Hans Gerner

Hans Gerner (1893-1946)

Hans Gerner, b. 7. February 1893 in Griesbach near Passau. The elementary school teacher living in Crailsheim at that time pushed 1922 into the circle around the "Sonntags-Zeitung"; his first woodblock caricature appeared in the number 46 of the same year. After a brief period of experimentation, Gerner quickly found his typical style, a meaningful and popular form of pictorial glossing of current political events. The popularity of the striking caricatures woodcuts, which quickly became an independent element of the "Sunday newspaper", is also reflected in the summary of folders and books published by the "Sonntags-Zeitung" - already in the years of inflation 1923 / 24 folders were with woodcuts Gerners on Japanese paper as stable value "means of payment". Friedrich Wolf, for whose agitprop theater he provided illustrations, confessed to Hans Gerner: "Your 'political picture book' has given me immense pleasure in this false time. I think you are now - as George Grosz more and more swings into the decorative stage - the only one in Germany, the skin in this notch ". Shortly after the appearance of his last caricature in the "Sonntags-Zeitung" (you see a Nazi chef grazing on a swastika meadow, issue 1933, 12), Gerner will be transferred to the Heuberg concentration camp in April and after his release first to Nürtingen, later to Aalen , In the early 1940s, Hans Gerner relinquished political pressure and joined the party to remain on the job. These experiences may coincide with his early death on the 1933. March 10 have contributed to Aalen.

Independent publications:

Political picture book 1922-1926. Foreword by Max Barth. Stuttgart, Verlag der Sonntags-Zeitung, oy [1926]

Illustrated Constitution of the German Reich of the 11. August 1919. A picture book in woodcuts by HG With a foreword by Erich Schairer. Stuttgart, publisher of the Sunday newspaper, 1930.

Little Hitler album. A collection of woodcuts from the Sonntags-Zeitung. Foreword by Hermann Mauthe. Stuttgart, publisher of the Sunday newspaper, 1932.

Secondary literature on Hans Gerner:

Verband Bildender Künstler Württemberg eV (ed.), Artist fates in the Third Reich in Württemberg and Baden. Stuttgart, Germany [1988]

Günther Wirth, Forbidden Art. Persecuted artists in the German Southwest 1933-1945. Stuttgart 1987

(Biography and bibliography from: Manfred Bosch (ed.), With the jig in the opposition, selection from Erich Schairer's Sunday newspaper 1920-1933, 1989)