While he wasn’t a draftsman, Kahn worked closely with illustrators to execute his vision. (An old friend from his Berlin days named Albert Einstein helped him obtain a visa.) Despite the chaos, Kahn wrote and designed 10 books over his long career, including The Cell, The Human Body, and Our Sex Life.
With the ascension of Nazism, Kahn, who was Jewish, fled Germany in 1933 to Palestine, France, and then to America. Throughout much of the 1910s and ’20s, Kahn led what he once described as “a double life”: hospital doctor by day, writer for a German science book club called Kosmos in his off hours. Woody would have been right at home.Ĭomplex analogies like “Man as Industrial Palace” reflect Kahn’s hands-on knowledge of the human body. Moving south, factory workers in the liver repackage sugar as starch-like glycogen and convert it back again. In the “nervous center,” tiny secretaries operate a switchboard. In the brain, white-coated technicians (sound familiar?) run gland, muscle, hearing, and vision centers. It shows a cross section of a man’s head and torso subdivided into a multi-tiered factory. Kahn’s most enduring image, “Man as Industrial Palace,” appears on the cover.
Image appears in Fritz Kahn (TASCHEN, 2013). “Man As Industrial Palace.” Fritz Kahn poster, supplement to Das Leben des Menschen III, Franckh/Kosmos, Stuttgart 1926, Fritz Schüler, © Kosmos. Sourced from books and magazines long out of print, the volume represents only 10 percent, roughly, of the designer’s massive output. Co-authored by the writer and Kahn scholar Uta von Debschitz and her brother, graphic designer Thilo von Debschitz, Fritz Kahn features 280 illustrations executed between 19. His goal was a bit more exalted: educate the public about how their bodies worked using familiar machines and other objects as visual metaphors for biological processes.Ī new book, Fritz Kahn, reacquaints us with this pioneer of popular science communication. By the mid-1920s, the German graphic designer Fritz Kahn was already experimenting with images that compared the body to a factory and brain circuitry to control panels. Woody might not have realized it, but he was nearly half a century late to this gag. Meanwhile, down in the body’s nether regions, Woody, dressed as a “sperm” in a bright white jumpsuit, waits for the signal to deploy (it’s date night). Up in the brain-depicted as mission control-tiny technicians direct the action. There’s a scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972) where Woody Allen re-imagines the body as a spacecraft. Image and caption appear in “Fritz Kahn” (TASCHEN, 2013). “The biology of smelling a roast: pictorial representation of the processes that occur in a man’s head between the sensation of smell and the ‘reflectory’ salivation.” Graphic and caption from Fritz Kahn’s “Das Leben des Menschen III,” Franckh/Kosmos, Stuttgart 1926, plate XV, © Kosmos.
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