Satire: Cartoonist Rainer Hachfeld: Good and Evil

The first caricature by Rainer Hachfeld was published by “Neues Deutschland” on December 27, 1989: a beheaded GDR, depicted as “Deutscher Michel” on his knees, hands her decapitated head on a tray to Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his Finance Minister Theo Waigel and Kohl says: “That’s how I imagine it, Theo…” Rainer Hachfeld came from the agitational imagery of the non-governmental left of the 1970s. His drawings were extremely rich in contrast, he made a clear distinction between light and shadow, good and evil, above and below.

In December 1989, the GDR was already pretty much down, its population hadn’t quite understood it yet – a year later it had disappeared, but the “New Germany” remained, and to the astonishment of the West, it was saved again and again by its readers. And Hachfield became the newspaper’s in-house cartoonist, alternating with Christiane Pfohlmann and Harald Kretzschmar until January 30, 2019.

Hachfeld’s caricatures were based on classic anti-imperialism in all its symbolic drasticity, clearly recognizable as in a comic or an instruction manual. The US was “Uncle Sam” in a stars-and-stripes tie, the CIA was floppy hat types in sunglasses, sinking their teeth into the Latin American continent as if it were a big slice of pizza; Corporations appeared as whores and politicians as hand puppets. Animal comparisons were not a problem for Hachfeld, nor was the sexualization of political violence. One of his most famous drawings, which he made for “Konkret,” shows CSU leader Franz Josef Strauss having sex with the judiciary. Strauss sued him and ultimately won justice before the Federal Constitutional Court, where Hachfeld had gone to defend the freedom of art.

“The rude is a source of jokes, of satire,” Hachfeld told “nd” on his 70th birthday in 2009, because “a caricature is not supposed to spread good taste, but rather critical understanding.” He published his first newspaper drawing in the “Welt” in 1961, without any political aspirations. Born in Ludwigshafen, he originally wanted to become a painter in Paris, but then he worked in an advertising agency and also painted sets for West Berlin cabarets, from which his older brother Volker Ludwig also came, who later founded the anti-authoritarian Grips Theater for children. The brother’s actual name was the same as their father, the cabaret artist and lyricist Eckhart Hachfeld (1910–1994), but he didn’t want to be confused.

Rainer Hachfeld, who also wrote screenplays, became unmistakable through his caricatures. First for the “Spandauer Volksblatt”, the most liberal newspaper in West Berlin in the 1960s, then for the “Berliner Extra Dienst”, the loosest paper from the staid SEW corner in the 1970s, before he became satire editor at “Stern”. “Is a good cartoonist automatically a leftist?” “nd” asked him. Answer: “I haven’t seen any good right-wing cartoons yet.”

He died in Berlin at the beginning of the week; he was 85 years old.

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