"Fun" - that is the motto of this biography about Rolf Kauka, the inventor and publisher of the comic book series "Fix & Foxi".

In her greeting at the beginning, the widow of the person portrayed suspects that he would have enjoyed the book.

And its author, Bodo V. Hechelhammer, concludes his presentation with the sentence: "Rolf Kauka would have been particularly pleased with this well-rounded story, even if he himself had not written down his life like this, but certainly differently."

Andrew Plathaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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The only reason why there is no explicit mention of "fun" is that it was mentioned four pages earlier, as a result of the efforts to keep the world of "Fix & Foxi" alive even after the death of its creator, which was twenty-two years ago : "The prince of the foxes would have fun with it." And back to the beginning of the biography: Immediately after Alexandra Kauka's greeting, the foreword is followed by Kauka's self-chosen motto: "Make others happy, then you'll have your fun." Apparently to have been a funny man, Rolf Kauka.

At least that's how he acted.

And affable: he signed the forewords to his publisher's comics – and since their debut in 1952 they have numbered in the thousands – “Your Uncle Rolf”.

However, this good uncle had a pedagogical-political concern: Kauka was a German patriot who, with his notebooks, saw the opportunity to bring this attitude to the youth in western post-war Germany as well.

And his methods can be described as notorious.

For example, Kauka was the first to bring "Asterix" to Germany, but he trimmed the French antiquity satire to current political events.

The Kauka translations said of the immense power of the Germanic warrior Babarras (that was the name of Obelix at the time; Asterix became Siggi): "Like others have a guilt complex, he always carries around a huge boulder."

Kauka stayed true to his beliefs

This reactionary Germanization of comics was well known long before Hechelhammer's biography;

not, however, that it was German journalists from the satirical magazine "Pardon" who drew their French colleagues from "Hara-Kiri" to their attention at the time, so that the Asterix fathers René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo found out about it and made sure that Kauka got his rights to lost the translation of her series - and with it a license to print money.

Of course, it is not certain whether "Siggi and Babarras" would ever have had as much success in this country as "Asterix and Obelix" did.

Kauka, as Hechelhammer's book makes clear, remained uncompromisingly true to his convictions - even against personal and pecuniary interests.

The basis of his worldview is traced back to the "Third Reich": Born in 1917 in Markranstädt near Leipzig, the son of a disabled man made a career in the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.

With tiresome attention to detail, Hechelhammer takes us to the German invasion of France and later defensive battles in the east, where Kauka excelled and won many awards.

He received the only other medal shortly before his death: in 1998 the Federal Cross of Merit.

By then, Kauka had been living in the United States for a decade and a half after lucratively selling his publishing company (several times).