Obituary for Janosch: Horst Eckert's collected fears

In any case, a lot has died in the oeuvre of Horst Eckert, whom the world only knew as Janosch. Even in children's books and often ridiculously unnecessary. The death of the hare, which, unlike in the popular original, forces the hedgehog to run, is celebrated with relish. And with Janosch he doesn't need any trickery to triumph. He doesn't care at all. The hedgehog immediately forgets that he was even involved in a race and instead goes to the lake for a picnic with his wife. The two of them are having a nice time. In this version, no one is interested in competition except the neoliberal bunny. He really wants to be the winner.

And so he runs with the starting advantage of his long legs, of which he is extremely proud, from Olmburch via Brehm and Lümmeburch to Hamburch, but is run over by a car, gets caught in a trap, has an accident and injures himself in the most horrific way. But he still sticks rigidly to his goal. He wants to be a winner with his long legs. Which is why he panics that the hedgehog might have overtaken him as a result of all the accidents, "and tortures himself with his fear until he dies."

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Janosch described the beginning of his career in one of his unreliable autobiographical sketches at the end of the 1990s that he started “wanting to be a painter” because he “didn’t want to work anymore.” For a machine cleaner in the wool combing mill, working meant “your fingers could get caught between the gears”.

And then he decides: he's not going to take part. And escapes from work into an activity that he has always refused to call art. He calls what he does “taking freedom to the extreme.” This is no less modest, just much more radical in its rejection of bourgeois conventions. Because it can also mean just spending the day dozing in a hammock and imagining images in the air.

The canonical picture books of the 70s and 80s come from this world of aerial photography. It often seems cute and harmless at first glance. But Janosch's dream world is animated by desires and lusts, often a polymorphic sexuality. The happiest couple in the entire work - even more than the naked woman and the strange bird - are the cricket and the mole, whose clumsy tenderness sometimes slips into violence. This world is grounded in a variety of fears: the fear of uniformed gunmen, the fear of brutal clergy, the fear of and the longing for overpowering women. The protagonists have to deal with this somehow. They do it as impostors and ruthless liars, many of them are losers, vegetarian crocodiles, boastful mice, people who give everything for their apple until its weight almost crushes them.

They are never role models. Even the nicest of his characters have ulterior motives. Or they are trusted. Also the wolf in “The Lives of Animals” (1981). Sure, he gave the little pig an entertaining, wonderful pig life. But did he just fatten it up so that he could eat it all the more with pleasure? Or did he really love it? Not certain. Never comes out. Because before anything could happen, “the wolf died and was buried.”

Janosch lived to be a blessed 95 years old, which borders on a miracle because he did not live a healthy life. Childhood in Hindenburg, now Zabrze, would probably have been hell even without the war. He spent almost half of his life in Tenerife, where he moved in 1980 and lived until the end. For a long time, Janosch believed that he could burn out his soul wounds with hard alcohol. He was a person who had been injured in many ways. He died on November 4th.