Caricatura Museum Frankfurt

In the location's words:

Frankfurt am Main has been the capital of satire since the founding of the satirical magazines Pardon in 1962 and Titanic in 1972. The Caricatura Museum Frankfurt - Museum of Comic Art continues this claim. The drawings by F.W. Bernstein, Robert Gernhardt, Chlodwig Poth and Hans Traxler form the basis of the collection. Together with F.K. Waechter and the authors Bernd Eilert, Eckard Henscheid and Pit Knorr, they form the Neue Frankfurter Schule (NFS). Contemporary German comedy has been decisively influenced by this group to this day. By the end of the 1990s, the idea of a permanent tribute to their satirical drawings had taken root at the place where they were created and a meeting was held between Hans-Bernhard Nordhoff, then head of the cultural department, and Titanic cartoonists and authors as well as Achim Frenz, who was subsequently commissioned to set up a museum. Achim Frenz had already taken care of comic art in Kassel under the label "Caricatura" and managed the museum until fall 2023; since January 2024 Martin Sonntag.

From 2000 to 2008, the Caricatura was housed as a department in the Historisches Museum Frankfurt. On October 1, 2008, the Caricatura Museum Frankfurt was finally opened on Weckmarkt - in the Leinwandhaus, which had been the Historisches Museum's first building in 1892. Since April 2019, the Caricatura Museum has been organizationally separate from the Historical Museum and is now an independent institution under the care of the Frankfurt Department of Culture.

The Caricatura's landmark is a bronze moose sculpture designed by Hans Traxler in front of the building, wearing a trench coat, vest and hat. The sandstone base of the sculpture bears a bronze plaque with the names of the eight representatives of the New Frankfurt School and the motto coined by F. W. Bernstein: "The harshest critics of moose used to be moose themselves".

In 2020, the Caricatura Museum Frankfurt, together with the Caricatura - Galerie für Komische Kunst Kassel, was awarded the Hessian Culture Prize for its commitment to the genre of caricature. At €45,000, this is the most highly endowed cultural prize in the Federal Republic of Germany.