Karl Lagerfeld and Tomi Ungerer : Crossers of borders

Two citizens of the world have left us within ten days. The Illustrator and writer Tomi Ungerer is on 9. February, died. The fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld on the 19. February. A was born in 1931, the other in 1933, both have experienced as children the war. They both died far away from their home town. Tomi Ungerer in Cork. Karl Lagerfeld in Paris.

At first glance, the anarchist Alsace with the biting Humor and the exquisite, the dashing Dandy of the catwalks, moreover, do not have a lot in common. They were both Crossers of boundaries. A valuable species in times of the nationalist foreclosure. Tomi Ungerer lived in Strasbourg and in the vicinity of Cork. Previously, he had inserted stations in New York and in the canadian province of Nova Scotia. He felt like a fish in the water when he was in Germany. Karl Lagerfeld was a German, lived in Paris and was with his collections around the world. Both of them moved to the Talk between the German and the French, without you being aware of it. Both of them felt their Region and not so much your country. Tomi Ungerer said: "I'm an Alsatian, uprooted, rooted, but with roots." Born in Hamburg, Karl Lagerfeld is understood less as a German rather than as Hanseat.

they condemned the immense stupidity of populism

Always torn between two cultures, rejected by both dull nationalism and any kind of authoritarianism, and condemned the immense stupidity of populism. She loved to provoke. "I am my own country. My flag is my handkerchief,“ joked Tomi Ungerer. In his drawings he made again and again about chauvinists funny, regardless of where they came from.

As the AfD in the Bundestag moved in, it was Karl Lagerfeld very angry: "If this continues, I give up the German citizenship. I don't want to be a part of this neo-Nazi Clubs,“ he explained – and. "I'm very English, but rather in an abstract sense," he said in an Interview with "time" and "Vogue". "This has nothing to do with Patriotism or even nationalism. This is something Cultural, literature, art, silent film, especially Jewish culture, in Vienna and in Berlin.“

Tomi Ungererer has spent his life trying to find words and images for the Back-and-Torn between the French and the German culture. Strasbourg is the seat of the so-idiosyncratic "Alsatian culture", and Ungerer grew to between Babar and Struwwelpeter, between Lafontaine and Max and Moritz, between Gustave Doré and Cranach. He was indoctrinated by the Nazis in the school, and as the French in 1945, returned, tried, you, him, his Alsatian accent to exorcise. "Speaking French is chic", dunned small signs in his school. Tomi Ungerer was the embodiment of the convinced European.

The one fought with the pen and the aphorisms, the other with fabric and scissors. Three months before the European elections, threatening to weaken a Brexit and populism, already wobbly structure even more, they are gone now. The two with your free Bohemian look will be missed.

The death of Karl Lagerfeld, is The epitome of the perfect fashion designer

translated From the French by Odile Kennell.