The True Story of Max and Moritz: Ancient and Medieval Texts before W. Busch

Abstract

Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908) was a German cartoonist and poet whose most famous work was an illustrated dogtrot verse about a pair of little hellions called Max and Moritz. Published in German in 1865, it has delighted generations of German children and their parents and was eventually translated into English by editor and litterateur Christopher Morley in 1932. Knowledge of the Max and Moritz saga had come to Americans earlier, however, through the comic strip “The Katzenjammer Kids” (later “The Captain and the Kids”), first drawn by Rudolph Dirks for the New York Journal in 1897 and long continuing in popularity. (I remember a version of the cartoon in the 1930s as my own childhood favorite Sunday reading.) Katzenjammer is German for a ‘hangover headache’ (literally “cat’s clamoring”), which is presumably what the terrible twosome gave all the adults around them. Manfred Gorlach has continued and much expanded the Max and Moritz corpus by orchestrating the “discovery” for an overexpanding number of versions of the poem in many languages. The present volume brings together fragments and complete versions of the poem, which consists of a preface, seven tricks, and a conclusion. The fragments are from Egyptian, Sahidic, Ancient Greek, Umbarian, Latin, Gothic (in both Moeso and Crimean versions), Old High German, Old Saxon, Old West Norse, early Welsh, early Middle English (in Peterborough and Pershore versions), Anglo-Norman, Old Spanish, Medieval Latin, Middle Dutch, and others. The full text appears in Old English, Middle High German, late Middle English (Chaucerian), Middle Scots, and early Modern English, as well as the Busch recension and a contemporary English translation. The burden of this tongue-in-cheek scholarly display of textual analysis, iconographic description, manuscript history, and critical appraisal is that Wilhelm Busch was not, after all, the author of Max und Moritz but only a latter-day transmitter. Manfred Gorlach’s labor of love in creating this elaborately extensive spoof of linguistic analysis and textual criticism should earn him a special Nobel Prize for