Strange art – Ernst Kahl could do it differently

“We can do it differently” is the name of a fairly brilliant film by Detlef Buck from 1993, to which Ernst Kahl wrote the script. In it, two spins and brothers from western Germany drive to East Germany because they inherited a house in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from their grandmother. The only problem is: they are illiterate and cannot read the street signs nor the street cards and are therefore difficult to progress. A cute road movie that becomes a crime -redesque and, contrary to expectations, it also goes out well – very funny and finely worked.

Unlike the Wigald Boning film “The Three Girls from the 1997 petrol station”, to which Ernst Kahl also wrote the script. In it, Boning plays a million inheritance who has to prove himself at a petrol station before he can compete with his mother’s legacy. However, three women work there, and he has an extremely neurotic relationship with women in general, cough. It should be rejected, as “with a minimum of mental and staging effort, a kind of new German flatness is celebrated”, the “Lexicon of International Film” judged.

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Light and shadow, radiant or depressing: You can say that the satirist Ernst Kahl could also be different, and he could do a lot: drawing, texts and singing – as a autodidactic genius, taught everything himself, but then also studying a little art in Hamburg with David Hockney (without high school and without an entrance exam) and also re -reinforced.

In addition to F. K. Waechter, F. W. Bernstein and Hans Bernstein and Hans Traxler, the actual old masters of comic art in the FRG, he became an outstanding artist and draftsman of the new Frankfurt School in addition to F. K. Waechter, F. W. Waechter, F. W. W. Waechter. The former editor -in -chief Hans Zippert judges Kahl: »He could do everything. The wild, brazen, black, old mastery, just like the lovely, harmless, apparently amateurous. His pictures, cartoons, comics and installations were a declaration of war on a stupid reality. He refined the Kalauer to the masterpiece and calmed down through the art art. «

Born in 1949 and raised in the Schleswig-Holstein province as the son of a Sparkasse branch manager, Ernst Kahl suffered from children with four years and spent five weeks in a hospital, where the only entertainment in the “Great Wilhelm-Busch-Album” existed there, with his violent and funny stories. “I don’t know if Busch injured my psyche at the time, after five weeks I was dismissed as healed,” said Kahl in the magazine “Specifically” on the 150th birthday of Max and Moritz. It was the same bush book, from which his beating father also liked to perform at home with the children.

In 2011 Ernst Kahl was awarded the Wilhelm Busch Prize after he had already received the highest German satire award in 2007.

Ernst Kahl was considered a very friendly and easy -to -manner man who, as a “reserved, silent provocateur” (Wiglaf Droste) in his drawings and pictures, horror and silly to Morbider Komik, for example when a little girl offers a hanging her waffle ice or if a raccoon drives a boy from his bathtub or can heal Michael Jackson with his penis wounds. One of his series of pictures is called “forgotten disasters”.

To illustrate violence, Kahl often used a false-naive children’s marking style and edited topics from religion, sexuality and colonial history, also in the form of speaking animals. His praise of the poodle is unforgettable: “The most beautiful dog in the Ruuuudel is and remains the cuuudel (…) of all the funniest nuuuudel, that is and remains the puuud, recorded in 1996, together with the guitarist Hardy Kayser for her album” In the fridge is still on fire “. There is also a very nice ode on the “little bird”, which is warned to leave his cage because life is so dangerous: “Little bird does not fly as far as it is snowing”.

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