It's been a long time since the Erlangen International Comic Salon has travelled this far back into the history of the medium with an exhibition, namely to the birth year of the modern comic, New York in 1897! And to our great astonishment, we don't meet any real Americans there, but two brothers, Rudolph and Gus Dirks, who were born in the northern German town of Heide in Holstein: two Germans at the cradle of comics! Wow!

The exhibition tells the story of the Dirks family, who decided to emigrate to America with their seven children in 1882 because they hoped for a better life there. It was a time when Germans were still economic migrants. However, the American dream only materialised for a few. The Dirks' were one of them.

Two of their sons, Rudolph and Gus, showed an early talent for drawing. Rudolph was the first to go to New York to try his luck. Two years later, his younger brother Gus followed him. With a bit of luck, Rudolph got his foot in the door of one of New York's biggest newspapers, William Randolph Hearst's "NY Journal". In December 1897, his meteoric rise to a celebrated comic pioneer began there with "The Katzenjammer Kids": publisher Hearst explicitly wanted the 20-year-old to do something like Wilhelm Busch, and so Dirks' characters Hans and Fritz became the rebellious-anarchist heirs to Max and Moritz. They spoke a German-English gibberish that corresponded to the diction of the immigrants and became a major source of the comic strip's special charm and humour. Gus Dirk's talent was even greater than that of his older brother and he was able to choose his clients in New York. However, his career only lasted a short three years. In 1902, Gus Dirks took his own life at the age of 21. The story of the Dirks brothers around 1900 is also the story of a capitalist world in upheaval: the mass media emerge, the first signs of a leisure society can be recognised and in technology there is a spirit of optimism of "anything goes": automobiles replace carriages and the first films flicker across the screen in darkened rooms.

The exhibition presents original drawings and newspaper pages as well as rare documents from the time and the archives of the Dirks family. The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive monograph on the life and work of the Dirks brothers (avant-verlag, Berlin).

Alexander Braun

An exhibition in co-operation with the Kunstmuseum Erlangen