The grinning penguin

Lachen links, L‘Asino, El Borinot, Il Bec­co Gial­lo, Sim­pli­cis­simus. Titles like these helped shape the artis­tic resis­tance against fas­cism in the 1920s and 1930s. In numer­ous satir­i­cal jour­nals, illus­tra­tors, poets and writ­ers used their means to fight against polit­i­cal insan­i­ty, which attract­ed large sec­tions of the pop­u­la­tion to its side in the inter­war peri­od (11 Novem­ber 1918 — 1 Sep­tem­ber 1939) and expressed itself in Europe par­tic­u­lar­ly in Aus­tro­fas­cism under Doll­fuß and Schuschnigg, in Ital­ian Fas­cism under Mus­soli­ni, in Span­ish Fas­cism under Pri­mo de Rivera and Fran­co and in Nation­al Social­ism under Hitler.

qujOchÖ takes this as a start­ing point for an exam­i­na­tion of this spe­cif­ic form of resis­tance and a trans­for­ma­tion into the present. Along draw­ings, illus­tra­tions, poems and sto­ries from that time qujOchÖ, togeth­er with friend­ly artists, fol­lows the foot­steps of Olaf Gul­brans­son, Rag­n­vald Blix, Franziska Bilek & Co, and of often for­got­ten illus­tra­tors, poets and writers.

Some of the satir­i­cal jour­nals pub­lished in the inter­war peri­od have been dig­i­tized and made freely acces­si­ble in recent years, e. g. the Hei­del­berg his­tor­i­cal hold­ings at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hei­del­berg or the online edi­tion of Klas­sik Stiftung Weimar, Deutsches Lit­er­at­u­rar­chiv Mar­bach and RWTH Aachen. In addi­tion, there are exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logues and sci­en­tif­ic texts ded­i­cat­ed to the satire of these years. qujOchÖ sifts this mate­r­i­al and builds a small archive which serves as the basis for the pro­duc­tion of its own satir­i­cal mag­a­zine enti­tled “Der grin­sende Pen­guin”. Sub­ti­tle: “Satire für die 20er-Jahrs” (in engl. “The grin­ning pen­guin — Satire for the 20s”). The mag­a­zine is pub­lished in a total of three issues with a cir­cu­la­tion of 7,500 copies, print­ed in broad­sheet on 60 g/m2 recy­cled paper with 8 pages in col­or. It is dis­trib­uted in Vien­na, Graz, Linz, Salzburg and Innsbruck.

If the pen­guin jumps into the water, don’t be afraid, just jump after him!

Ö1 Lep­orel­lo: Vor­witz im Frack, 25. März 2020

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