Albert Hopf

( Johann Ludwig ) Albert Hopf (born May 27, 1815 in Neulewin , † September 26, 1885 in Berlin ) was a politically and socially critical caricaturist and satirist .

life and work

His family soon moved to Berlin. Originally he was a pattern painter in fabric and wallpaper companies , but no longer practiced his profession after 1847. At the age of 29, in 1842, he published the first caricatures under the pseudonym Hans Qualm . In 1846 he published the liberal monthly newspaper Der Charlottenburger Beobachter .

At the end of 1847 he founded the Berlin Charivari , which was to appear monthly. In its third edition (February 1848) he published an article entitled The Mattress Ball in Potsdam , which caricatured the Potsdam Officers' Society and brought it into conflict with the Higher Censorship Court . The paper was then renamed Satan. Berlin Charivari . It also appeared with a different layout, and Albert Hopf was no longer mentioned as the author (although he still was). Numbers 4 (March) to 6 (May) were published.

Instead of No. 7 by Satan, Der Teufel appeared in Berlin from mid-June 1848 , which was published by the same publisher ( Louis Hirschfeld ) and the same printer (J. Draeger). The sheet was also published by Albert Hopf and even showed the same illustration, namely Satan dressed as Mephisto .

Between 1848 and 1854 sentenced to prison terms several times and repeatedly expelled from Berlin and the surrounding towns, Hopf lived practically like a tramp. During this time he continued to work on his characters Nante and Brennecke .

His Brennecke volumes were repeatedly confiscated. In the humoristic and cozy Brennecke calendar he alluded to the leap year 1852 with the following verse:

Freedom - dear audience! the press,
is not very strong.
If the calendar is tame, judge
the circumstances of the time carefully , and just don't forget
the whey market.

(At that time there was a notorious remand prison on the Molkenmarkt )

Mary Lee Townsend provides a detailed account of his life and work: Humor as high treason. Albert Hopf and the Revolution 1848 ", Berlin 1988. It also contains a bibliography of Hopf's writings that were known up to 1988, divided into booklets, leaflets, pieces and miscellaneous.

Hopf, alias Anastasius Schnüffler , was the "main employee" of Neuer Berliner gemüthlicher Krakehler from September 1854.

He was also a freelancer for the Kladderadatsch , a much larger joke sheet with readers all over Germany and Europe.

The next sheet he brought out was Helmerding , which only published non-political satire for a few months, but then also became political from September 1864.

In the course of his life he wrote several hundred joke books, plays , pamphlets , calendars and anthologies.

Web links

• Works by and about Albert Hopf  in the German Digital Library