“Mother and Daughter” – a contemporary version of the German comic-strip classic „Father and Son“
From 1934 until 1937, the now legendary German comic strip “Vater und Sohn” (Father and Son) appeared in the Berliner Illustrirten Zeitung, a wide-circulation illustrated weekly paper. The creator Erich Ohser, who worked under the pseudonym e.o.plauen, relied on drawings only, using no words at all. The strip quickly became extremely popular, even way beyond its initial German-speaking audience and remained so long after the series ran out. Even today, the stories are reprinted in the form of various collections and are even used for educational purposes.
But what’s behind its massive popularity?
Father and Son might be considered stand-ins for the “little people“, the regular Joes who never come up with a winner in life’s lottery. But in these stories the two protagonists use their creativity and anarchic wit to solve whatever dilemmas come their way. And because they do this in a very likeable and often hilarious way, we experience great sympathy for the characters.
In Germany, Father and Son have become timeless figures, even veritable archetypes. In fact, they are timeless in a way that still continue to inspire new interpretations, even three generations after their original creation. By now, several artist have tried their hand at reviving the congenial couple, sometimes as the traditional male interpretation other times as a female version. However, this is not the place for a comprehensive study of the reception history of the strip. I gladly leave that to the scholars.
The comic strip you’ll find on this website is my personal homage to a classic that has been with me since early childhood – albeit in their Father-and-Son incarnation and not, as with me, as Mother and Daughter. The idea to take this on, stems from the time when COVID struck and I was stuck at home for months on end. Naturally it took some time for the characters to evolve and taking on a life of their own. But now it’s done, and – starting February 25th – you’ll find a new strip on this site every Tuesday for the next 33 weeks.
The Artist
Katharina Greve, born in 1972 in Hamburg, Germany, studied architecture at TU Berlin and has since switched to full-time cartoonist, comic strip artist, creator of graphic novels, and, last but not least, ex-architect. She works for some of the most renowned satirical publications in Germany while also doing political caricature work for well-respected broadsheets. Katharina has so far published eight volumes of comic/cartoon art, graphic novels and the like. Her last publication (2024) was “Princes Petronia – The Brimborium Strikes Back” released through Avant Publishers.
For her work she received several awards. Among others, the 2016 Max-and-Moritz Award for her webcomic “The High Rise”; in 2017 she won 3rd place at the German Cartoon Awards and in 2021 and 2024 she won German Caricature Awards for satiric newspaper cartoons.
The Father of the „Father and Son” Cartoons
Erich Ohser was born in 1903 in Saxony and grew up in the town of Plauen. After graduating from Leipzig Art School, he moved to Berlin in the late 1920s. Here he made a name for himself as a book illustrator – for his friend Erich Kästner among others – as well as a political caricaturist for left-leaning periodicals. Among the chief subjects of Ohser’s satirical work were the rise of the Nazi Party and their exponents Hitler and Goebbels.
At the beginning of the Nazi reign, Ohser 1934 applied to join the Reichspressekammer, a censorship institution that was to oversee the press and publishing businesses. Ohser was not accepted, which was tantamount to an occupational ban. But when the major Ullstein publishing group searched for an American style comic strip for their Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung paper, they landed on Ohser’s “Father and Son” strips. At that point the publishing house still had enough clout to wangle an special permit for the artist. However, he had to fulfill two requirements: the strips must not be political in any way, also he was not allowed to use the name he was known under as a political caricaturist. Ohsen complied and chose as a pseudonym the name e.o. plauen – his initials plus the name of his hometown.
The warmhearted and slightly mischievous and subversive series instantly became a great success. Even while the strip was still running in the paper, three anthologies were published with printings of tens of thousands of copies. Father and Son trading cards, toys, figurines, and even stage plays followed, and there was advertising for coffee filters and cigars. This overwhelming omnipresence, along with the fact that he, as an artist, was being reduced exclusively to this one work, has probably contributed to Ohser’s decision to end the series in 1937 after 157 instalments.
It came as shock to many when in 1940 Ohser started drawing caricatures of the allied enemy for the Nazi weekly Das Reich. However, among friends Ohser continued to make fun of Hitler and his cronies – which turned out to be his undoing. In 1944, neighbors informed on him and he was duly arrested by the Gestapo. The night before his trial, Ohser committed suicide.
> Official biography on the homepage of Erich-Ohser House, Plauen
