Icon: enlarge
Herbert Feuerstein (2012)
Photo: Stephanie Pilick / picture alliance / Stephanie Pilick / dpa
The worst would have been an honorary title, Herbert Feuerstein was in constant danger.
Had he stayed in Austria, things could have turned out badly for him, as head of the festival in Salzburg or even as minister of culture in the republic.
"There are always warning signals: That could lead to a medal that you acquire, that you do not earn. And at some point you are a councilor and then life is over," he said in an interview in 2014 on the occasion of the publication of his autobiography.
Herbert Feuerstein escaped this fate, he always reinvented himself when life threatened to get too comfortable.
He was a student at the Salzburg Mozarteum and, with a disrespectful newspaper criticism of the festival president's composition, caused an abrupt drop out of his studies.
He followed his love at the time, a guest student from Hawaii, to the USA, where he became an employee and later editor-in-chief of the "New Yorker Staats-Zeitung", a German-language immigrant newspaper.
After the divorce he returned to Europe, directed a sick satire publishing house and after its end became editor-in-chief of the German edition of "MAD".
Everything can, everything has to be fooled
For twenty years, Feuerstein poured unrestrained nonsense into the heads of pubescent boys.
"MAD" was the publication most confiscated from schools, reported Feuerstein, not without pride.
Whether this is true and how it should be measured at all does not matter, because one thing is undisputed: Herbert Feuerstein exercised cultural influence here, which continues to have an impact today.
Not only did he enrich the German language with his broadcasts of American comics, such as Don Martins, with statements of well-being such as "Würg!"
for displeasure and "Lechz!"
for passionate longing, not only puns he invented shaped the style in which headlines are formulated in editorial offices and advertising slogans in agencies today.
Feuerstein also planted a fundamental attitude of mind in the heads of his young readers: Everything can, everything must be ripped off.
While conventional satire (or worse, cabaret) always wants to convey an important and powerful message, which should make you laugh because of the sheer weight of meaning, Feuerstein's humor is free of any claim to moral training.
"I'm stupid, but so are you - let's learn from this together."
Herbert Feuerstein
This humor sprang from Feuerstein's not at all funny attitude to life: He was a person who constantly had to struggle with fears and who always reckoned with the worst.
He cultivated few friendships, he found it difficult to be close to people.
Why?
"Actually, I don't feel like checking that," said Feuerstein after puzzling over it a little himself.
His comedy, one can therefore only assume, was probably the only way out of the ubiquitous senselessness that was perceived as omnipresent: "I'm stupid, but so are you - let's learn from it together."
He later implemented this humorous approach on television with Harald Schmidt.
The program "Schmidt Each other" conceived by Feuerstein is still considered by many to be the high point of Schmidt's career, everything after that was only a weak echo of this collaboration.
Herbert Feuerstein was still present on German television for a long time, had his own travel series, moderated twelve hours on WDR during one night, in the later years also turned back to classical music - but all that, said Feuerstein, was only Craft ".
In 2014 he finished his public work.
Herbert Feuerstein has now died, his life lasted 83 years.
It was full of breaks - and, contrary to expectations, it worked out perfectly.
Icon: The mirror