Robert Gernhardt
1937–2006 · German writer, poet and satirical graphic artist, also a painter
Robert Gernhardt (Tallinn, 1937 – Frankfurt am Main, 2006) was a German painter, graphic artist and poet whose work belongs to the satirical tradition of postwar Germany. He is best remembered for his verse and comic writing, but his training was as a painter: he studied painting in Stuttgart and then at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, and also German studies at the Freie Universität.
Born into the Baltic German minority, he had to move with his family to Poznań and, after the war, to Göttingen, where he finished school in 1956. From 1964 he lived in Frankfurt as a freelance artist. From 1972 he spent long periods at a house in Tuscany.
Alongside F. K. Waechter and F. W. Bernstein he contributed to the satirical magazine pardon, and in 1979 he co-founded Titanic. Associated with the so-called Neue Frankfurter Schule, he combined social critique with an irreverent stance toward cultural tradition. His legacy lives on in German comic verse and in his writing for the comedian Otto Waalkes.