Walter Trier

Walter Trier (25 June 1890, Prague – 8 July 1951 Craigleith, near Collingwood, Ontario, Canada) was an illustrator, best known for his work for the children's books of Erich Kästner and the covers of the magazine Lilliput.

Trier was born to a middle class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. In 1905, Trier entered the Industrial School of Fine and Applied Arts; he later moved to the Prague Academy. In 1906, he entered the Royal Academy, Munich, where he studied under Franz Stuck and Erwin Knirr. In 1910, Trier moved to Berlin where he spent most of his career.

Trier married Helene Mathews in 1913; a daughter, Margaret, was born a year later.

An anti-fascist, Trier's cartoons were bitterly opposed by the Nazis. In 1936 he emigrated to London. During the Second World War, Trier helped the Ministry of Information produce anti-Nazi leaflets and political propaganda. He and his wife became British citizens in 1947, the same year that they moved to Canada to be near their daughter, who had moved to Toronto with her husband in the late thirties.

Works for the periodicals

Simplicissimus and Jugend appeared in 1909. The next year, Otto Eysler, the editor of Lustige Blätter, persuaded him to move to Berlin and work for that magazine; Trier worked for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung as well.

In 1927/1929, Trier was introduced to Erich Kästner, and he illustrated Kästner's Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives).

Trier provided the front cover design for every issue of Lilliput from its start until 1949. Each time, the design employed a man, a woman, and a dog. The man and woman were usually young and almost always a couple, the dog was almost always black. It seems the original dog was Trier's. It was run over by a tram and killed, and since then Trier immortalised him in his Lilliput covers; the idea was light-hearted and the settings and styles varied considerably.

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