1938.11.29 “It’s nice when it’s fixed up”
by Mischa Richter (1910-2001)
22 x 24 in., ink and wash on paper
Coppola Collection
Mischa Richter (1910-2001) was a well-known New Yorker, King Features, and PM newspaper cartoonist who worked for the Communist Party’s literary journal “New Masses” in the late 1930 and early 1940s, becoming its art editor in the 1940s.
A striking example of how some American artists were already framing domestic fascist sympathy immediately after Kristallnacht. The cartoon appeared in New Masses less than three weeks after Kristallnacht (November 9–10, 1938), the coordinated Nazi pogrom against Jews across Germany and Austria. Shop windows smashed, Jewish professionals expelled, “Jude” painted on storefronts—these were the exact images circulating internationally in mid-November.
By late 1938 Lindbergh had become a deeply controversial public figure. In October 1938 he had accepted the Order of the German Eagle from Hermann Göring and publicly praised German air power. Disillusioned with the British and French, he was planning to move his family to Berlin. The couple identified a house in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to rent (New York Times, Nov. 16: “According to information from German aviation and American diplomatic quarters, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh is contemplating transferring his residence from his French island-Illiec, off the coast of Brittany--to Germany and Mrs. Lindbergh is now looking for a furnished apartment in Berlin.”
To the American left, this was tantamount to legitimizing the Nazi regime. “Herr Lindbergh” … the honorific deliberately Germanizes him. The implication is collaboration: Lindbergh as an American face comfortable with Nazi racial policy.
This setting clearly references the targeting of Jewish doctors and shopkeepers during Kristallnacht. The idea that “the last tenant let the place get a little run down” is grotesque and speaks to complicity, as mass violence is re-described as aesthetic improvement… The edited caption, “It’s nice when it’s fixed up,” should clearly be read as a sharply metaphorical statement.
The American left was not surprised by the trajectory of Nazi anti-Jewish violence.
At some point, Lindbergh cancelled the planned move, stating he did not want to support German actions against Jews. The family moved back to the US in early 1939.
