Mickey Mouse

Shortly after Mickey Mouse’s “birth” in 1928 Walt Disney started to export the cartoons all over the world and in this way also to the Weimar Republic. The movies attained and inspired the German audience in no time. At least when German companies took in Mickey Mouse for marketing and merchandising, it transformed from a character into a brandmark, which gathered a tremendous media network around itself in Germany. In the context of this development, there was an extensive reception of Disney’s movies and characters, which was expanded by productive approaches to this subject. Most strikingly, contemporary print media frequently mixed up admiration for Mickey Mouse’s movies with references to Mickey as a ‘typical American’ character, which is sometimes in opposition to German movie comprehension. The present paper focuses on this aspect and how it influenced the reception of Walt Disney’s work and productive approaches to it.