Janosch

Janosch was born Horst Eckert on 11 March 1931 in Hindenburg in Upper Silesia, then part of Germany and now Zabrze in Poland. His parents were Johann Eckert and Hildegard, born Glodny, and he grew up partly with his grandparents in a miners' tenement before his parents could afford their own flat. His father, a metallurgist who was called up during the Second World War, was an alcoholic and violent towards the family, and his mother was strictly religious. In later life he said he felt himself to be Silesian above all, and a little Polish.

In 1944 he began an apprenticeship in a locksmith and smithy workshop, which he later called the most important time of his life, because it taught him that nothing was impossible. After his father returned in 1946 the family fled Upper Silesia for Lower Saxony. After stops in Nordhorn and Bad Zwischenahn, where he worked for years in textile factories, he took a pattern design course at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld under Gerhard Kadow, a pupil of Paul Klee. After a short stay in Paris he moved to Munich in 1953 and spent some trial terms at the Academy of Fine Arts, but left without finishing.

After leaving the academy Janosch worked as a freelance artist and began writing for newspaper arts pages in 1956. A friend suggested he turn his drawings into a children's book, and his publisher Georg Lentz suggested the name Janosch. His first book, Die Geschichte von Valek dem Pferd (The Story of Valek the Horse), appeared in 1960, and his first novel, Cholonek oder Der liebe Gott aus Lehm, in 1970.

His best known work began with Oh, wie schoen ist Panama in 1978, in which the little Tiger and the little Bear set out to find the land of their dreams, pulling the Tigerente behind them. Post fuer den Tiger and Ich mach dich gesund, sagte der Baer followed, and the Tigerente became a familiar figure on toys, school bags and German television. His stories were filmed as Janoschs Traumstunde for ARD in 1985 and 1989, and Oh, wie schoen ist Panama was made into an animated feature film. By the end of his career he had published about 150 books, translated into more than 30 languages.

His awards included the Munich Literature Prize in 1975, the German Youth Literature Award in 1979, the Dutch Zilveren Penseel in 1983 and 1987 and Zilveren Griffel in 1984, the Federal Cross of Merit in 1993, the Silesian Culture Prize of Lower Saxony in 1999 and the Bavarian Poetentaler in 2002.

In 2010 he said he would write no more books and wanted only to travel and lie in a hammock. He returned in 2013 with a weekly drawing for ZEITmagazin, built around his gruff alter ego Wondrak, which ran until November 2019. In the 2000s he placed the rights to his work in Janosch film und medien AG, and in 2024 the Picture Book Museum in Troisdorf acquired the world's largest collection of his original illustrations.

In 1980 Janosch moved to a house in the mountains of Tenerife, first to recover from an illness, and he stayed there for the rest of his life. He rarely gave interviews and once said he would most like to be invisible. In 2005 he visited his home town of Zabrze for the first time in decades.

He was openly critical of religion, sat on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation and drew satirical cartoons for it. He also supported a sparrow protection campaign of the German Wildlife Foundation and the Tannheim aftercare clinic for children. In 2013 he married his longtime partner Ines Eckert, and in 2021 they founded the Canarina foundation for nature and the environment in the Canary Islands.

Janosch died on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, on Tenerife, aged 95. His Tuebingen publisher Bernhard Feil announced the death to the German Press Agency, dpa, on 4 November, and it was reported by Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and other German media. No cause of death was made public, and no funeral arrangements had been announced at the time of reporting.

Janosch was one of the most widely read German children's authors of the twentieth century. The Tigerente, the little Tiger and the little Bear became cultural fixtures in Germany, with a long running children's television programme named after the Tigerente, playgrounds and bus stops decorated with his characters, and his books still in print decades after they first appeared. Behind their simplicity, his stories carried his lifelong themes of friendship, home and the search for the meaning of life.