Fredric Wertham

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Fredric Wertham (born March 20, 1895 in Nuremberg as Friedrich Ignatz Wertheimer ; † November 18, 1981 in Kempton , Pennsylvania ) was a German-American psychiatrist and author . He is best known for his book Seduction of the Innocent , published in 1954 , which resulted in the creation of the Comics Code .

Origin, education and profession

Fredric Wertham's parents were the businessman Sigmund Wertheimer and his wife Mathilde, nee. Lust. Wertham studied in Munich, Erlangen , London and Würzburg , where he graduated in 1921. In the same year, Wertham got a job in a Munich clinic. There, the clinic manager Emil Kraepelin examined a possible connection between social background and environmental conditions on the one hand and the behavior of the patients on the other. In 1922 Wertham emigrated to the USA . When he was naturalized in 1927, he Americanized his name. In the USA, Wertham worked at Johns Hopkins University , among others , before becoming head of the Lafargue Clinic, a psychiatric clinic in the New York borough of Harlem .

Early publications

In 1934 Wertham published his first scientific work The Brain as an Organ . As a forensic psychologist , he was regularly commissioned to prepare psychiatric reports for criminal court proceedings. In the following years he conducted research on the influence of education and social environment on later criminal behavior, which was reflected in his case study Dark Legend (1941). In it, Wertham deals with the story of a 17-year-old who killed his mother. Wertham stated that the boy lived in a dream world brought about by the influence of films, radio plays and comics. This was the first time that Wertham established a direct link between comics and crime. At the same time, the scientist had found “his subject”, which in the following decades became the focus of his work.

In 1949 he published another study, Show of Violence , in which he reported on selected murder cases that he was dealing with in his capacity as a court expert.

Seduction of the Innocent

→ Main article: Seduction of the Innocent

In his 1954 published the most famous publication Seduction of the Innocent (dt .: Seduction of the Innocent tried) Wertham with the help of statistical methods, the harmfulness of comics prove. He assumed that the representation of immoral facts has a direct impact on the child / adolescent reader. This is how Wertham described a clinical picture, allegedly caused by reading comics, linear dyslexia . He invented this term for a certain form of reading weakness, namely the inability to grasp the meaning of texts that were larger than a speech bubble.

Using many examples, Wertham denounced in particular the countless depictions of violence in the then popular “Crime Comics”. The collection of picture quotations in his book was indeed an accumulation of gruesome scenes and documented the "cult of violence" criticized by Wertham. In addition, he found temptations to sexual perversion in the skin-tight tops of Phantom Lady or in slightly apron jungle heroines . The noose of the magic lasso from Wonder Woman was a vagina symbol for him , in the relationship between Batman and Robin he found indications of a homosexual relationship.

The book became a bestseller . Through numerous other publications and television appearances, Wertham, who was a talented populist , achieved a certain national fame. He compared the makers and publishers of comics to sadistic vampires who sucked the juices of innocent children's lives. In his view, comics caused a systematic poisoning of the well of childlike spontaneity and set the course for later aggressive crimes.

The comics code

The theses represented by Wertham were taken up as arguments in political discussions primarily by conservatives who demanded legal measures against the comic nonsense.

With his statements against Crime Comics, Wertham is credited with a significant contribution to the establishment of the "Comics Code" of the "Comics Magazine Association of America", which came into force in October 1954. This was a kind of voluntary self-regulation by the producers that comic publishers had to bow to. The comic strip code was adopted to forestall government censorship .

With the Comics Code coming into being, public interest in Wertham and his mission began to wane. In the following decades too - especially in his work Sign for Cain (1964) - Wertham upheld his controversial theses in principle, even if he now primarily believed television to be the cause of social grievances.

literature

  • Ole Frahm: Last warning. Youth culture is harmful to young people: FW and his crusade against comics . In: Frankfurter Rundschau , November 16, 2006, p. 25.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b City Archives Nuremberg C 27 / IV registry office, birth register no.521, entry no.1302.
  2. ↑ a b Bayard Webster: Fredric Wertham, 86, dies; Foe of Violent TV and Comics on nytimes.com (English).
  3. ↑ a b Fredric Wertham at Comic Art (English).
  4. ↑ Fredric Wertham at lambiek.net (English).
  5. ↑ text on cairn.be (French).
  6. ↑ Comic heroines of the 40s / 50s at comicradioshow.com .
  7. ^ Gerhard Habarta, Harald Havas: Comic worlds. History and structure of the ninth art. Edition Comic Forum Vienna, 1992.
personal data
SURNAME Wertham, Fredric
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wertheimer, Friedrich Ignatz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American psychiatrist and author
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Nuremberg
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1981
Place of death Kempton , Pennsylvania , Pennsylvania