Wilhelm Busch:
Landschaft mit Windmühle (Ausschnitt)

Deutschsprachige wissen ja viel mehr über Wilhelm Busch - da kann ich mir das Predigen sparen. Aber bevor Sie mir mit dem kulturspezifischen Struwelpeter oder Karl May daherkommen - vom politisch-inkorrekten Wienerlied ganz zu schweigen - will ich Sie doch auf die rechten Links hinweisen, vor allem auf die Busch-Seiten, die auch viel Visuellem Herberge bieten, auf das wie immer umfangreiche Gutenberg.Spiegel Angebot, auf die Gedichte in Johannes Spangenbergs Sammlung - und auf die Bilder, die ich den anderen Busch Übersetzungen beigefügt habe.

Begeben Sie sich auf Entdeckungsreise! Nur bedenken Sie: Wilhelm Busch ist ein Spiegel. Der beste Spiegel, den Deutschland jemals hatte. Und schon Cervantes warnte vor der Gefahr, die hinter/vor jedwegem Spiegel harrt...

Wilhelm Busch:
Rainy Landscape (Detail)

You may know of Wilhelm Busch as a forerunner of the comic strip - e.g. his much-translated Max und Moritz - and/or as a poet in his own right. What you might not know is that Busch was not just a superior draftsman but also a remarkable painter. Too bad he himself thought little of these efforts, although they came after years of conscientious study.

Not that I have any expertise in painting, far from it, but my gut feeling is that Busch was much better in this regard than he himself or posteriority gave him credit for. The punishingly modest assessments of his own paintings were not praised for what they really were, i.e. signs of a superior but humble personality, but were simply reproduced, again and again, as truths straight from the master's mouth. Then as now, self-effacement is acknowledged only in the very long run. If ever...

To me, some of Busch's images - usually done on the cheap, e.g. on carton, etc. - remind me of paintings that came, around the fin de siecle, most impressively and expressively out of France. (Of course, others are reminiscent of the classical Dutch painters - no surprise since Busch studied painting, among other places, in the Netherlands.) But, then, I am not even a bloody amateur when it comes to holding a brush. It's just that (I think) I know (tempera-mentally, though expressed here in culinary terms) whether an egg is fresh or rotten - even if I can't lay one myself.

Nevertheless, I had great pleasure looking at these images, and I wanted to make some available to my readers, too. On this and other Busch pages. In that context, many thanks to my good cultural Samaritan, let's call her "M", who liberally supplied me with images and insights!

If you want to see more on the Net, there are the marvellous Busch-Seiten and you will find not only the written but also the drawn, painted and sculpted Busch there. Plus, as usual, Gutenberg.Spiegel offers a large assortment of prosa and lyrics, plus many of the comic strips (Bildergeschichten).

I should also mention that this poem sometimes goes under the title of "Herbst" (Autumn). And, if you should you ever get to Hannover, you may may want to visit the large Wilhelm-Busch-Museum, where many of the shown visuals are kept.