November 2003
Simply Red
The story of Munich's most famous satirical magazine
Under its last emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s rigid social hierarchy, conventional attitudes and traditional values laid themselves wide open to the subversive force of satire. From 1896 onwards, the preeminent mouthpiece of liberal literary criticism was a Munich-based weekly magazine entitled
Simplicissimus.
Why Munich? The capital, Berlin, had its own magazine,
Kladderadatsch, founded half a century earlier. The proximity of the government and the royal family encouraged a moderate, subtle and laconic satire. By contrast, Munich was a light-hearted, cosmopolitan city that nourished the Bavarian sense of the exuberantly foolish and boisterously comical, a city whose inhabitants, as Frank Wedekind maliciously put it, hurried past Greek temples and Roman triumphal arches in search of the nearest
Bierlokal. Its amiable Prince Regent in his ordinary, bourgeois clothes and baggy trousers preferred to see artists and intellectuals rather than government officials dining at his table. On New Year’s Eve of 1896, an impoverished artist, Thomas Theodor Heine, sat in a
Kaffeestube in Munich dejectedly nursing a glass of punch when he was approached by an aspiring editor, Albert Langen, with the idea of creating a literary weekly magazine for a mere ten Pfennige an issue. The two young entrepreneurs took their plan to Thomas Mann’s father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim—a professor of mathematics, whose home was a well-known meeting place for intellectuals—for advice and encouragement. By April the magazine was in the newsstands. The first issue boldly proclaimed:
“No sword, nor helm, nor lance shall I now bear,
The deadly word’s my weapon, I declare.”
Although the title
Simplicissimus alluded to the main character in a 17th-century picaresque novel by Johann Jakob von Grimmelshausen that held up a mirror to the cultural mores of its time through the misfortunes of its naive hero, the model for the magazine’s role in both real and literary terms was the court jester, whose comments traditionally served to question royal authority.
“I am a jester, yes indeed.
The bells on my cap and not in the spire
Will greet all those that to merriment aspire,
For laughter is our common creed.”
Langen was initially interested above all in satire that targeted everyday life. Aphorisms, anecdotes, fables and literary sketches best fulfilled this purpose—brief and biting. He welcomed and nurtured a wide range of authors, nearly all of whom, like the editorial staff, were under the age of 30: Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann as well as Frank Wedekind and Rainer Maria Rilke contributed occasionally, but the magazine relied primarily on regular features, such as the
Lausbubengeschichten (scalligwag’s tales), by Ludwig Thoma. These were subjectively narrated stories told from a child’s point of view, innocently describing and thus also ridiculing the idiosyncrasies of bourgeois aspirations in Wilhelmine Germany.
The magazine did not only feature everyday, situational comedy. It came increasingly to rely upon political satire. Following the adoption of the Imperial Press Laws of 1874 that proscribed specific penalties for what was termed
Majestätsbeleidigung (insults to the person of the monarch), such insults, real or perceived, were severely punished. In 1898 a
Simplicissimus cartoon showed a fairy-tale prince in Rococo dress rejecting New Year’s greetings from his courtiers with the comment: “1898? But I thought that I had ordered time to go backwards!” The real
casus belli, however, was the cover drawing of issue 31 of 1898. The German Emperor had recently visited Palestine and delivered a militant speech in Damascus that seemed intent upon stirring up trouble between Muslims and the colonial powers of France and Britain. The cartoon, by Thomas Theodor Heine, showed the German Emperor Barbarossa—easily identifiable as Kaiser William II by virtue of the Prussian spiked-helmet in his hand—snickering over the territorial ambitions that prompted the Crusades and, by implication, current foreign policy. Inside the magazine an anonymous poem added insult to injury:
“So once again we welcome you, my Lord,
And many thanks for saving our good name.
For if your far-flung travels had ignored
The Holy Land, we would have died of shame.”
The inference was clear and so were the consequences. Sale of the magazine was immediately banned at Prussian railway stations. Heine was brought to trial and was sentenced to six months’ detention. Langen fled to Zurich and then Paris, returning to Munich only five years later, after he had paid a fine of 30,000 gold marks. The author of the poem was identified as Frank Wedekind and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Magazine sales jumped from 15,000 to 86,000, demonstrating almost by accident how profitable political satire could be.
The magazine’s readership recruited itself largely from the middle classes—although their social aspirations were frequently the butt of
Simplicissimus’ barbed wit. The most common target was authority in all its forms. For a while this included the Wittelsbach family, lampooned for selling off the royal collection of art to the Bavarian state or kowtowing to its powerful Prussian neighbor. The most obvious representative of authority was Prussian militarism. Increasingly, in the years prior to the Great War,
Simplicissimus ridiculed the aristocracy that occupied the upper echelons of military and economic structures for its feeble-minded reliance on the skills of the newly rising middle-class officers. The anti-militarism of these years was a product of Bavarian aversion to the formality of Prussian army structures. The goose-step or dueling lieutenants, not the army’s actual purpose, remained the focus of satirical attention until the very eve of World War I. Nonetheless, the magazine’s influence was considered so dangerous that, as of 1910, officers were required to sign a pledge swearing not to read it.
During these years the magazine’s political tone became overtly socialist—possibly because class distinctions were less rigid in Bavaria than elsewhere—actively supporting the huge strikes that shook German industry in the early years of the 20th century as well as the first Russian revolution, in 1905. Yet its support was based on stereotypical representations of the working classes and revealed its authors as victims of the very structures they themselves were seeking to undermine.
Albert Langen lost control of the magazine in 1906, when his fellow editors and artists demanded and were given a share of the profits in one of the earliest examples of self-management by a company of artists. He died three years later and was succeeded as editor-in-chief by Ludwig Thoma. Whereas Langen had always maintained a kind of literary internationalism (Marcel Proust also contributed), his successor was a staunch nationalist and encouraged not only anti-French but above all anti-British sentiment in the magazine’s contributions. From today’s perspective it may seem strange that
Simplicissimus berated and mocked Germany’s major institutions and political instruments while championing its interests within Europe, but such was the ideological balancing act that pervaded much literary and social criticism in prewar Germany. Britain was a particularly popular subject for virulent satire. During the Boer War a podgy Edward VII was shown trampling tiny inhabitants of a British concentration camp to a pulp, with the words: “This blood is splashing me from head to toe. My crown is getting dirty.” America fared little better. The German ambassador to Washington, DC, was graphically depicted in the process of ingratiating himself into a particular orifice—retribution for having reacted too timidly in the face of perceived American aggression. The tone of such commentary was consistently xenophobic and is now credited with contributing towards the deterioration of relations between Germany and its international interlocutors.
The outbreak of World War I obviously called for a revision of the magazine’s purpose. What had been a mouthpiece for unabashed and irreverent criticism now felt itself called upon, under the direction of Thoma, to provide patriotic support for the nation’s defense. Within a week the German general Paul von Hindenburg was being referred to, in all seriousness, as “our hero.” Patriotic fervor was absolute and unconditional. The arsenal of vitriol previously directed at domestic institutions and structures was now focused on Germany’s enemies. After the war a defeated and demoralized Germany was particularly sensitive to criticism. Overt and disrespectful satire was often equated with disloyalty. Ludwig Thoma, whose personal politics were now extremely conservative, no longer contributed political pieces and distanced himself from his prewar jibes at the status quo. Other members of the editorial board found themselves inhibited by the climate of economic and social depression. Postwar German society was a more desperate and less structured place with fewer comic stereotypes to serve as the butt of satirical comment. Competition sprang up in the form of other illustrated magazines that vied with
Simplicissimus for the custom of an increasingly penurious readership. Munich itself became a center of political reaction unsuited to the liberal tone that the magazine sought to recapture in the 1920s, but attempts to move the editorial offices to Berlin failed because most of the editors were too snugly ensconced in comfortable houses outside Munich.
The magazine’s failure to assess the threat posed by Hitler and the National Socialists was symptomatic of its inability to engage fully with postwar German reality. Not until it was too late did members of the editorial board, such as Heine, target the party and its leader, and even then he faced opposition from other board members. The Nazis themselves wasted no time in shutting down the magazine following their take-over of Bavaria in March 1933. Heine, who was of Jewish extraction, fled to Norway and lived to tell the tale of his satirical exploits. The magazine, robbed of the entrenched social structures and stereotypes on which satire feeds and lacking the charisma and courage of its founding members, faded into oblivion.
