Eduard Otto Nückel, born on September 6, 1888 in Cologne (aka Köln) , died November 12, 1955, Cologne – some sites say he died 1956 ie not 1955.
Nückel was a German painter, graphic artist, illustrator and caricaturist. He contributed to the satirical magazines Simplicissimus and Der Simpl, the weekly Jugend, and the children’s magazine Ping-Pong. He illustrated books by writers such as Thomas Mann, ETA Hoffmann, and Alexander Moritz Frey.
He is noted for developing lead cuts (cut on sheets of lead versus the typical boxwood – presumably resulting from the difficulty in getting good wood blocks). Lead cuts (electroplated to stand up to the printing process) were used for his only wordless novel, Schicksal (later republished as Destiny).
Schicksal is a story of social realism ie not a happy story.
This melodramatic novel traces the tragic life of an impoverished woman who is consistently victimized not only by men but by a culture that offers little opportunity for women to survive. The heroine’s drunken father and overworked mother die early in her life, leaving her alone to survive. She works for a farmer in a village where she is seduced by a travelling salesman, resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. After imprisonment for the murder of her unwanted child, she works as a prostitute, forsakes a chance for a traditional relationship, murders a man with an ax during a drunken revelry and is shot by the police as she jumps to her death from a window of an upper-story room.
Wordless Books, The Original Graphic Novels; Beronä, David A., 2008 p.93
This pitiless story of a girl of the lower classes is curt, bare and powerful. The baseness of the underworld milieu is drawn with unsparing line; but the tale is lifted out of the merely lurid by the honesty of the artist’s feelings, by his mastery of his medium. It reaches pure tragedy.
Publisher’s blurb from the back cover of the 1930 American edition.
1920s Schicksal
1930 Destiny – translation of Schicksal into English.