William Hohenzollern Sausage Maker

Bud Fisher’s 1919 satirical short, William Hohenzollern Sausage Maker, functions as a vitriolic visual post-mortem of the Prussian monarchy. In this biting caricature, the former Kaiser—now stripped of his imperial regalia and martial grandiosity—is relegated to the domestic absurdity of a butcher’s shop. Fisher utilizes the primitive yet potent elasticity of early animation to transform the once-feared autocrat into a bumbling purveyor of encased meats, a metaphor for the grinding down of the German war machine into the mundane offal of history. The film operates on a plane of vengeful whimsy, where the geopolitical carnage of the Great War is transmuted into a slapstick purgatory. Through sharp, economical line work, Fisher deconstructs the Hohenzollern mythos, replacing the Iron Cross with a string of frankfurters, thereby achieving a populist catharsis for a global audience still reeling from the tremors of the Western Front. It is a work of graphic exorcism, using the inkwell to drown the ghost of European absolutism.