Date: Tuesday 25 April 2006

Time: 17:00

Venue: Room H202, Humanities Building

Cost: Free

Robert Gernhardt is a poet, cartoonist, satirist, essayist, novelist and painter. Born in 1937 in Reval (Talinn)/Estonia, Gernhardt studied painting and literature in Stuttgart. Together with F.K. Waechter and F.W. Bernstein, Gernhardt developed a form of self-referential poetry, prose and cartoon, referred to as the 'New Frankfurt School', that is both satirical, playful and comic.

From 1962, Gernhardt collaborated on the satirical magazine Pardon which influences an entire generation of German satirists. In 1979 he founded the satirical magazine Titanic with Waechter, Bernstein, Eckard Henscheid and others.

Gerhardt's satirical style combines social critique with a self-consciously irreverential attitude to cultural and literary traditions. His poetry and prose situates itself both within the comic traditions of Wilhelm Busch, Joachim Ringelnatz and Christian Morgenstern and the urban poetry of Heinrich Heine and Bertolt Brecht. Gernhardt's poems which frequently produce their comic effects through play with language and sound as well as through playfully quoting literary tradition have become part of public consciousness in Germany.

Contact Dr Helmut Schmitz at H.Schmitz@warwick.ac.uk for more information.