Obituary: Achim Frenz is dead: the man from the card center

There is a photo on my cell phone that shows Achim on April 13th last year in the European Parliament in Brussels, where we both (and several others) were at the invitation of Martin Sonneborn, the MEP from Die Party. As a matter of course, Achim sat down with his girlfriend in the last occupied row to photograph me as I photographed him. In fact, Achim was the man in the background of the German satirist and comic illustrator scene throughout his life. But his impact on this very scene can hardly be overestimated.

It may be that he initially had further ambitions. I got to know Achim at the beginning of the 80s, but initially only in writing. At that time, he and his friend Andreas Sandmann ran an obscure “Card Center – North/Centre” in Kassel, I think because they had found stationery and stamps from the real card center – whatever it was for. This first Frenz company published photocopied pamphlets with confusing content, and as its representative, Achim once contacted the editorial team of the legendary “Dreck Magazine” in Bielefeld by letter, which I was publishing at the time together with Hans Zippert, Fritz Tietz, Harald Lippert and Rüdiger Stanko.

This first contact soon became more. The card headquarters subscribed to the “Dreck Magazine” and possibly even sold it in Kassel. At some point we met in person, in the second half of the 80s, at a “Titanic” party that took place at the “Orfeo” cinema in Frankfurt. “Ah,” I greeted Achim, “the north/centre map center here too.” That became my motto for a long time, whenever we met unexpectedly somewhere.

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A year ago in Brussels we hadn’t seen each other for a while because I had spent most of the 00s and 10s in China. In the 90s, in my role as “Titanic” editor, we met much more often. I wasn’t there when Achim and others organized the first major exhibition of comic art in Kassel in 1987, parallel to the Documenta as a kind of counter-exhibition. It was called “The Full Truth at 70” and showed caricatures by 70 artists and illustrators.

Achim, who came from Bremerhaven, had studied art in Kassel and then founded a group of artists with others that called themselves “Visual Opposition” and mainly made screen-printed posters. When the second major exhibition of the Kartenzentrale, which was then called “Caricatura,” took place in the Museum for Sepulchral Culture in 1992 parallel to Documenta, I was part of the supporting program along with other “Titanic” editors.

I vaguely remember making fun of the idea of ​​exhibiting comic art in a very serious way, much to Achim’s chagrin. But that just shows very clearly how new this approach was at that time, and how relatively young and stupid I was back then. In fact, comic art also needs institutions that promote it, purchase it and classify it historically, and especially places where it is exhibited and collected, also because, as is often still believed today, it is no lesser art.

Achim Frenz did pioneering work in this area in Germany, which becomes very clear in retrospect. He first worked in Kassel, where the “Caricatura – Gallery for Comic Art” opened in the Kulturbahnhof in 1995, and then, since 2008, in the hometown of the New Frankfurt School itself, in Frankfurt am Main. Here he became director of the Caricatura Museum Frankfurt – Museum for Comic Art, which is appropriately and appropriately located in the historic Canvas House, in the immediate vicinity of the Römer.

Since then, the most magnificent exhibitions of comic art have taken place in this place, for which there are only a few places in Germany today, at least in relation to the museums that are dedicated to the art of seriousness.

Achim only retired as director of the museum on November 1st, and less than four months later he died last Monday in Kassel. He was 66 years old. I am very happy that I was able to meet him again last year. There wasn’t much that we talked to each other in Brussels back then. But the greeting was still the same when we met in the foyer of the hotel we shared: “Ah, the north/centre card center. Here too.”

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