From Huey, Dewey and Louie to Tick, Trick and Track

Erika Fuchs, the celebrated German translator of Mickey Mouse comic books, dies at 98

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29. April 2005 By Elizabeth Goetze

She was the creator of Entenhausen, Dagobert Duck and Gustav Gans, the German equivalents to Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander: Erika Fuchs, the first editor in chief and head translator of Disney comic books in Germany. Fuchs died last Friday in Munich at the age of 98.
Besides finding the fitting German translations for Duckburg's and Mouseton's whimsically named inhabitants, Fuchs introduced a whole new world of comic speak to German readers in the post-war era. The language she used was not merely onomatopoetic, such as seufz (sigh), but also descriptive, such as grübel, grübel (ponder, ponder). It soon entered both written and spoken language. Some avid fans on the Internet named these descriptive interjections, usually set between two asterisks and frequently found in chat rooms and e-mails, Erikative several years ago in her honor.

In the early days of comic books in Germany, though, the new lingo was regarded as detrimental to children and teenagers. The newsmagazine Der Spiegel even ran an article on comic books in 1951 called Opium in der Kinderstube (Opium in the Playroom). But Fuchs also slipped the occasional quote from Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Wilhelm Busch into her translations. “You can't be educated enough to translate comic books,“ she once said, defending herself from the popular notion in the early 1950s that comic books were trash.

Erika Fuchs was born in 1906 in Rostock in northeastern Germany. She studied art history in Munich, Lausanne and London, and graduated summa cum laude with a PhD. After World War II, she received an offer to join the editorial team of the newly founded German edition of Micky Maus comic books. Fuchs later said that she had been skeptical at first and that her husband had to encourage her to take the job. “He was sure that many young people would be reading comic books and that careful translation and good language would be particularly important.“

Fuchs remained the editor in chief of the Micky Maus comic books in Germany from their inception in 1951 until her retirement in 1988. Until the early 1970s, she translated nearly all Disney stories. Afterward, she only did those by Disney cartoonist Carl Barks, whom she did not meet until 1994. Her creative use of language and playful quotation of Germany's great literary heroes even garnered a literary prize for her contribution to the development of the German language in 2001 from the Heimito von Doderer Foundation.

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