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Bulb-nosed people in a strange country: This is how the typical Uli Stein joke worked
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / picture alliance / dpa
When people last spoke of Uli Stein, who has now died at the age of 73, they spoke more of the dimensions of his work than of the work itself, the man was a one-man joke industry: he published over 50 books during his lifetime, with a total circulation of approximately twelve million copies sold.
His bestseller "Merry Christmas" alone has sold around a million times.
There were also calendars, ties, computer games and everything else that could be consumed with the printed bulbous nose jokes that Stein drew.
Oh, and postcards: in the end it should have been 180 million joke picture postcards sold, more than two for every German, and a life's work for a postman.
From a commercial point of view, Stein was Germany's favorite joke maker.
Loriot, from whom he took over the bulbous noses of his characters, he left far behind in the total edition, as did the "Werner" inventor Brösel.
Anyway, everyone else, especially in the eighties and nineties, and shortly after the turn of the millennium.
It was then that the illustrator, born Ulrich Steinfurth in Hanover in 1946, experienced his greatest successes.
It was a quick start: after dropping out of a teacher training course and working as a journalist for a few years, Stein published his first cartoons in the mid-1970s.
First in the "St. Pauli Nachrichten" and later in more respected newspapers such as the "Stern".
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Stein was the master of 50 books and 180 million picture postcards sold
Photo: Holger Hollemann / picture alliance / dpa
Although his books were also published abroad, he could nowhere repeat the success he had in Germany.
The Chinese (in China an attempt was made to publish it, as well as in Finland and the USA) apparently only sometimes laughed at his Tuber Males, sales remained moderate.
The reasons may have been the deep roots of Stein's cartoons in the German middle class.
Stein's characters were average people of the kind that you can admire in ZDF's early evening series.
Officials, employees, teachers, their wives and children, all of whom stand out for their German honesty.
Typical stone scenes take place in restaurants ("Would you like to choose the wine right away or embarrass yourself later?"), In the garden ("You didn't really put mulled wine in the bird bath?"), At the doctor ("What am I missing? Am me the doctor or you? ").
There are also animals, again and again animals.
Cats, penguins, mice.
But even those often in the gesture of the middle class, working people in the matter of being an animal: There was a row house cosiness, a sleeve-protector feeling that is difficult to convey to the Americans or the Finns.
You had to know that first hand, better still second hand.
He did not rise above the German middle class
Uli Stein's world was small, and that is not meant negatively.
As a draftsman, he depicted the world of experience of the German generation with houses or gardens, which, like him, had become prosperous after the war.
German courtesy, thoroughness and cosiness, it is in many of Uli Stein's pictures.
He did not caricature her, he did not rise above her.
But when precisely this middle class in Germany eroded after the turn of the millennium, Stein's humor also fell visibly from the time.
In recent years, Stein has made a name for itself mainly through lawyers.
The illustrator was one of the toughest warnings against the unlicensed use of his cartoons on the Internet, and his lawyers calculated the value of each one of his cartoons at thousands of euros.
He would have liked to have made an animated film from his cartoons, but it never came back.
A week ago, Uli Stein died unexpectedly at the age of 73.
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