Expect the Unexpected. Essays über Tomi Ungerer zu seinem 80. Geburtstag ed. by Daniel Keel, et al (review)

Tomi Ungerer: obsessive, creative, provocative.

The mild Maurice and the wild Tomi? They must have made a remarkable pair, producing images and picture books in the hectic city of New York in the 1950s and 1960s. When Maurice Sendak completed the series of his popular bear books with A Kiss for Little Bear, Tomi Ungerer countered with No Kiss for Mother, a picture book about bad kitty Piper Paw, which caused outrage in the United States. Probably most readers had not noticed the hidden explosive in Sendak’s final picture, and even less so the gesture of reconciliation at the end of Ungerer’s story. It seems that the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and the enfant terrible from Alsace, who grew up under German and French repression, are closer than they may seem at first glance. “All minorities,” Ungerer suggested in 1997, “share the same humour: Jews, the Irish, Alsatians. Black humour” (112).

On November 28, 2011, Tomi Ungerer, who now lives in Ireland following long years in New York and the Canadian Nova Scotia—with many interludes in his home town of Strasbourg—celebrated his eightieth birthday. In honour of this birthday, Diogenes published a celebra-tory volume of essays on him, authored over the last forty-four years by drawing and writing colleagues, including Ungerer himself. They feature an obsessively creative man and the impressively wide spectrum of his creations. Even readers primarily interested in his books for children will gain from learning more about his work not suited or intended for younger audiences. Because the sense of uneasiness with the modern adult world so vividly expressed in his commercial, personal, and political art also informs Ungerer’s work for children, it prevents it from indulging in the children’s book genre’s wide-spread harmlessness. This overall subversive consciousness is rightly highlighted by the contributors who work in the field of children’s literature criticism (Ute Blaich, Roswitha Budeus-Budde).

Essays reflecting this more subversive strand include contributions on the early caricaturesque drawings of a U.S.-American society besottet with sex and technology (Jonathan Miller, Walter Killy), on provocative political posters (Hellmuth Karasek), and punchy, facetious advertising graphics (Robert Gernhardt). Ungerer himself reflects on his illustrations of Das große Liederbuch [The great book of song], which cannot deny their nostalgic origin despite their darker duplicity. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the great Swiss playwright, observes how opposites converge in Ungerer’s work: the idyllic in the Song Book and Heidi illustrations on the one hand, and the monstrosities in Fornicon and Babylon on the other, modelled on nineteenth-century precursors as varied as Ludwig Richter and Honoré Daumier. In her honorific speech to the Kästner Prize, Jutta Limbach draws out the parallels between Ungerer and Kästner, who passed equally harsh judgement on adults while openly reaching out to children—Kästner did so in writing, Ungerer mainly in pictures.

Art historian Werner Spies digs deeper, analyzing Ungerer’s art in relation to modern art, especially the works of Picasso and Max Ernst. Andreas Platthaus draws on his intimate knowledge of Ungerer’s art to profile the oeuvre of this verbal-visual genius in its uniqueness. In a second contribution focusing on Ungerer the writer, Platthaus traces two models to the picture book cat Piper Paw: the recalcitrant tomcat Piper in Heute hier, morgen fort [Here today, gone tomorrow] and the author himself as child in Es war einmal mein Vater [Once upon a time my father] (205). Personal memories of Reinhard Stumm and Thomas David’s description of a day in Ungerer’s Irish workshop give insight into the artist’s creative process. Overall, readers will regret the publisher’s decision not to include any illustrations in this collection of essays, especially when specific images are referenced. Readers can instead...