They wouldn't be able to last there for six weeks, the colleagues objected, and then they would be fired.

Even bets are said to have been made in the spring of 1996 on the inevitable expulsion.

It was almost inconceivable that two cartoonists from the satirical magazine Titanic should all at once deliver up-to-date caricatures for the political section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Wouldn't there be an ideological Grand Canyon to be bridged?

Christian Riethmüller

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Maybe he was, but that didn't matter to either side. In any case, Johann Georg Reissmüller, at the time responsible for the political section of the FAZ and as highly conservative as it was feared, played a decisive role in winning the artists Achim Greser and Heribert Lenz for the newspaper. And the two Franks, who met while studying graphic and communication design and have often worked together since then, agreed to take on the challenge. It was to be a very special covenant.

When the first cartoon by Greser & Lenz appeared in the newspaper in April 1996, a drawing on the BSE crisis, it was not the start of a six-week interlude, but rather a connection that has continued to this day and which has definitely made press history.

“With their work for the FAZ, Greser & Lenz have revolutionized political caricature,” says Achim Frenz, director of the Caricatura Museum for Comic Art in Frankfurt, where he gave the cartoonists the title “Bad.

A quarter of a century of jokes for Germany ”on her 25 years of work for the FAZ, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and other publications of the publisher such as the Metropol magazine is now dedicating an exhibition that opens on Wednesday evening.

Only rarely the pure message

Almost 400 works will be on view, most of which present the bundle that the museum was able to acquire for its collection at the beginning of 2021 with the help of the newly created municipal purchase budget. In addition to many caricatures, there are also a number of templates for a well-known beer mat series that the duo draws for a regional brewery in Aschaffenburg, where the two maintain a joint studio in an Art Nouveau house. The focus of the show, however, are the caricatures that were created for the FAZ, but also for the Titanic, where both were in the eighties - Greser in 1986,Lenz in 1988 - and had become known above all with their comic series "Genschman" (with the then Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher as a superhero) and "Die rote Strolche" (with various SPD grandees as characters).

If these works, some of which are decades old, still have their own charm today and not just as a funny chronicle of the times, this is due to the often lavishly furnished tableaus that are full of details.

The caricature is seldom focused on the pure message.

Much more often the drawings unfold a whole world, lovingly designed and provided with somehow hearty-looking staff, which sometimes cushions the ridicule so that it hits the viewer all the more forcefully in the next moment.

Master of the comic art

This does not go hand in hand without injuries. Politically overly correct souls will certainly be offended by the fact that stereotypes are used in the caricatures and that people joke about origin, gender, skin color or sexual orientation. For some viewers this goes too far, as can be seen not least in many letters to the editor to the FAZ.

"Every war has its victims, the same goes for the good joke", Greser & Lenz refer to their motto, which incidentally knows no sparing Newcomers, Offenbachers and Frankfurters. The latter two not only frequently provide the staff for the caricatures, but are also allowed to babble in their native idiom, which is also a special feature of the work of the two Franconian artists. Your jokes for Germany in the newspaper for Germany like to have a Hessian or, also not infrequently, a Bavarian tongue, which reinforces the comedy when, for example, a Donald Trump character makes a hand-made speech.

A somewhat lesser known side of the work by Achim Greser and Heribert Lenz, which is still carried out according to the old custom with pen, ink and watercolors on paper, is their animal drawings, which appear every two weeks on the “State and Law” page of the FAZ.

Here a bizarre to grotesque joke is lived and, above all, the craftsmanship of the two is demonstrated.

They are not only joke makers, but also masters of the comic art.

The exhibition "Greser & Lenz: Schlimm" can be seen until November 21 at the Caricatura Museum for Komische Kunst Frankfurt, Weckmarkt 17.

A 705-page catalog with more than 1,700 images was published for the exhibition, and costs 48 euros.

Further information: https://www.caricatura-museum.de