The very open letter

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The completely open letter is a humorous column by Loriot and Manfred Schmidt that appeared weekly from 1957 to 1961 in the German illustrated magazine Quick . In the more than 200 issues, the authors dealt with current events, curious reports and everyday experiences.

In 2014, a complete edition of the completely open letters written by Loriot was published . Schmidt's letters have not yet been published as a book.

publication

In 1957, the Quick editorial team planned to revise the first pages of their magazines. Until then, the individual issues began directly with the report. Now the magazine was about to open with prize puzzles, which were very popular at the time. As a humorous contribution in addition to the riddle, the column The very open letter by Manfred Schmidt and Loriot was intended. At that time Manfred Schmidt was one of the most popular cartoonists in Germany through his Quick series Nick Knatterton , while Loriot had his first major success in Quick with his series Der Gute Ton . The very open letters were designed as editorial letters to the editor and satirically dealt with current events, curious reports and everyday experiences of the authors. They were accompanied by a drawing by the respective author.

The first completely open letter appeared in the edition of September 28, 1957 with the following accompaniment: “Loriot, the master of the good tone, also reads the QUICK, especially since he receives a free copy every week. In this letter he turns to the editorial staff with a burning problem. We fear that more letters will follow. ”In the following four years, The Quite Open Letter was included in almost all issues of Quick , only in January 1958 the column was omitted in favor of solving a special price puzzle. Loriot and Manfred Schmidt each wrote about half of the letters. Usually the two authors took turns every week, but this mode was also deviated from more frequently.

The end of the column was a consequence of the hundredth fully open letter from Loriot of August 13, 1961. In it he referred to the cover story of the Spiegel from July 18, in which it is reported that it is allowed in Germany to make wine with sugar water, To add carbon dioxide and potassium ferrocyanide . Loriot took this to extremes by making the additives the main component of German wine, to which "according to ancient family tradition" there is also one grape per barrel. This led to considerable protests and angry letters from winemakers to the Quick . While Der Spiegel printed similar reactions to its article in the following editions, Quick did without it. Instead, parts of the letters were forwarded to Loriot with the request that they be answered. He then ended his work on this column in his 102nd contribution. In it he reported that threatening figures regularly lay in wait for him, including winemakers and wine merchants, even though he has, among other things, "emptied a bottle of wine every day for years". For his own protection, he asked the editors in the letter to release him from the column. Although the editors answered this request below the letter with a "No", it was still the last completely open letter that Loriot wrote. The last letters from Manfred Schmidt appeared in the following two editions. The October 8, 1961 edition then contained another letter from Loriot, which he had written before and which had been rejected by the editorial team at the time. In contrast to the other letters, it was not part of pages 2 or 3, but appeared in the back of the Quick . The affair surrounding the Wein-Brief did not end there. At the urging of the publisher Diedrich Kenneweg , Loriot had to take part in a PR campaign in the Mainz House of German Wine and a wine-growing region at the end of October . The satirical travelogue, in which Loriot continued to distribute in addition to a correction, was published in December under the title Wine purely poured by Loriot in the Quick .

Unlike many of Loriot's other works that appeared in magazines such as the Quick , Loriot did not publish the open letters in book form. As a result, they fell into oblivion and were even unknown to Loriot connoisseurs, as the German scholar Stefan Neumann states in his dissertation on Loriot's life and work from the year 2000. In 2014, three years after Loriot's death, his daughter Susanne von Bülow published the book The Quite Open Letter together with the author Peter Geyer and the book designer OA Krimmel . It was not published by Loriot's regular Diogenes Verlag , but by Hoffmann and Campe . The book contains 115 letters from Loriot together with the accompanying drawings, in addition to the 103 letters published in Quick , there are also 12 that were rejected by the Quick editorial team and have now been published for the first time. People, events and press reports to which Loriot referred in his letters are commented on in short footnotes in the book. In addition, the book contains a foreword by Peter Geyer, an overview of the "wine incident" including some letters to the publisher and from the publisher and Loriot's travelogue, as well as other critical letters to the editor. In addition, a very open letter from Manfred Schmidt is printed in the book, which he had formulated as a direct response to a letter from Loriot. Schmidt's other letters have not yet been published in book form. The actor Johann von Bülow , who is distantly related to Loriot, gave readings from the book. The live recording of a reading in the Berlin bar of every reason appeared as an audio book.

Classification in Loriot's oeuvre

With a term of four years, the fully open letter was the longest series of magazines Loriot designed for adults; only the children's series Reinhold das Nashorn ran longer at the age of seventeen. The publication of the letters coincided with the time when Loriot had great success with advice parodies such as The Good Sound , The Road to Success and In Case . In contrast to these, with the completely open letters the focus was almost exclusively on the text. They too were accompanied by a drawing, but in most cases they were more of an illustrative character; the humor of most of the letters would have worked without them. This was the first time that Loriot's comic language, which is an essential aspect of his work, was fully developed in the letters. The text design of the letters was similar to the advice parodies and was often characterized by a contrast between the language and the content. The everyday, the banal and the tasteless were presented factually and in sophisticated language, a style that also characterized many of Loriot's television sketches. In terms of content, too, the letters were often an anticipation of these skits. An example of this is the letter dated June 7, 1958. In it Loriot reports on the purchase of trousers, in which the sellers recommend him to wear trousers that are too long and too short for various reasons. The letter is strongly reminiscent of the men's fashion sketch from Loriot's telescopic sketches , the second episode of the Loriot series broadcast in 1976 , in which a couple wants to buy a suit for the man.

In many of his drawings for his very open letters , Loriot depicts himself as a bulbous nosed man, an element of his work that also appeared in other places, such as the last episode of his True Stories . In his letter of February 14, 1959, Loriot himself deals with this subject and complains that caricaturists begin to look similar to their drawings after just a few years. In the accompanying drawing, a male bulbous nose stands in front of the mirror and holds a drawing of a male bulbous nose in his hand.

Book editions

literature

  • Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. Life, work and work of Vicco von Bülow . Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 2011, ISBN 978-3-86821-298-3 , p. 187-193 .

Individual evidence

  1. a b Peter Geyer: Foreword. In: Susanne von Bülow, Peter Geyer, OA Krimmel (ed.): The very open letter. Pp. 6-9.
  2. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 187.
  3. The wet hand . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1961 ( online ).
  4. Susanne von Bülow, Peter Geyer, OA Krimmel (ed.): The very open letter. 2014, pp. 211-229.
  5. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 190.
  6. Julia Emmrich: Call from Uncle Loriot was almost an accolade. In: The West . January 3, 2012, accessed May 7, 2021 .
  7. The very open letter. Johann von Bülow reads Loriot. In: loriot.de. Retrieved May 7, 2021 .
  8. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 193. Neumann describes The Open Letter as the “longest Loriot series of all time”, but Reinhold forgets the rhino .
  9. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 193.
  10. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 188.
  11. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 190-191. Eckhard Pabst: "The picture hangs crooked!" Loriot's TV sketches as a criticism of modernization . In: Anna Bers, Claudia Hillebrandt (Ed.): TEXT + KRITIK . No. 230 , 2021, ISBN 978-3-96707-487-1 , pp. 23–37 , here: 25 .
  12. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, p. 191.
  13. Stefan Neumann: Loriot and the high comedy. 2011, pp. 192-193.