50 years of abundance

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50 Years of Abundance is a comic novel by the German cartoonist Chlodwig Poth .

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The story describes on more than 280 pages the career of Klaus-Dieter Rosinsky, born in 1945, and at the same time tells the career of the Federal Republic of Germany. The egomaniac Rosinsky, son of an owner of a shoe store chain who became prosperous during the economic miracle and later a member of the Bundestag, rebelled against his conservative father during his student days, was involved in the SDS during the 68 movement and lived in a commune with revealing sexuality. From there he began the “ march through the institutions ” in the advertising industry and, with increasing independent economic success and later market leadership of his own advertising agency, developed more and more into the opposite of his early ideals. He designs public relations campaigns for the environmentally destructive chemical industry (e.g. the trivialization of the dilute acid waste in the North Sea), election advertising for conservative parties and marries the daughter of a company boss because the constant establishment of new sexual contacts demands "the full." Program "having to perform in the process became too tedious. The marriage fails after having a son.

The career of the multimillionaire with Porsche and designer villa is contrasted by sporadic contacts with his friend Wolfgang from student days, who remained true to the previous common values ​​and joined the Greens as a constant ecological warning in the early 1980s . Up to this point the history follows the history of the Federal Republic. From now on, Poth outlines a growing ecological catastrophe with total traffic blackout , forest and animal deaths, drinking water scarcity, climate change and the accompanying social unrest, from which even the economic elite, to which Rosinsky now belongs, can no longer escape despite all efforts. At the end of the story, Rosinsky dies with the rest of mankind from the consequences of the catastrophe, while God ponders whether he shouldn't save mankind for their art after all, because in this area it would have met his expectations.

In the book, the development of the Federal Republic is shown primarily through the hidden objects typical of Poth . The same inner-city intersection is often shown over time, from the rubble landscape after the end of the war in 1945 to the urban development of the 1950s to 1980s to the apocalypse at the end of the book in which Rosinsky ended his life in ruins together with numerous fellow sufferers on the street.

Publications

reception

The book was reviewed in 1990 in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau by Karl Riha and in the Süddeutsche Zeitung by Claudius Seidl .

In a 1991 review in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit Chlodwig Poth, Nikolaus Müller-Schöll attested "a great sense of the characteristic detail " and " good hearing for tones ", but considers the work to be " tiring " because it is funny without surprising and would often confirm that “ everything is just as we have always imagined it. "

For Oliver Maria Schmitt , chronicler of the New Frankfurt School , 2001 was “this singular superb book ... the first fully drawn novel in German literary history”.

In his book Where my sun shines ...: The cabaret program for home , published in 2009, Ottfried Fischer Poth describes Poth's book 50 Years of Abundance as an “intelligent, funny and impressive drawn novel”.

According to Helmut Kronthaler (2009), in contrast to the popularity of Poth's “progressive everyday life”, this “monumental comic novel” was “no longer a great success”.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book reviews, volumes 16-17, documentation, p. 196 [1]
  2. ↑ Nikolaus Müller-Schöll: Satire Trümmer . In: The time . No. 19 . Zeitverlag, May 3, 1991, ISSN  0044-2070 ( online [accessed August 28, 2014]).
  3. ↑ Oliver Maria Schmitt: The sharpest critics of the moose: the New Frankfurt School in words and lines and pictures . Fest, Berlin 2001, p. 51
  4. ↑ Ottfried Fischer : Where my sun shines ...: The cabaret program zur Heimat [2]
  5. ↑ Helmut Kronthaler (Red.): Lemma Chlodwig Poth in: Lexicon of Illustration in German-speaking Countries since 1945: LdI . Munich: Ed. Text + review, 2009