Word: simples
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Under Nazi suppression, Simpl's best minds fled the country. The magazine was rudely resurrected under Nazi auspices, but it disappeared near the end of the war. In 1954, a new group took the famous old name and had another go at it. They flailed away at militarism and German pomposity, but somehow things were no longer the same. The targets were indistinct, the barbs not finely honed. Occasionally, as in its current issue, it found the mark. Piqued by what it considered excessive panoply surrounding the Adenauer funeral, the magazine noted that his body had been borne...
Simplicissimus, often shortened familiarly to Simpl, is the honored name of Germany's world-famous satirical magazine. Before World War I, it dabbed acid fun at Kaiser Wilhelm II, and for its lese majesty was frequently banned. It took on new teeth in the 1920s just in time to start potshotting at the rise of Nazism. One Simpl view of Hitler showed the top of his head lifted up to reveal a void within. "Isn't it strange," remarked the magazine, "that you can make such a lot of trouble with so little stuff?" It was not strange...
...Munich, a few days after the Reichstag Fire, six grave men held a meeting. They were the owners of, and chief contributors to, Germany's famous political-satirical magazine-the weekly Simplicissimus, whose biting, brilliant cartoons had ridiculed human stupidity since 1896. Now, the owners of ' Simpl" had met to find an answer to the gravest question human stupidity had ever put to them: "What shall we do when here, too, the Nazis take over?" Simplicissimus' founder, stalwart Thomas Theodor Heine, put the reply calmly: "One simply has to go into exile-pauper fashion...
...reflecting too faithfully "the physiognomy of the reigning class, [of] too ostentatious Government officials . . . officers . . . Junkers [and] the subservient spirit of the small bourgeoisie." In this tradition, Simplicissimus also faithfully recorded each new step in Adolf Hitler's rise to power-a rise which Simpl found too ludicrous to be believable...
...years passed and the menace of Hitler became unmistakable, Editor Schoenberner experienced the pain of watching most of Simpl's staff succumb slowly but surely to the enemy. Strange palsies seized the hands of cartoonists when they were asked to depict Hitler; a poet who had made Germany laugh with his verses "On Hitler's Mustache" took to wearing a brown shirt. When Hitler's minions broke into the offices to tear them apart, they found a magazine that was already dead by its own hand...
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