Berlin honors Walter Trier with a memorial plaque

Some of his works are classics of modern illustration art, including the cover image for Erich Kästner’s Berlin novel “Emil and the Detectives” from 1929. But the artist who created them is hardly known today. That should change at least a little on Monday. On this day, the Senate will honor the illustrator Walter Trier (1890-1951) with a porcelain plaque that will be unveiled at his former home in Lichterfelde.

“With this memorial plaque, Walter Trier is once again rescued from oblivion,” says Konstanz art historian Antje M. Warthorst, who has studied Trier’s work intensively in several publications and exhibitions she has curated.

Caricatures, stage sets, humorous everyday scenes

In addition to the well-known illustrations for 20 Kästner books such as “Pünktchen und Anton” and “Das doppelte Lottchen”, this also includes numerous caricatures, commercial illustrations, stage sets and humorous everyday scenes that were published in publications such as the satirical magazine “Lustige Blätter”, the illustrated fashion magazine “Die Dame” or the weekly newspaper “Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung”.

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Born in Prague in 1890, Trier came from a German-speaking, Jewish, and very liberal and artistically oriented middle-class family. He moved to Munich to study, where he demonstrated his early talent for drawing and humor in works for “Simplicissimus”. In 1909, lucrative offers from the Ullstein publishing house and Otto Eysler, the editor of the “Lustigen Blätter”, lured him to Berlin.

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It was here that Kästner and Trier met in 1929 through the mediation of children’s book publisher Edith Jacobsohn. The writer was just beginning his career at the time. At that time, Trier was the more famous of the two, his characteristic style omnipresent in the city, especially thanks to his drawings of magazine covers.

“Anyone in Berlin at that time, with numbers in their head, mindless from the noise of the city, rushing through the streets and seeing a ‘Trier’ at the first kiosk, stopped, took a breath and smiled,” as Kästner later recalled in his obituary. “That’s how Walter Trier spread smiles among people his entire life.”

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Trier’s life changed fundamentally. Because of his Jewish origins and his left-liberal political views, he was only able to work in Germany to a very limited extent, and his cooperation with Erich Kästner also ended for the time being. In 1936, he and his family managed to flee to England. From 1947 until his death in 1951, he lived with his wife in Canada. He left Berlin behind forever.

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“I am delighted that a person and artist who fought against the bad all his life and captured the funny moments is now being honored with a memorial plaque,” says Trier expert Warthorst. “With him, space is made for hope.” This Monday (July 1), she is one of the speakers at the ceremonial unveiling of the memorial plaque sponsored by Gasag on Trier’s former home at Herwarthstrasse 10, alongside Senator for Culture Joe Chialo and Siegfried Eckert from the Erich Kästner Society. The event begins at 4 p.m.

His single-family house in Berlin, surrounded by an idyllic garden, which Trier immortalized in a drawing for the cover of the magazine “Die Dame” in 1926, was both a workplace and a place of retreat for the artist. Even though Trier was one of the more prominent members of Berlin society in the 1920s and 30s, regularly took part in the annual Great Berlin Art Exhibition and the exhibitions of the Berlin Secession with his works, and was even on the jury for the Miss Germany election in 1930, contemporaries described him primarily as an introverted person who did not care much about public appearances.

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Trier preferred to spend his time in Berlin with his family – his beloved daughter Margarete was born in 1914 – and his three hobbies: drawing, sports and toys. He collected the latter with great passion; contemporary witnesses compared his study in Lichterfelde to a child’s room, and the large glass cabinet with his toys occupied a central place. “He loved the world, however bad it might be, and made it his toy box,” wrote Erich Kästner about Trier in 1951. “And he loved the toys and made them a part of his world.”

Numerous works by Trier beyond the well-known Kästner illustrations, including his political caricatures from exile, have been made available to the public again in recent years through publications by the Favoritenpresse publishing house, founded in Berlin in 2020.

“Even before I founded the publishing house, I was pretty shocked at how little Walter Trier was known in Germany – even though his drawings were everywhere,” says publisher Bodo von Hodenberg. He is therefore very pleased that the state government is honoring the illustrator at a later date. He also hopes that “through a symbolic act such as a memorial plaque, the work will gain visibility beyond children’s book illustrations and that Trier will be recognized in all its diversity, independent of Kästner.”