Comic Art | Ernst Kahl could do it differently

"We Can Do It Differently" is the title of a rather brilliant 1993 film by Detlef Buck, written by Ernst Kahl. In it, two brothers, both inspired by the West, travel to East Germany because they inherited a house in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from their grandmother. The only problem is: They're illiterate and can't read street signs or maps, making it difficult to get anywhere. A sweet road movie that turns into a grotesque crime thriller and, contrary to expectations, has a happy ending – very funny and finely crafted.

Unlike the 1997 Wigald Boning film "The Three Girls from the Gas Station," for which Ernst Kahl also wrote the screenplay. In it, Boning plays a millionaire heir who must first prove himself at a gas station before being allowed to inherit his mother's money. Three women work there, however, and he has an extremely neurotic relationship with women in general, cough. The "Lexikon des Internationalen Films" judged that it was objectionable how "a kind of New German shallowness is celebrated with a minimum of intellectual and directorial effort."

Light and shadow, radiant or depressing: one could say that the satirist Ernst Kahl could also do other things, and he was very good at that: drawing, writing and singing – as a self-taught genius, he taught himself everything, but then also studied a bit of art in Hamburg with David Hockney (without a high school diploma and without an entrance exam) and worked as a corpse washer on the side.

With his style, often described as "old master," he became, alongside F. K. Waechter, F. W. Bernstein, and Hans Traxler , the true old masters of comic art in West Germany, an outstanding artist and illustrator of the New Frankfurt School, associated with the magazine "Titanic." Former editor-in-chief Hans Zippert said of Kahl: "He could do anything. The wild, the bold, the dark, the old master, as well as the sweet, the harmless, the seemingly amateurish. His paintings, cartoons, comics, and installations were a challenge to a dumbed-down reality. He refined the joke into a masterpiece and joked his way through high art."

Born in 1949 and raised in the Schleswig-Holstein countryside as the son of a savings bank branch manager, Ernst Kahl contracted polio at the age of four and spent five weeks in a hospital, where his only entertainment consisted of the "Great Wilhelm Busch Album" lying around, complete with its violent yet hilarious stories. "I don't know whether Busch damaged my psyche at the time, but after five weeks, I was discharged as cured," Kahl wrote in the magazine "Konkret" on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Max and Moritz. It was the same Busch book that his abusive father liked to read to his children at home.

In 2011, Ernst Kahl was awarded the Wilhelm Busch Prize, after having already received the Göttingen Elch, Germany's highest satire prize, in 2007.

Ernst Kahl was considered a very friendly and approachable man who, as a "reserved, quiet provocateur" (Wiglaf Droste), combined horror and silliness into morbid comedy in his drawings and paintings, such as when a little girl offers her ice cream cone to a hanged man, or when a raccoon chases a boy out of his bathtub, or when Michael Jackson can heal wounds with his penis. One of his series of paintings is called "Forgotten Disasters."

To illustrate violent relationships, Kahl often used a seemingly naive children's drawing style and explored themes from religion, sexuality, and colonial history, often using talking animals. His hymn to the poodle is unforgettable: "The prettiest dog in the pack is and remains the poodle (...) The funniest poodle of all, that is and remains the poodle," recorded in 1996 with guitarist Hardy Kayser for their album "Im Kühlschrank brennt noch Licht" (The Light is Still On in the Refrigerator). It also includes a beautiful ode to the "little bird" who is warned to leave its cage because life is so dangerous: "Little bird, don't fly so far when it snows."

As has only just been announced, Ernst Kahl died on July 5 in Schwabstedt, North Frisia. He was 76 years old.