ArtView December 2013 | Page 15

figure of Bohlwinkel remained an “unmistakably
anti-Semitic caricature.”
Leading Tintin scholar or “Tintinologist”
Michael Farr defends Hergé staunchly against any
charges of collaboration. Speaking with Hergé late
in his life, he said that of course with hindsight, he
would have done things differently. His apparent
collaboration was only accidental: “I did not make
pro-German propaganda. I was not pro-German, I
did not have German friends.”
Yet to this day The Shooting Star is used by
some right-wing extremists to claim that Hergé was
pro-Nazi and anti-Semite. “Looking at his entire
life, oeuvre and statements, he was not,” writes
another Tintin scholar, Randy Lofficier,
“but... The Shooting Star remains a blot on Hergé’s
record...”
Perhaps this book is best seen as a work that
tells more about the moral conflicts faced by people
of that time, through the history of its making, than
by the story within its pages.

Images © Hergé/Moulinsart

Hergé with a statue of Tintin