The actor Günther Maria Halmer was recently sitting in the Café backdrop at the Kammerspiele and was talking about his 80th birthday. He talked about his relationship with Helmut Dietl – and briefly also about Karin Dietl-Wichmann. Dietl and he were in a stuck situation at the time, Halmer said, it was about the casting of Tscharlie Häusler in the “Munich Stories”. They played billiards and became friends, but they didn’t find each other professionally. At one point, Halmer called Dietl to tell him he was taking on another role; that he has no time for Tscharlie.
Karin Dietl-Wichmann answered the phone and said Helmut Dietl was in Toronto. When she heard what Halmer wanted to say to her husband, she said: “Make no mistake!” She called Dietl in Canada and, according to Halmer, he was “very excited”. Then it went fast. Dietl got in touch, they came to an agreement and Halmer became a cottager. How fortunate.
Karin Dietl-Wichmann was Helmut Dietl’s first wife. When they fell in love in the 1960s, she was a successful journalist who also worked as a PR woman for, among others, Federico Fellini. Dietl, four years younger than his girlfriend, studied and worked as a cable porter at Bayerischer Rundfunk.
When Wichmann was supervising a film in Rome, Dietl is said to have booked a flight to Rome with the money he had borrowed from his mother to surprise Karin Wichmann. She then took him to her apartment in the Piazza del Popolo. The journalist Claudius Seidl describes this in his Helmut Dietl biography “The Man in the White Suit”, which was published in 2022.
Relationship stories were her thing
Dietl-Wichmann always wanted to be a journalist. Her father supported her, she once said, he said: “Do what you want.” She then became, among other things, editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan and the brightly colored, she was with the famous and sometimes friends with Clint Eastwood or Christine Kaufmann. Everyone called her KDW. And eventually she started writing books.
Her works were called “Finally get a divorce”, “Mamma Mia. The book about mothers and daughters” or “Can old age still be saved”?. Relationship stories were her thing, said a friend on Sunday. Dietl-Wichmann knew what she was writing about, she was married three times, they had their daughter Sharon with Dietl, with whom she unfortunately had no contact for a long time, and she was in her seventies when she wrote about aging.
When we met her in her apartment in, of course, Schwabing, in 2018, she put a crémant on the table at noon. She had “something buddy-like and Tuscan-like”, according to the SZ. Dietl said at the time that others would describe her as “overconfident and tough as nails”. She herself said that she was self-confident, yes, but she didn’t overdo it.
Alone on a small island for years
She also had a good sense of humor, and she was always full of energy. And, last but not least, she was also courageous: Between 2005 and 2007 she lived on a small Philippine island. Alone.
She’s not afraid of aging, she always said that too. After all, she doesn’t want to sit behind the stove, she always wants to work, live, love and go out. “I also go to the pub with my grandson,” she said southern courier 2019 in an interview. He’s not ashamed, on the contrary, his friends would say: “She’s awesome, the old woman.” That was it, the confident.
When asked how old she wanted to be, she said: “Maybe I’ll be 110. Terrible idea. You can call me again in 30 years.” She won’t answer. Karin Dietl-Wichmann died on Saturday at the age of 82 in a nursing home in Munich. Her daughter Sharon said Sunday she had been with her mother for the past few days.