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But is Captain Haddock really English then? Moulinsart (Marlinspike) is his ancestral castle, even though his family must have been forced to sell it at some point, as he didn't own it when Tintin first met him. But then again, the ancestral surname "Hadoque" was changed into "Haddock", which sure looks like an English form of it. So I guess the Haddock family, who orginally were Belgian aristocrats, could have moved to England after they had lost their castle, and when they got there, they also changed their name.

Let's try not to veer off topic too much - we've a dedicated thread for discussing Captain Haddock's nationality:
Captain Haddock: his nationality.

Belgium has always had a reputation as an Anglophile country since Britain played a major role in gaining recognition for the the kingdom of Belgian in the 1830s and declared war on Germany when it invaded Belgium in 1914.

Even during the Occupation, the censor does not appear to have come down heavily on aspects of Belgian comics which showed sympathy to the British: Tintin's British adventure "The Black Island" was published in colour for the first time in 1943; EP Jacobs' science-fiction comic "Le Rayon U" ("The U-Ray") includes British-like characters such as Lord Calder, Major Walton and Sergeant MacDuff.

Really? Because I've always heard, that The Black Island was one of the two albums, which they were forbidden to print during the occupation. But it maybe only was the black and white version?

See thread Black Island: Banned by the Nazis?

It was simpply bad timing. Having a Jewish villain during the war could be seen as cosying up to the Nazis.

How about Wronzoff (or Puschov in the English version), the big bearded gang leader of The Black Island. His Eastern name and beard could make him a Jew, couldn't it?

Yes, it could, but then again, the ship's cook in Shooting Star might be Jewish, and so might Professor Calculus - any of the characters might be Jewish.
However, neither of these, nor Puschov, is drawn as a particular stereotyped Jewish character. As discussed before, you appear to be alone in seeing anything specifically Jewish in the character.

How would Hergé have drawn a bushy-bearded non-Jewish Eastern-European-named character? Exactly the same as he would have drawn a bushy-bearded Jewish Eastern-European-named character, perhaps?

It would be racist, and indeed patronising, to say that a Jewish person can't also be a villain or that a villain can't also happen to be Jewish.

And from today's perspective, when most readers come to a book like this without a background of anti-Jewish prejudice, I don't think it's particularly problematic that Bohlwinkel has a Jewish name and stereotypically cartoon Jewish features that would in any case probably be unrecognised as such by most children today.

Even if people do recognise that he's probably Jewish, he is, as you say, just one of many villains of many nationalities and ethnicities in Hergé's work. So I don't think anyone's suggesting that the book shouldn't be read and enjoyed by everyone today.


Given what was being done to millions of Jewish people at the time, and given that the way Jews were portrayed in Nazi propoganda played a big part in enabling this to happen, it's hard to share your casual attitude to the timing...

If 99 percent of readers today completely miss or choose to ignore the wartime context of the book, that's great. That's how I read it as a child, and that's how I usually re-read it now.
But if you're studying Hergé's work more deeply, it would be ludicrous to believe that none of the choices that Hergé made about the nationality of the goodies and baddies in this book had greater significance to readers at the time it was written.
As I said a few pages back in this thread, you surely can't have it both ways. If we accept that Hergé's references to nationalities, historical events, aircraft makes, etc, are significant and politically intended in pre-war anti-Nazi books like King Ottokar's Sceptre, it seems a bit inconsistent to then believe that these choices are all merely coincidental in The Shooting Star.

To be fair to Hergé, I suppose it's just possible that giving sinister American capitalist villains stereotypically Jewish features was such a prevalent cartoonists' shorthand at the time that Hergé may not have realised that he was making Bohlwinkel look specifically Jewish.
But, taken along with everything else - Bohlwinkel's original American nationality, the cut panels from the original newspaper version showing two Jewish businessmen gloating in mock-Yiddish about how the end of the world means they won't have to pay their creditors, the axis-friendly personnel of most of the Aurora team and their German military seaplane - it's hard to believe that readers at the time would have found this adventure as neutral as readers are able to now.

As I said, I don't think all this makes the book particularly problematic today. And I'm not even suggesting we should judge Hergé too harshly for it in the context of its time. I'd assume that he was nervous that Belgian's new Nazi rulers would spot his attacks on them in King Ottokar's Sceptre and was trying to keep out of trouble by making this book a bit more in line with their views. Many people did much worse things to stay out of trouble with the Nazis.

I'm just suggesting that creating a villain who's an archetypal Jewish-American financier controlling underhand and sinister plots from his distant lair against an Axis-equipped scientific expedition probably wasn't an entirely coincidental and neutral choice on the part of Hergé...

I don't think anyone's promoting any special villain-depiction ban for Jewish people.
The possibly Jewish villain in The Black Island whom mct16 mentions doesn't seem particularly offensive in the context of that book's mixed-nationality gang, and causes little controversy.

Neither does the portrayal of the Jewish gang in the original version of Land of Black Gold, where they're not demonised at all. And where there are cases of non-Jewish ethnic groups being portrayed insensitively given the historical reality of the time - in particularly the black Congolese in Tintin in the Congo - I think people are equally quick to point it out.

I'm Jewish and have always found The Shooting Star a difficult book to cosy up to. Bohlwinkel is not the only Jewish stereotype to appear in the stories - think of the shopkeeper in The Crab With the Golden Claws and Mr Sakharine - but he is the only one to be acting like a Nazi propaganda character under the Belgium occupation. Without these features he might actually be one of the better, more realistic villains, but they are impossible for anyone with a passing knowledge of European history to ignore.

Also - there's a very good reason why we don't see him again. He's a Jew "brought to justice" in Nazi occupied Belgium. There's only one thing that could mean in that particular time and place. Poor Mr Bohlwinkel.

That's a very interesting point - I'm not certain I've ever seen it expressed, so thank you very much for the insight!

(Oh and, "Welcome back!" Not seen you around these forums for a while! :-))