He looks satisfied, Herr Ulbricht, leaning on his little red wall like an allotment gardener, only that the top of the wall is reinforced with broken pieces and there are barbed wire and watchtowers in front of it.
In August 1961, for example, the cartoonist Manfred Oesterle put the GDR State Council Chairman on the cover of "Simplicissimus", and one could dismiss that as the expected reaction of a cartoonist to a current political event (here the erection of the Berlin Wall) when the issue of the Munich satirical magazine had not appeared on August 5, 1961 – eight days before the start of the construction of the Wall.
Satire that is ahead of its time can probably be called the great art of this profession.
Andrew Plathaus
Responsible editor for literature and literary life.
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The "Simplicissimus" itself is also considered to be such. However, because of its early years: those from 1896, when Albert Langen founded the opulently printed illustrated weekly in Munich, to 1914 and from 1919 to 1932. In between and after that there were embarrassing phases, when the Kaiserreich as the biting leader of the bourgeois press mob, "Simplicissimus" first offered himself to German war propaganda and then, after his renaissance made possible by the new freedoms of the Weimar Republic, capitulated to the National Socialists before he had to be hired in 1944 - not because of opposition to the regime, but due to a lack of paper during the war.
The Bonn Republic as an object of mockery
But his admirers in the post-war period did not want to put up with this less than creditable end.
A first attempt at revival as "Simpl" lasted only four years until 1950, but when Olaf Iversen, born in 1902, who had grown up with the old "Simplicissimus" in his Munich youth, dared a new attempt in 1954, he was luckier.
The readers too, because the new "Simplicissimus" produced title pages that can compete with the classics of the grand masters who used to work for the newspaper, such as Thomas Theodor Heine, Olaf Gulbransson or Karl Arnold.
Only that their creators - Oesterle, Henry M-Brockmann, Wigg Siegl or Hanns Erich Köhler - do not enjoy anywhere near the same fame as their predecessors.
Wrongly, as an exhibition in Cologne's Käthe Kollwitz Museum now shows,
Well, not exclusively, because this topic is justified here by the fact that Käthe Kollwitz was also represented a total of sixteen times in the old "Simplicissimus" between 1908 and 1924.
However, the museum is only showing four of these works (and not even a single one in the elaborate booklet accompanying the show), which are then part of a summary of the prehistory of the new “Simplicissimus”, which at least offers two dozen famous cover pictures of the old one.
Almost all, by the way, are presented as printed editions;
original drawings are only occasionally included.
And the same goes for the main part of the show with more than a hundred works.
Caricature quality like in the good old days
The rich print inventory is due to the acquisition of the collection by Uwe Westfehling, who also curated this show.
If you disregard the fact that his lyrics sound like they were written in the 1950s - stylistically, not in terms of content - he has put together a great compilation.
Which, however, cheats around an aesthetic appreciation of the caricatures.
It is remarkable how faithfully the post-war artists followed the example of the old "Simplicissimus" guard.
Anyone who doubts that nostalgia can also promote satire should be convinced of the opposite here.
And not only in those cases where the West German draftsman decidedly varied motifs from the German Empire and the Weimar Republic - such as in the case of the wonderful sheet "Dynastie Adenauer proclaimed",
Konrad Adenauer is at the center of this exhibition anyway - and if you only walked a hundred meters from the museum, you would be standing at his monument in front of the Church of St. Apostles.
The long-serving Federal Chancellor, born in Cologne, aroused the worst suspicions in his opponents and the best in the work of the caricaturists during his lifetime.
The highlight in this regard is Manfred Oesterle's title drawing at the conclusion of the Elysée Treaty in 1963, which, under the title "Little European Friendship Couple", combines characteristic caricature attributes of Adenauer (wrinkles, bags under the eyes, high forehead) with those of De Gaulle (long nose, big ears, Képi). portrait chimera, which would also have brought honor to the work of Picasso or Buffet.
And it stands alone in the history of German caricatures.
No wonder that this motif was reprinted by Simplicissimus together with eight other caricatures of the deceased on the occasion of Adenauer's death in April 1967.
The regret over the passing of the favorite enemy can be read in the accompanying editorial text.
It was a portent: The “Simplicissimus” had survived the death of its re-founder Iversen in 1959, but after Adenauer's departure it only continued for a few months.
Then the new "Simplicissimus" was history.
Two other attempts at resuscitation failed in the 1980s and 1990s.
The new "Simplicissimus" 1954-1967. Satire for the Bonn Republic.
In the Käthe Kollwitz Museum, Cologne, until October 3rd.
No catalogue, but there is a comprehensive accompanying booklet (German or English) free of charge.