In 1951 the first Mickey Mouse comics appeared in Germany – Culture

I brought you something nice, we know this sentence and the situation of the promise that it conjures up from childhood, when your aunt comes for afternoon coffee. The “aunt” in this case is the moderator Linda Zervakis, the situation is the third triad of the chancellor candidates on the previous Sunday. She has an old Mickey Mouse notebook with her, and the one she’s trying to please is Armin Laschet, a candidate for the CDU. A 1993 issue linked to the presenter’s teenage memories. “That cost three marks ninety. My parents used to have a kiosk, that’s why I remembered it.” The cover picture of the magazine is about the rainforests, even then it was clear that their deforestation is harmful to the climate.

Almost 30 years ago Mickey Mouse was already concerned with climate change, explained Linda Zervakis: “Mr. Laschet, apparently not that many comic books are read in the CDU …” The party apparently overslept the explosive topic, and even now it seems to be slowing down when it comes to climate neutrality. Armin Laschet points out that there was a CDU environment minister, Klaus Töpfer, in the year of the Mickey Mouse issue, and emphasizes: “The global change in the climate is a threat that we have to answer globally.”

The Mickey Mouse magazine from August 12, 1993, with which Linda Zervakis lured Armin Laschet out of the reserve when it came to climate protection.

(Photo: Ehapa Verlag)

A few weeks ago the German Mickey Mouse turned seventyThat means, in 1993 the booklets were safely and successfully established on the market, many issues were printed in millions at the time. It was a long time ago when comics were frowned upon as minor trash and youth spoiling. (You bought them in the grocer across from the school and smuggled them home, past the parents’ eyes. And then had to accept the frowning disapproval when the corresponding pile was discovered while cleaning.) They were the first colorful comics in Germany and the first that were even available in booklet form. In the 1950s, the stories often had a fairytale tone (the deforestation of the rainforest was not an issue until much later), especially when the comics were set in the parallel universes of Duckburg, such as the forest world of A- und Administrnchen. In the beginning, the comics were really expensive fun: 75 pfennigs per issue, which was above the average hourly wage at the time. Nevertheless, around 130,000 copies of the first issues were sold. It didn’t take long before the comics were fully rehabilitated and became cult and collector’s items. (A question aside: where did Zervakis get the magazine, does it come from his own collection? And how open were Zervakis’ parents when it comes to comics?)

One does not want to assume that reading comics in the SPD or the Greens would be more intense than in the CDU – the parties all have a similar solid bourgeois base – and whether Candidate Baerbock and Candidate Scholz would have reacted more confidently to Mickey Mouse Coup – as a coup, the campaign is now being celebrated across the network. The election campaign is being conducted with grim seriousness, the crises are simply enormous and the prospects are very bleak, climate catastrophes, migrants, a Bundestag with almost a thousand members. For some, a bit of subversion is frowned upon. Roger Köppel, editor-in-chief of Schweizer World week, complained in image-Talk: “If Mickey Mouse is taken as a reference point for politics in a Chancellor’s triad, then we have reached the final stage.”

.
source site