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The Incomparable Fritz
Axel Scheffler pens a portrait and a personal memory of the cartoonist, illustrator and satirist Friedrich Karl Waechter on the first anniversary of his death My father kept the satirical magazine Pardon hidden from us children. There were photos of half-naked women in it and this was the stuffy and prudish mid-1960s after all. I found it anyway, and I still remember the first Waechter drawings I ever saw at the age of seven or eight. They were simple and sweet pen and ink drawings showing animals swimming in rivers: 'Ein Biber im Tiber, Derselbe in der Elbe. Eine Gemse in der Themse.' (A beaver in the Tiber, the same chap in the Elbe, a chamois in the Thames - of course, the lovely rhyme is lost in a literal translation). There they swam - in a Christian Morgenstern sort of way, for no other reason than that their names rhymed with the names of the rivers. And that was intriguing to me as a boy. Later I bought some of his children's books and posters for my little brother: Die Kronenklauer ('The Crown Robbers'), co-written with Bernd Eilert, for instance (Rowohlt, 1972). The drawings came across as fairly traditional with their masterly cross-hatching, but they offered something entirely new and fresh in their cheeky anti-authoritarian attitude, their revelling in nonsense, and the fact that they encouraged children to be actively part of them: to draw in the book, cut things out, and invent their own stories. As a teenager I enjoyed his weekly cartoons in the supplement of Die Zeit: his drawings were sometimes provocative, often 'rude', but always imbued with a sense of tenderness for the follies of human existence. His pictures and texts managed to be caustic and warm-hearted at the same time. His sense of the absurd, combined with the quality of his drawing, created the unmistakable Waechter touch which certainly had - though it's hard to pin-point these things - an influence on my, and many other people's, perception of the world. Friedrich Karl Waechter, proof positive that German humorists do indeed exist, sadly died of cancer last autumn at the age of 67. Born in 1937 in Danzig, he grew up in a small town in the north of Germany and attended art school in Hamburg to train as a graphic artist. The year 1962 saw him settling in Frankfurt am Main, and working on the satirical magazine Pardon. Together with other eminent comic writers and cartoonists - Robert Gernhardt, F.W. Bernstein, and Chlodwig Poth - he formed a group which was to become a famous, much respected, and without doubt culturally influential one: the 'Neue Frankfurter Schule' (New Frankfurt School) - a play, of course, on the original 'Frankfurter Schule' of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their particular brand of nonsense and subversion, celebrated in 'Welt im Spiegel' (a regular double-spread in Pardon), was revolutionary in its own way. In the 1970s Waechter, by now father of three sons, created a number of children's books, many of them activity books, as I have already mentioned. Perhaps best-known are his anti-authoritarian answer to Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (Shock-Headed Peter) - Der Anti-Struwwelpeter - and the picture book Wir koennen noch viel zusammen machen ('There's Lots We Can Do Together'), the story of the friendship of a bird, a fish and a pig and their joyous exploration of doing things together. In 1979, Waechter co-founded another influential satirical magazine (still going strong), Titanic, where he had a regular spot for his cartoons. (Titanic would appeal to readers of Private Eye or Le Canard Enchaîné.) After almost thirty years of drawing those, he stopped - a decision I can empathise with - to concentrate instead on his work for the theatre, penned for children as well as for adults. He also continued to write and illustrate books. These later works are of a somewhat quieter, more enigmatic nature and have an almost melancholic quality. Artistically they demonstrate the full range of his draughtsmanship, working more with bold brushstrokes and later with collage. He won the illustrious Deutsche Jugendbuchpreis for a second time in 1999 for Der rote Wolf (having won it years earlier with his tale of the unlikely friendship between that fish, bird and pig.) His final works elude any fixed categorisation: perhaps they are best described as picture books for grown-ups and children, unique in style and content. There is the rather strange story of Der Affe des Strandfotographen ('The Beach-Photographer's Monkey'), his own version of Die Schoepfung (the Biblical story of the Creation) and the story of Prinz Hamlet, seen through the eyes of his best friends Punch and Bear, a visual and original feast. In the early nineties I took part in a one month course given by F.K.Waechter at a summer academy in Hamburg. The theme was 'story-telling through pictures' and it was a great pleasure to be regaled by the tales of Fritz (as I then learned he was called) Waechter. He was a tall and rather quiet man, his face mostly hidden behind a curtain of long curly hair. I kept a respectful distance, but was thrilled when my pictures received a snippet of dry praise from the great master.
His very last work Vollmond ('Full Moon'), based on a popular verse in Berlin dialect, was written and drawn while Waechter was receiving cancer treatment. It tells the story of the unintended journey of a dumpling-eating character through space to an empty moon and back to earth where, thanks to love, all will be well with the world again. A small masterpiece and a comforting farewell present from a great artist who said he was drawing and writing for people who were once five and remembered what it was like, and who wanted to live till they were ninety-nine. For him, sadly, that wish was not to be granted.
Friedrich Karl Waechter, born 3 November 1937, died 16 September 2005.
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