Ali Mitgutsch: The children’s book author died at the age of 86 – culture

Sixth fold-out page, right in the middle, there he immortalized his own childhood memory. Published in 1968 in his very first Wimmelbook, “Rundherum in Meine Stadt”. You can see the Auer Dult in Munich, a place little Ali longed for in the post-war years, there are stalls for household goods and dishes, but also rides, a chain carousel, a ship swing – and a Ferris wheel. A little boy sits in the top gondola and happily waves to the folk festival visitors. Red cheeks, funny round eyes, a cheeky face – in Ali Mitgutsch’s drawings, children didn’t look neat and modest even back then, but rather as if they were ready for a prank at any time. There is something else with this boy: He appears animated and happy because he can – even if only for a brief moment – look at the world from above.

Ali Mitgutsch described a Ferris wheel ride on the Auer Dult so impressively in his book “Herzanzünder. Mein Leben als Kind”, it was absolutely clear how life-defining it must have been for him in the end: “From above, my eyes searched the world for new, unfamiliar ones There were lots of pictures with lots of details, (…) children chased one after the other, carts were pulled, a woman collected her shopping from the pavement (…). For me, supervision of things and situations remained for a lifetime an exciting topic: it became the perspective of all my hidden objects. “

Looking at the world from above, always with an astonished childlike look: That is Ali Mitgutsch’s achievement and his unique life’s work. On the whole, he saw a thousand different little stories that made generations of children, parents, and grandparents happy. A gifted narrator who draws, loving and humorous at the same time, the feelings of triumph will never be forgotten, when, after leafing through his picture books for the thousandth time in this whole double-page bustle, one still discovered something new, as an adult or less adult: There! A boy stands in front of the marching band and bites a lemon to make them play worse! Hihi, a door is open to the changing room on the beach, you can see a man’s bare bottom.

He could tell the wildest stories in the most beautiful Bavarian singsong

There is something going on in every corner of this Mitgutsch-Wimmelwelt, and yet above all there is a basic friendliness and philanthropy, which also corresponded to the attitude of the illustrator – whoever visited him at home in Schwabing, home and work place at the same time, immediately felt at home. A hodgepodge of memorabilia and utensils, pinned photos, torn newspaper articles, loose brushes. He was right in the middle of it all, who with his oriental-looking cap and sharp-cut face already had something of the city Indian-like and who could tell the wildest stories in the most beautiful Bavarian singsong, not without repeatedly asking attentively: “Would you like another cup of tea?”

In his hidden object books, which made him famous and sold more than eight million copies, he showed an ideal one, and that meant, of course, that the world was too ideal, that was sometimes held against him. He replied, comforting and at the same time indicative of him: The message of his work was not to live in a heal, but in “a healable world”. He had these words announced in autumn 2018, when he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit and could not come to the Bellevue Palace himself because his state of health no longer allowed it.

If you believe in a curable world – what are you then? A dreamer? An optimist? A fool? He had a “shitty childhood”, said Ali Mitgutsch at home when it came down to exactly what it was like to grow up in war and post-war Munich. Alfons, born in 1935, who quickly became “Ali” because of his raven-black hair and his quickly tanning skin, was a delicate, weak child. The youngest of four, his father a railway official, his mother deeply believing, she gives him a sentence: “Ali, I pray for you, you are the most endangered of my children.” Small, skinny, a “Krischperl”, as they say in Bavaria, teased by others, unhappy at school; he is dyslexic and otherwise has a hard time.

“All around in my city” wins the German Youth Book Prize in 1969

He feels the world he experiences as raw, violent, unjust, when his older brother Ludwig is killed in the war, it is a huge loss. So Ali creates a world he likes in his imagination; he invents stories in which two characters often appear, Jumbo, the strong, and Fritz, the clever, and both give the “endangered” child strength. He breaks off an apprenticeship in lithography, studies at the Graphic Academy in Munich, publishes his first children’s picture book “Pepes Hut” in 1959 https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/ In 1969 the German Youth Book Prize.

Open detailed view

In his laudation on Mitgutsch, the writer Peter Härtling said at the time: “An authoritarian upbringing created authoritarian literature for many years. The song of the good child sounded high. There was not only Professor Unrat; there was also the student Unrat. Generations of parents helped to send mental and spiritual cripples into life, docile subjects who had learned not to look up: not to their father, not to the teacher, not to the state. Little adventures were allowed; big rebellions were not. ” Tomi Ungerer once said that at some point he noticed that the children in his books showed no fear, were fearless. The children at Ali Mitgutsch are children who really don’t care about a lot, in the best sense of the word. You are cheeky, stick your tongue out, do pranks. At Mitgutsch, the police sometimes slipped on a banana peel and adults walked around in cow dung and sometimes behaved in a weird way.

Ali Mitgutsch marries, has three children, a middle-class life with small escapes: He has been on long journeys since he was 15, and he often leaves his family for several months to explore the world, including trips to Lapland, North Africa , India. “For me, traveling is always as if I were a field that is freshly plowed. Worn things disappear, deeper layers come to the surface,” he once said. But Schwabing, the place where he was a child and lived as an adult, is his home, he liked to stroll through the English Garden, fought for years in a citizens’ initiative against the gentrification of the district, campaigned for a good neighborhood, with district festivals and Bookcases.

Only those who look at the world from above can see the whole. And Ali Mitgutsch wanted everything to be seen in this world. And above all, each and every one of them. “For me, drawing was an infinitely long, often arduous, but always happy journey through life that I can only look back on,” he said in an interview shortly before his 85th birthday. He died last Monday evening at the age of 86 in Munich in his apartment on Türkenstrasse.