Cartoon/Humour

The fact that the comic book does not have the same status in Germany as it does in France, Italy or Spain is due in no small part to the great German tradition of satirical cartoons. In the early twentieth century, whilst other European countries were discovering and importing this newly created genre from America, Germany could not initially see the need for further illustrated amusement. It appeared to have more than enough of its own on offer with the caricatures and comic strips of world famous publications such as Fliegenden Blättern, Münchner Bilderbogen, Simplicissimus or Neuruppiner Bilderbogen that all criticised politics and made fun of polite society. German readers felt far too sophisticated to be interested in something as supposedly simple as comics. In Germany therefore the comic was initially considered strange.

The first successful German comic book, Vater und Sohn by e. o. plauen (Erich Ohser), appeared between 1934 and 1937 and was a humorous series, but unlike the French comics that were being published in the same period, its form was far closer to a traditional picture book story. Only very rarely did textual elements appear in Vater und Sohn, and so it lacked that characteristic combination of illustration and text within a frame that differentiates the comic from other types of graphic narrative.

Much later on in the 60s, Robert Gernhardt developed his comic series Schnuffi for the satirical magazine Pardon. It was a purely nonsensical story with a visibly careless illustrative style – it was supposed to look as simple as possible so that it corresponded precisely to the prejudices held against comics. His two colleagues F. K. Waechter and F. W. Bernstein (Fritz Weigle) limited themselves to a classical form of cartoons, i.e. humorous individual pictures that lacked the sequential narrative structure of comics. However a group of Frankfurt satirists founded by Gernhardt, Waechter and Bernstein included some of the most important illustrators of humorous cartoons and comics amongst its number: Hans Traxler, Clodwig Poth, Bernd Pfarr, Achim Greser and Heribert Lenz. Poth and Pfarr in particular stopped using the comic solely as an element of parody and instead began to make use of its specific strengths.

And so they set an example. Poth’s socially critical comics inspired illustrators such as Gerhard Seyfried, who became the comic chronicler of the protest movement in the 1970s; Marie Marcks and Franziska Becker, whose stories were dedicated to caustically funny methods of emancipation; Ralf König, who did the same for the gay movement; and Volker Reiche, who later on with Strizz became one of the most important German comic strip illustrators. Pfarr’s mixture of absurdist humour and highly individual illustrative style was successfully continued by Brösel (Rötger Feldmann) in Werner and in the comics of Walter Moers. Käpt’n Blaubär, based on one of Moers' characters, and Ottifanten by comedian Otto Waalkes, became two of Germany‘s most popular newspaper comic strips. Thomas Körner (alias ©Tom) wrote the comic strip Touché specially for the Berlin Tageszeitung, which set a new standard for German humorous comics.

A young generation of cartoonists has established itself since the millennium. They maintain a simplified style and are finding an audience far beyond the usual comic strip readership. They include FIL (Philip Tägert) and the Austrian Nicolas Mahler, two grandmasters of nonsense. However, the most popular comic strips are the ones originally started on the Internet, such as Nicht lustig by Joscha Sauer and the cartoon series Shit Happens! by Ralph Ruthe. These strips do not aim to have a satirical narrative, but rather find their humour in basic word play and situational comedy, and are part of the tradition of comedic illustration as opposed to caricature. And so the German humorous comic has finally made the break with tradition.