Bull & Peas

Correspondents who cabled that no German cartoonist had dared to caricature President von Hindenburg during the recent April Fools' Day spree of lampooning German statesmen (TIME, April 11), were obliged to retract their error last week when attorneys for President von Hindenburg began suit for libel against the Communist newspaper Rote Fahne (Red Flag) because of a cartoon it published on April 1. Rote Fahne depicted a huge bull standing before three white-clad butchers, with the caption: Hindenburg in Civil Dress Reviews the Companies of Honor on Remembrance Day. Whatever this meant (and the President's attorneys professed ignorance) it at least implied that the Herr President resembles a bull, an allegedly libelous implication. As the suit got under way last week, the Berlin police destroyed on their own responsibility every copy of the offending issue of Rote Fahne that they could snatch.

Totally different was the procedure of genial President Paul Loebe of the German Reichstag when one Adolf Stein, Nationalist newsgatherer, signed a story in which he graphically described how Frau Loebe allegedly eats peas, beans, spinach and other vegetables with her knife. When President Loebe learned that in retaliation for this article a subordinate Reichstag official had deprived Correspondent Stein of his card of entrance to the Reichstag, he at once interceded and caused the card to be reissued. Said Herr President Loebe, after thus turning his wife's other cheek: "Newspaper men must not be punished merely for making humorous personal attacks." Observers thought that if Frau Loebe does sometimes eat with her knife, her husband took a shrewd course to stifle the report.