The caricaturist of the weekly satire magazine Simplicissimus, who became well known under the name Th. Th. Heine and was the son of rubber goods manufacturer Isaak Heine, was named David Theodor at birth. Heine enjoyed an upper middle-class upbringing. However, his school career at the Thomasschule in Leipzig came to an abrupt end when it became known that the March 1884 issue of Leipziger Pikante Blätter, a magazine published by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, had printed some of his caricatures anonymously even though pupils were banned from engaging in any kind of publishing activity.
Heine subsequently trained at the Academies of Art in Munich and Düsseldorf, worked as a landscape painter, and was employed by Fliegende Blätter magazine as an artist and caricaturist from 1892. In 1896, Heine and publisher Albert Langen came up with an idea for a new weekly magazine titled Simplicissimus. Its distinctive logo, the red bulldog, was created by Heine along with hundreds of caricatures. Heine was remarkably productive: besides keeping Simplicissimus supplied with weekly caricatures on political, social and cultural topics, he also created artworks for Fliegende Blätter and worked on posters and advertisements for the still new world of advertising.
In 1898, after publishing a caricature making fun of Kaiser Wilhelm II's trip to Palestine, Heine was found guilty of lèse majesté and sentenced to several months in prison, which he served at Königstein fortress in Saxony. Frank Wedekind, who had contributed to the act of lèse majesté with a satirical poem, initially fled but then also served a sentence in Königstein.
From 1917, Heine lived in Diessen am Ammersee with his wife and his daughter Johanna. Shortly after the Nazi Party came to power, the local Nazis began to covet Heine’s large estate and did not rest until his wife and daughter sold it after his emigration. Both women died in Munich during the time of the Third Reich. Heine faced great danger as early as the spring of 1933, not only because of his Jewish origins but also because of his caricatures of Hitler and the Nazi movement. He hid in his apartment in Munich, fearing that he would be arrested in Diessen.
He was greatly disappointed by the behavior of his colleagues in the editorial offices of Simplicissimus, who submissively sided with the Nazis and willingly sacrificed Heine and editor-in-chief Franz Schoenberner to ensure the magazine’s survival. Heine fled from the Gestapo to Berlin and was hidden by husband and wife Hans and Mathilde Purrmann, both painters, who procured him a passport belonging to a deceased person and thus enabled him to emigrate to Prague.
From 1936, Heine lived in Brno; after the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, he emigrated to Norway, where he created caricatures and illustrations for Oslo’s daily newspaper Dagbladet. When Norway was occupied by German forces in April 1940, Heine was banned from practicing his profession. He then turned to writing and wrote a satirical, semi-autobiographical novel titled Ich warte auf Wunder (I Wait for Miracles), which was published in Swedish in 1944 and in German in 1945. In 1942, he fled to Stockholm and became a Swedish citizen. The Swedish National Museum celebrated his 80th birthday in 1947 with a major retrospective exhibition. After the Second World War, it took a long time for Heine to be rediscovered as an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and writer in the Federal Republic.
