in his hands become only apparent truths, hypocrisy, or platitudes. His use of onomatopoeia is a characteristic of his work: "Allez-oop-da" — Max and Moritz steal fried chickens with a fishing rod down a chimney — "reeker-rawker"; "at the plank from bank to bank"; "rickle-rackle", "hear the millstones grind and crackle"; and "tinkly-clinket" as Eric the cat rips a chandelier from a ceiling in Helen Who Couldn't Help It. Busch uses names he gives characters to describe their personality. "Studiosus Döppe" (Young Bumbel) has little mental ability; "Sauerbrots" (Sourdough) would not be of a cheerful disposition; and "Förster Knarrtje" (Forester Knarrtje) could hardly be a socialite. Many of his picture stories use verses with trochee structure: Master Lampel's gentle powers Failed with rascals such as ours The overweighting of the stressed syllables strengthens the humour of the lines. Busch also uses dactyls, where one accented syllable is followed by two unaccented syllables, as in his Plisch und Plum, where they underline the pedantic and solemn words with which teacher Bokelmann educates his pupils. They create tension in the Sourdough chapter from Adventures of a Bachelor, through the alternation of trochees and dactyls. Busch often synchronizes format and content in his poems, as in Fips the Monkey, where he uses the epic hexameter in a speech about wisdom. In both his illustrations and poems Busch uses familiar fables, occasionally appropriating their morality and stories, spinning them to illustrate a very different and comic "truth", and bringing to bear his pessimistic view of the world and human condition. While traditional fables follow the typical philosophy of differentiating between good and evil behaviour, Busch combines both. Canings and other cruelties It is not unusual to see thrashing, tormenting, and caning in Busch's works. Sharp pencils pierced through models, housewives fall onto kitchen knives, thieves are spiked by umbrellas, tailors cut their tormentors with scissors, rascals are ground in corn mills, drunkards burn, and cats, dogs, and monkeys defecate while being tormented. Frequently Busch has been called a sadist by educators and psychologists. Tails that are burnt, pulled off, trapped, stretched, or eaten is seen by Weissweiler as not aggression against animals, but a phallic allusion to Busch's undeveloped sexual life. Such graphic text and imagery in cartoon form was not unusual at the time, and publishers, the public, or censors found it not particularly noteworthy. Topics and motifs for his early work were