Today’s featured strip was once immensely popular in its native Germany, but who now remembers the name of Erich Ohser  (1903 – 1944) or his nom de plume E. O. Plauen*? Sic transit gloria mundi, alas.

Cartoonist and illustrator Ohser belonged to a set of three Erichs, the other two being Erich Kästner, a satirist and journalist, and Erich Knauf, a newspaper editor and poet. The three met in Leipzig and found in each other sympathetic souls with a common aesthetic and worldview. The Erich trifecta moved to Berlin at the end of the 1920s, where Knauf became the editor of publishing house Büchergilde Gutenberg, which published Ohser’s cartoons and illustrations as well as volumes of Kästner’s poetry.

All Erichs were ardently opposed to the emerging scourge of Nazis, but Ohser’s caricatures were particularly biting and ‘depicted [HItler and Goebbels]’ cohorts as gangs of dull-witted thugs, employing all the weapons of caricature: exaggeration and distortion, one-sided emphasis and intentional grotesquerie‘**. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Ohser’s work opportunities dried up completely as he was not admitted to the Reich Chamber of Culture, which meant that he couldn’t work at all. Fortunately, the editor of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung finagled a special permission from the Ministry of Propaganda – Ohser could continue working, as long as he used a pseudonym and stayed firmly away from political material. Such was the birth, in 1934, of the weekly strip Vater und Sohn and the sobriquet ‘e.o.p.’, later expanded more officially to E. O. Plauen.

Father and Son won Ohser public acclaim, as well as financial success, but also many copycats and some inevitable appropriation – to Ohser’s chagrin, the strip’s characters were used to advertise Nazi charity drives and political events. Ohser ended the strip in 1937, probably because he felt that his creation was being misused by other hands, but he continued to work on cartoons and illustrations under the same pseudonym. He also had to put his talent at the service of the reviled enemy to survive, producing caricatures of anti-Nazi figures such as Churchill and Roosevelt for Nazi weekly newspaper Das Reich.

« ‘I draw against the Allies – and not for the National Socialists’: This is how Ohser justified his disturbing caricatures of the 1940s to a friend of his, the writer Hans Fallada. He drew Russia as a murderous bear beast, America as a greasy, greedy capitalist, England as a bloodthirsty colonial ruler – it’s hard to believe that the same man gave the world the touching ‘Father and Son’ picture stories. » [source]

This uncomfortable position of living a sort of double life screeched to a halt when Ohser and Knauf were arrested in 1944 after being denounced by their roommate for anti-Nazi sentiment. Ohser committed suicide in his cell the night before the hearing. Knauf was killed a month later after being sentenced to execution by the court.

There are a few collections in various languages drifting about, but the definitive English-language one was published in 2017 by New York Review Comics. Here are a few excerpts from the latter, lovingly colorised (as is often the case around here) by co-admin RG. I also limited my selections to one-pagers, which leaves out (for example) the pleasantly surreal episode spanning many weeks when Father and Son get stranded on a desert island.

The advantage of mute strips is their universality! (Speaking of mute strips, go check out Mr. Mum’s International ‘Anything Can Happen’ Club…)

~ ds

* Plauen is the name of the town where Ohser grew up.

** From the afterword to Vater und Sohn (2015) by Elke Schulze, translated to English.