Without Words

Abstract

His cartoon advertisements quickly propelled the Viennese canapé-supplier “Trzesniewski” (motto: “inexpressibly good”) to a surprisingly high recognition level. Every week they provide for astonished amusement in the local Vienna paper the Falter, and his insights into well-known personalities in radio, film and television in the daily Standard are among the crudest columns perpetrated on the Austrian reading public. The man whose eyes and ears are always tuned to the present refuses to attempt prognoses for the future. Whether he has the feeling that his life in 2017 will be easier or more difficult than it is now? Tex Rubinowitz: “I don’t have any feeling. And if I did, it would be a bad one, since I’ll be going downhill even faster than I am now” Certainly: The future is uncertain. And things can happen. In his book And for people who can’t read, the cigarette has a line through it — some 213 jokes and 3 short novels on 160 pages — Tex Rubinowitz draws a human face that is emerging from a tube and is connected to a thought balloon: “Reborn as a salve named Ulrich — but on the other hand I became a Hindu.”

in Conversation with Martin Behr