To this day I like cartoons and comic-strips. Not all of them, of course. But whether it's Gary Larson, Bill Waterson, or Matt Groening--whether it's the new comic WUMO, Pickles, Non-Sequitur, Zits or Dustin--I love them.
One of my morning and breakfast rituals is to tear the comic page out of the paper and hand it over to my son, Gabriel. Before him I would do the same for his older brother Jacob who is in Germany now. And before he even takes the first bite from his piece of Nutella toast Gabriel will already have "digested" the first two or three comics of the day. WUMO ist witzig (WUMO is funny) he told me today. I do not read them before he has. It would feel like spoiling his laughter and joy at reading and understanding the joke or punch-line. I like for him to tell me what he thinks is funny; and I like for me to be surprised at what he picks.
The person who introduced me to comics was my step-grandfather, Kurt Kutscher. He was the man who joined my father's mother, shortly after the war. They never married and the story is that he simply left his family in Hitzacker, a small town not so far from Hamburg. My father never really liked "Kutscher" as he was called by him and his brother, Jens (their mother called him (Kuuuaard"). I knew him as "Opa Jens"--not to be confused with "Opa Volkswagen" my mother's father. My father's brother, Jens, on the other hand seemed to get along beautifully with Kutscher.
Opa Jens was a short often short-tempered and brash man. He was an unlearned helper at construction sites and had picked up quite a few construction skills over the years. No, he was not very educated, but he provided for my grandmother and her two sons, she had just become a war-widow, and became an indispensable part of the family.
Opa Jens was a simple man. He always wore the same type of clothes: long-sleeved underwear, a flannel shirt, and a type of thick corduroy pants that were held up with suspenders. He was quite bow-legged and stiff in the knees. In my recollection he moved quite like one would imagine a sailor to move, stiff legs, shuffling a bit, shifting his body from side to side.
Opa Jens often would take us to the little shop next door, Eckmann's, where he would buy us ice-cream and candy, treats we would rarely get from our parents. And while I often felt that he didn't quite know how to handle me (likely because I cried often), he looked out for me and would frequently introduce me to others as his "Enkelsohn" "Grandson."
Opa Jens had a shed that was a room in the old animal stall on the property. We all called it "Opas Schuppen." It was the room that years before had housed the chickens. In the back of this room there was a door to another smaller room and then yet another door to an even smaller one. In my mind the mystery of his Schuppen and the building itself got greater with every door through which one could go. What treasures may lie all the way in the back? Opa Jens had built a few work-benches into the biggest room. They were filled with tools and little screw/bolt/nut organizers. On the walls hung his saws, scythes of many shapes and sizes and even the blades for his circular table saw (an instrument of extreme power and noise which he knew how to use perfectly: pushing wood across it only millimeters away from the powerfully spinning blade). He was a man who knew how to use tools!
Opa Jens had only a few routines. One of them was a weekly trip to the tobacco shop around the corner where he would pick up the weekly stash of cigarettes for him and my grandmother (Ernte 23 for him, Juno ohne Filter for her). On this trip he also would pick up the latest editions of a few weekly comics he liked. Sometimes I would accompany him on these trips. The comics were laid out across the counter, along with other weekly magazines. I remember to this day the peculiar smell that came from the mix of fresh ink and paper with various tobaccos from cigarettes and cigars. Brightly colored comic books they were with names like Bessy (about a young farmer's boy and his collie), Silberpfeil (about a Kiowa chief and his white friend; a very popular coupling in the German imagination), Reno Kid (about a lone cowboy seeking justice but only finding injustice), Lucky Luke (with a permanent cigarette in the corner of his mouth) and Wastl (an unlikely super-hero in a bright yellow suit who looked like a cross between pop-eye, captain Ahab, and Superman).
Once he had purchased them and we had returned home. He would toss them on the table and begin reading while smoking. I could not touch them until he was done with the first book. And while he began poring over the next one, I got to read the one he had just finished. I could never tell, if he really read them or just looked at the pictures, puzzling together the stories in that way. One thing he never did, but I couldn't wait to do was turn to the back of every comic book where there usually was a small compilation of drawn and written jokes. These jokes were my first introduction to humor. Some of the jokes I remember to this day and some of the punch-lines have even made it into parenting moments with my boys. All three will remember the one were the street sales person calls out "Heisse Wuerstchen, heisse Wuerstchen" (hot sausages) and a passerby stops shakes the sales person's hand says "angenehm, heisse Meyer" (my pleasure, my name is Meyer). It just so happens that the word for "hot" can, in some syntactical constellations, sound like the conjugated form of the German word for "my name is." The joke, of course, being that while the second person's last name is Meyer the first person's last name seems to be "Wuerstchen" (tiny sausage).
The majority of these comics, by the way, was drawn and written realistically, only Wastl and Lucky Luke were not. So, there was not much humor inside the comic-books themselves. And although I often quite liked the stories I savored the jokes on the back. I would force myself to read through the whole comic-book before I allowed myself to read the jokes.
When my grandfather was done with the comic-books he would hand them to me to keep. My small three-shelf bookshelf at the time soon carried mostly comic-books. I would often look through them to look for jokes I had forgotten or even over-looked.
One day, however, I decided that I didn't want the comic-books anymore. To this day I don't know, if I really didn't want them anymore or if I had somehow, somewhere picked up the notion that "at my age" (9-10) one should not read comic-books anymore but rather focus on real books. I just don't remember. I decided to get rid of them and threw them in the garbage.
A day later Opa Jens found them in the garbage can, confronted first me, then my mother. He was deeply hurt and angry with me. For him seeing those books in the garbage was a slap in the face. And even though I had not for a moment considered this when I threw them out, I understood it immediately when I saw his anger. My mother defended me with a good logical, but shallow, argument: Opa Jens had given them to me; I should be free to do with them as I please. But I could never feel quite good about that argument. And, what was even worse, I missed them! I missed those comic-books! I knew, partly by Opa Jens' anger, that I had made the wrong decision when I threw them out.
Opa Jens said he would never let me have a comic-book again. I mourned the loss of trust. But slowly his hurt healed. At first I could not read them at all, but after a few months he would let me "borrow" them and later he said I could keep them after all.
I have to believe that Opa Jens somehow "knew" that the act of throwing out those books as not about him. He "knew" that I had done it perhaps to please others, to appeal to another person(s), to become "older" and more "mature." But like he must often have felt in this life, my decision to dispose of the books had felt to him like I had disposed of him. He had had a hard life, the comic-books were the riches he had bestowed on me (none of which I could have known at that time, but I do now), finding them in the garbage must have struck a chord of worthlessness in him, more powerful than one can imagine.
But he and I overcame the pain. As I grew and became stronger he often would rely on me to help with manual tasks: lawn-mowing, raking, moving heavy items and later driving him and my grandmother. He never spoke to me about his other family, but I have to believe that his care for my sister and me was his attempt at making up for the hurt he likely created in the family he left behind.
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