Home-Grown Shojo Manga and the Rise of Boys' Love among Germany's 'Forty-Niners'

Unlike the US, England and France, Germany failed to develop an indigenous comics industry in the early twentieth century. Despite the pioneering work of Wilhelm Busch, who in the 1800s had created a number of enduringly popular illustrated stories -- most famously Max and Moritz (1865) -- and notwithstanding a healthy tradition of editorial cartooning through the periods of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, German newspapers never took up the habit of publishing comic strips: there was thus no German equivalent to the American Katzenjammer Kids (created by German emigre Rudolph Dirks in 1897, and themselves inspired by Max and Moritz), to the British Weary Willie and Tired Tim (Tom Browne, 1896), or to Australia's Ginger Meggs (Jimmy Bancks, 1921). The relative lack of comic strips was a significant obstacle to the evolution of German comic books, and the rise to power in 1932 of Adolf Hitler's Nazis, with their desire to control all media, actively discouraged such a development. One of the few notable continuing inter-war German comics is Erich Ohser's pantomime gag strip Vater und Sohn (Father and Son), now regarded as a classic, which appeared from 1934 to 1937 in the tabloid Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung; Ohser had been a liberal political cartoonist during the Weimar Republic, however, and faced with being banned from working by the Nazis, he was forced to publish under the pseudonym E.O. Plauen. From 1940 on Ohser returned to political cartooning; as a result, he was eventually arrested for sedition, and in April 1944 he forestalled his almost certain execution by committing suicide in jail. Adapted from the source document.