Word: simplicissimus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Thomas Theodor Heine,*80, cofounder, cartoonist and guiding genius of Germany's late great humor magazine Simplicissimus; in Stockholm. Sharp-penned Heine was jailed for making fun of the Kaiser, exiled in 1933 for making fun of Hitler. In his old age he ruefully remarked that "ridicule does not kill, it popularizes...
...city of Munich, a few days after the Reichstag Fire, six grave men held a meeting. They were the owners of, and chief contributors to, Germany's famous political-satirical magazine-the weekly Simplicissimus, whose biting, brilliant cartoons had ridiculed human stupidity since 1896. Now, the owners of ' Simpl" had met to find an answer to the gravest question human stupidity had ever put to them: "What shall we do when here, too, the Nazis take over?" Simplicissimus' founder, stalwart Thomas Theodor Heine, put the reply calmly: "One simply has to go into exile-pauper fashion...
Into exile, pauper fashion (first in France; later, in the U.S.), went spare, spry Simplicissimus Editor Franz Schoenberner. Confessions of a European Intellectual is the witty, intelligent story of his life-a story whose capacity for hard sense and an all too rare humor gives it a distinct place in refugee literature. As befits the outlook of an editor of satire, it contains no awed descriptions of intimate meetings with famous people; as an intellectual confession it confesses nothing but disrespect for overintellectualized confessions...
Editor Schoenberner's task was to keep Jugend youthful-a job he did so well that soon he was offered the editorship of Jugend's chief competitor, Simplicissimus. While Jugend hunted feverishly for a new editor, Schoenberner performed, the hilarious, exhausting feat of editing both weeklies at the same time. After reading and rejecting hundreds of manuscripts in the Jugend offices, he would speed over to Simplicissimus-only to find that the manuscripts he had just rejected had been sent out again to Simplicissimus...
...Funny Nazis. Much of Editor Schoenberner's book reads like the life story of a character invented by Ludwig Bemelmans. But its humor and gaiety paradoxically give place to sadness when Schoenberner describes his career with Germany's most humorous weekly. Simplicissimus had once numbered Thomas Mann among its staff and George Grosz among its cartoonists; it had published the maiden work of Heinrich Mann and Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, as well as stories by De Maupassant, Chekhov, Strindberg and Hamsun. Under the Kaiser, its Cartoonist-Editor Heine had been imprisoned in a fortress...