The real Jacob

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The real Jacob
Title page of issue no.353 of January 13, 1900.
description Satirical magazine
language German
publishing company JHW Dietz ( Germany )
Headquarters Hamburg (1879–1881)
Stuttgart (1883–1923)
Berlin (1927–1933)
First edition November 5, 1879
attitude February 25, 1933
founder Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz
Frequency of publication monthly until 1888; weekly from No. 58 1888
Article archive 1884-1933
ISSN (print) 2195-8157
ISSN (online) 2195-8165
Caricature in the True Jacob on the sugar crash of 1889.
In 1891, “The true Jacob” illustrated the anti-Semite slogan “Against Junkers and Jews”.

The true Jacob was a German social democratic satirical magazine that was founded in 1879 and appeared with interruptions until 1933. For a long time it was the most widely read magazine around the SPD .

The title is derived from a saying: If something is “(not) the real Jacob”, it gets to the heart of the matter (or not). The origin of this saying is the biblical story of Jacob and Esau . When Jacob cheats his brother Esau about the birthright and birthright blessing, Esau says to his father: “He is rightly called Jacob” (= the deceitful) ( 1 Mos 27,36  LUT ). According to another interpretation, the phrase can be traced back to the disputes over the tomb of the apostle James the Elder and his bones, because several places fought over the pilgrimage.

history

Hamburg 1879–1880

At that time, the founder Wilhelm Blos was a journalist for the social democratic Hamburg-Altonaer Volksblatt . The passing of the Socialist Law in 1878 abruptly ended the publication of many social democratic magazines, for which Blos also worked. In the more liberal Hamburg , however, with the support of the publisher JHW Dietz, he was able to set up the satirical magazine The True Jacob in addition to working on his court newspaper . On November 5, 1879, the first of a total of twelve issues appeared. In October 1880, Blos was expelled from Hamburg and Prussia by the Reich authorities .

Stuttgart 1884-1890

In 1884 Dietz and Wilhelm Blos continued their collaboration in Stuttgart . The real Jacob appeared there in regular succession until 1914. Wilhelm Blos wrote numerous satires, stories and poems there under the pseudonym Hans Flux .

Under the Socialist Law, every number of the paper was monitored by the police. The social democratic tendency of the paper was not questioned; however, the public prosecutor's office never succeeded in producing sufficient evidence to prosecute, as the tone of the magazine was more moderate than that of other social democratic periodicals during this period. Openly social democratic periodicals and books were printed abroad and illegally smuggled in.

After 1890

In January 1890 the Socialist Law was repealed. Only with the Lex Heinze was a censorship law in force again from 1900 (see history of censorship ). The real Jacob , however, was still under surveillance, especially since from 1892 charges could be brought under current press law at every place where the magazine was distributed.

Until 1891 the title page was always decorated with a poem; the booklets were more text-heavy. From 1891 the title page was adorned with a caricature printed in four colors . Pictorial satires, caricatures, agitation pictures and illustrations could now be printed in color and gained a higher status in the magazine. The main targets of ridicule were Otto von Bismarck and imperial politics. In addition, however , the real Jacob was also shaped by serious contributions that dealt with trends and events in current politics, especially with the fate of social democracy.

The Ill. Staats-Zeitung ruled in 1895 about the True Jacob : The True Jacob (...) surpasses all humorous-satirical weeklies of our parties of order in terms of spirit and repartee. (...) Actually, the 'True Jacob' does not want to be a joke sheet in the popular sense, but a battle sheet for the comrades. No sensible comrade has ever suspected him of giving art and entertainment a large place in his supplements.

The period between 1900 and 1907 was the magazine's most productive period.

In general, the party-political guidelines set by the SPD faction in the Reichstag were followed . This was also the case during the First World War , when “Burgfrieden” prevailed in the Reichstag and nationalist tones gained the upper hand. Also in the True Jacob the opponent Russia in Feind was defamed in words and pictures. However, the “Jakob Perseverance” did not suffer from a lack of paper, which was by no means unusual in the war years.

During the Weimar period, the paper stood on the ground of the new political order and promoted the republic and its constitution with its pictures.

Interruption of existence 1923–1927

In October 1923, hyper-inflation forced the paper to be discontinued, but from January 11, 1924 the SPD replaced it with the satirical magazine Lachen links through its Dietz publishing house . Lachen links was replaced again in 1927 by the True Jacob .

Prohibited in 1933

The approaching National Socialism was bitterly opposed by the True Jacob from the beginning. His attitude caused the newspaper already in the seizure of power of Hitler , so 1933 was prohibited.

Edition

The circulation figures are unknown before 1887. In 1887 it was 40,000 pieces; 1890 at around 100,000 copies. It rose continuously to 380,500 until 1912, but fell to 163,000 (1917) during the war. In 1919 they reached 200,000 copies again. The top circulation was not achieved by any other satirical magazine in Germany; even the Simplicissimus only had a maximum print run of 200,000 copies. The bourgeois magazine Die Gartenlaube had a circulation of 400,000, the English-language satirical journal Punch 1,000,000 copies worldwide. The circulation of the True Jacob was, however, also higher than that of all other social democratic magazines. It thus reached more readers than, for example, Die Neue Zeit or the Socialist monthly issue .

The price of the magazine was constant from 1879 to 1917 at 10 pfennigs. But it was definitely profitable for the publisher Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz . In 1910 he also took over the unprofitable South German Postillon .

Employee

Responsible editors (so-called "seat editors") of the paper were:

In addition to the editors-in-chief, there were mostly also seat editors who were supposed to take responsibility in the event of an indictment.

Important authors of the issue were Max Kegel (1888–1902), Victor Adler , Wilhelm Blos , Arno Holz , Erich Mühsam , Clara Müller-Jahnke , Roda Roda , Emil Rosenow , Dr. Owlglass , Rudolf Lavant .

Otto Emil Lau drew the headline and the first caricatures . Other draftsmen were the crowd favorite Hans Gabriel Jentzsch , Otto Marcus , Edmund Edel , Rata Langa (Gabriele Galantara), Emil Erk , Erich Schilling , Fritz Grätz , Wilhelm Lehmann , and for a short time Max Engert , Arthur Krüger and Willibald Krain .

literature

  • Friedrich Wendel : 50 years of True Jacob. A commemorative publication . JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1929.
  • True Jacob, The . In: Lexicon of socialist German literature. From the beginning to 1945. Monographic-biographical presentations . Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1964, pp. 515-518.
  • Julia Schäfer: measured-drawn-laughed - images of Jews in popular magazines 1918–1933. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / New York 2004, ISBN 3-593-37745-4 .
  • Udohaben (ed.): The true Jacob: half a century in facsimiles. JHW Dietz Nachf., Bonn 1994.
  • Konrad Ege: Caricature and image satire in the German Empire. The “True Jacob”, Hamburg 1879/80, Stuttgart 1884–1914. Media history, employees, editors-in-chief, graphics. Lit, Münster / Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-88660-807-7 .
  • Manfred Häckel (ed.): Der Wahre Jacob: Lyrik und Prosa 1884-1905. Rütten & Loening, Berlin 1959.
  • Ann Robertson: Caricature in Context. On the development of the social democratic illustrated satirical magazine “Der Wahre Jacob” between the Empire and the Republic . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-631-44354-4 .
  • Hans-Josef Steinberg : Satirical magazines of the German socialist workers' movement. In: Hans-Peter Harstick (Ed.): Workers' Movement and History . Trier 1983 ( writings from the Karl-Marx-Haus , 29).
  • Christian H. Friday: The True Jacob - A historically voorbeeld van het duitse beeldverhaal . In: Stripschrift (Amsterdam), Nov. 1974, pp. 18-19.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Becker-Huberti : Celebrations, festivals, seasons. Living customs all year round. Freiburg u. a. 2001, p. 355.
  2. ↑ Printed in Wahren Jacob No. 242, 1895, p. 2054; quoted n. Ege 1992.
  3. ↑ Frank Zeiler: The “bonnet rouge” in the True Jacob. Appearances and ways of using a revolutionary symbol of freedom in a social democratic satirical magazine at the time of the Empire and the Weimar Republic , 2016, p. 23 ff. ( PDF ).
    Ders .: Constitutional satiries     between hostility towards the republic, rational republicanism and loyalty to the republic. A representation of the picture contributions to the Weimar Constitution in the satirical magazines Kladderadatsch, Simplicissimus, Der Wahre Jacob and Lachen Links . In: Yearbook of contemporary legal history . tape 17 , 2016, p. 416 ff . ( PDF ).
  4. ↑ Laughter on the left: the republican joke sheet - digital

Web links

Commons : The True Jacob  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
Wikisource: The Real Jacob  - Sources and Full Texts