Heinrich Zille

Rudolf Heinrich Zille (January 10, 1858 - August 9, 1929), German illustrator and photographer, was born in Radeburg near Dresden, as the son of watchmaker Johann Traugott Zill (Zille since 1854) and Ernestine Louise (born Heinitz). In 1867, his family moved to Berlin, where he finished school in 1872 and started an apprenticeship as a lithographer. In 1883, he married Hulda Frieske, with whom he had three children. She died in 1919.

Zille became best known for his (often funny) drawings, catching the characteristics of people, especially "stereotypes", mainly from Berlin and many of them published in the German weekly satirical newspaper Simplicissimus. He was the first to portray the desperate social environment of the Berlin Mietskasernen (literally "tenement barracks"), buildings packed with sometimes a dozen persons per room who fled from the rural regions to the expanding industrial metropolis during the Gründerzeit only to find even deeper poverty in the developing proletarian class. His special talent was the scathingly humorous portrayal of what were in reality quite unfunny life conditions of handicapped beggars, tuberculous prostitutes, and menial labourers, and especially their children, making the best they could of life and resolutely refusing to give up.

Zille did not consider himself a real artist: he often said that his work was not the result of talent but merely of hard work. Max Liebermann nevertheless promoted him. He called him into the Berlin Secession in 1903, featured his work in exhibitions, and encouraged him to sell drawings – and when Zille lost his job as a lithographer in 1910, he encouraged him to live from his drawings alone.

The Berlin "Common People" paid him the greatest respect, and very late in life his fame culminated when both poverty and freedom of expression reached new heights in the roaring twenties, with the National Gallery buying some drawings in 1921, the Academy of the Arts honouring him with a professorship in 1924, and Gerhard Lamprecht making the film Die Verrufenen based on his cartoon characters and stories in 1925. His 70th birthday in 1928 was celebrated throughout Berlin. He died one year later.