Picture antics

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Cover picture of Krischan with the beeper

Bilderpossen is a book by the humorous painter and draftsman Wilhelm Busch . It appeared in 1864 and contained four larger stories: Cat and Mouse , Hansel and Gretel , Krischan with the Piepe and The Ice Peter . After the first works on Munich picture sheets (17 of them appeared before 1864, the first was Die kleine Honigdiebe in 1859 ) and a few stories in Die Fliegende Blätter , it was the first book with picture stories by Wilhelm Busch. It is attributed to the early work.

background

Wilhelm Busch had settled in Munich after trying to study art in Düsseldorf and Antwerp. There, too, his studies disappointed him, so that he hung around haphazardly for almost four years. He got to know the publisher Kaspar Braun through the artist association Jung Munich . In the years 1860 and 1863 he wrote over a hundred articles for its satirical sheets, the Munich picture sheet and the flying sheets . Wilhelm Busch was thus free of debt for the first time, had a sufficient income and had also earned a reputation as a humorous draftsman. However, he found his dependence on the publisher Kaspar Braun increasingly restrictive, so that Wilhelm Busch began looking for another publisher. He turned to Heinrich Richter, the son of the Saxon painter Ludwig Richter . Heinrich Richter's publishing house had previously only published works by Ludwig Richter, as well as children's books and religious edification literature . Wilhelm Busch may not have been aware of this fact when he agreed with Heinrich Richter to publish a picture book that was to contain four larger picture stories.

content

The choice of subject was left to Wilhelm Busch by his publisher Heinrich Richter. With Hansel and Gretel , Wilhelm Busch took up a topic that had preoccupied him in previous years. Together with Hansel and Gretel, he had written a festive, parodic fairy tale that was set to music by the composer Georg Kremplsetzer and performed in February 1862 in the Odeon concert hall. Wilhelm Busch had already deviated from the Brothers Grimm's original in this fairy tale and showed children who voluntarily go into the forest to escape their evil stepmother. In the picture story, the angry stepmother is replaced by a kind-hearted little mother who warns her children not to enter the forest. As in a Singspiel, the witch is married to an ogre. The Busch biographer Eva Weissweiler describes this fat, black-haired figure with a crooked nose and big ears as the caricature of a Jewish-capitalist villain, as the worst anti-Semites of that time imagined .

Krischan with the Beeper is the story of the smoking Krischan, a boy who secretly and illegally smokes his father's meerschaum pipe . He feels nauseous from the unfamiliar tobacco consumption and everything revolves around him in his nausea, so that the furniture transforms into contour creatures that dance around and harass him in seemingly surreal images.

The story of Eispeter counts like so many stories by Wilhelm Busch about a bad boy. He's a passionate ice skater here who turns down all warnings. He breaks in and instantly freezes to a bizarre ice shape. Father and uncle then saw him out of the ice and bring him home, where he should thaw it in the warm oven. The thawing process is more dramatic than the parents intended:

Oh but oh!
Now it's over!
The whole guy
melts to a pulp

The parents collect the remains of their son with a spoon and lay him down in a pot between pickles and cheese.

reaction

The picture stories presented by Wilhelm Busch met with skepticism from his publisher Heinrich Richter. Busch responded to his criticism that his drawings did not meet the standards that Moritz von Schwind had set with his fairy tale drawings with an outraged letter. Heinrich Richter's misgivings were justified; the picture antics that were published in Dresden in 1864 proved to be a failure. It was neither a book of fairy tales nor a picture or caricature book and surpassed Struwwelpeter in its cruelty . The story of Eispeter met with particular displeasure.

From 1880 the picture antics were published in several editions by Bassermann Verlag with scaled-down zincographies , but without having become "really known" ( Arthur Rühmann in the afterword of IB 25/2). Despite this up to then only moderate publishing success, Anton Kippenberg dared in 1934, before the expiry of the copyright protection period in 1938, so that a license had to be acquired from the rights holder, to include the picture antics as IB 25/2 in the island library . Now the illustrated stories achieved 8 editions with 232,000 copies by 1962 and thus reached a wider audience.

supporting documents

literature

  • Michaela Diers: Wilhelm Busch, life and work. dtv 2008, ISBN 978-3-423-34452-4
  • Joseph Kraus: Wilhelm Busch. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1970 (16th edition 9/2004), ISBN 3-499-50163-5
  • Gudrun Schury: I wish I were an Eskimo. The life of Wilhelm Busch. Biography . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-351-02653-0
  • Gert Ueding : Wilhelm Busch. The 19th century in miniature. Insel, Frankfurt / M. 1977 (new edition 2007).
  • Eva Weissweiler: Wilhelm Busch. The laughing pessimist. A biography . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-462-03930-6

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Diers, p. 44 and p. 45
  2. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 118
  3. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 104
  4. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 119
  5. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 119 and p. 120
  6. ↑ Weissweiler, p. 120
  7. ^ Arthur Rühmann in Wilhelm Busch: Bilderpossen , Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1934, p. (66)

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