grgr (34): max & moritz (757f.)

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 ... on "a wilhelm busch cartoon face" (501) weisenburger (p. 223) writes in his 
companion: "german artist wilhelm busch (1832-1908) was the country's best known 
and most beloved humorist. m a x  a n d  m o r i t z, his illustrated children's 
book, appeared in 1865. these were also the names playfully assigned to two 
experimental a2 rockets fired from borkum in 1934 (klee and merk, 12). in 
addition, blicero has two members of his firing crew named max and moritz" ... 
still very popular in germany ... a grandmother of my wife gave last x-mas a 
wilhelm bush cartoon collection to our lil' daughter ... & about 2 weeks ago i 
had a take-away chicken &, while eating it, realized that there was on the bag a 
wilhelm busch reminescence showing moritz & max fishing for roasted birds in the 
chimney of the widow bolte ... nevertheless, though i was impressed by "max & 
moritz"' brutal end as a child, i never really liked wilhelm busch ... first 
thing that made me distrustful were that  a l l  the grown ups recommended it in 
a kind of brain-washed manner ... "cultural heritage" or something ... actually 
the humor of busch is quite narrow and, what has been pointed out by german 
post-war writers like heinrich böll or uwe johnson who hated busch truly, in 
parts anti-semitic ... just (- & nothing else but:) schadenfreude ...  
busch, so i read more than once, seems, nevertheless, to have been important to 
the development of cartoon as art (- "katzenjammer kids" etc pp) ... these days 
there is a renewed interest in his work ... the comical draftsman and writer 
robert gernhard (- "paulus schrieb an die apatschen/ihr sollt nicht in der 
kirche klatschen") has just published a new study on busch and came, in case i 
understood a recent tv-report correctly, to a somehow ambivalent conclusion ...

 kfl