This left his "wife as a hostage for the production of the manuscript" - which is where I hope Lips is being overly dramatic about the whole affair - while Lips made his way to London and found Lovat Dickson who agreed to publish before he had read a line of the book. The book is revolutionary. It was the first time a mirror was held up in such a simple graphic way to the west who were shown how most of the world - the supposed savage world - saw them. And how keenly it saw them.

Keywords: non-western art anthropology ethnology c20th Germany Nazis Africa Asia Pacific America

Price: AUD 325.00 = appr. US$ 224.86 Seller: Richard Neylon, Bookseller
- Book number: 9974