The aftermath of World War II in West Germany was not only military occupation, but also German fear of cultural occupation by an American mass culture considered inferior and superficial. Particular stress lay on the alleged deleterious effect on young people of American-style comic books—an especially salient danger, given that an entire cohort of boys socialized under Hitler was now being raised under the supposedly inadequate discipline of widowed mothers.

The resulting “Schmutz-und-Schund-Kampagne,” or “Smut and Trash campaign,” has been seen both as an importation of American postwar anti-comics panic and as part of a wider European resistance to Americanization; however, the campaign was also a local revival of a previous German anti-popular culture movement using the same vocabulary. Beginning before 1900, based on anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, authority figures had inveighed against popular entertainments, especially dime novels, as contributors to juvenile delinquency and criminality.

This earlier campaign peaked at the end of World War I, as a young Fredric Wertham was completing his doctoral studies in Würzburg, raising the possibility that Wertham’s later work was influenced by this campaign’s tenor and rhetoric. In any case, the discourse of the older campaign would be recapitulated in the later anti-comics movement—a connection which remains under-researched.