Ali Mitgutsch’s Wimmel Books are filled to the brim with colorful pictures. His mother’s talent for telling stories, his precise powers of observation – and a ride on the ferris wheel were the basis for his success.
Ali Mitgutsch has given children all over the world a present: his Wimmel books. For decades, they have been telling wonderful everyday stories without words and in bright colors. From the swimming pool, from the farm, from the mountains or from the city.
A timeless panopticon of life, full of joys, malice and misfortunes. He later created art for adults and arranged objects in object boxes. Now the Munich artist is dead. On Monday evening he died at the age of 86, his friend and biographer Ingmar Gregorzewski informed the dpa, after the Ravensburger Verlag had previously reported on it.
People of all ages love Mitgutsch’s books – to this day, even if some things seem to have fallen out of time. Excavators, tractors and cars look very different today than they did more than 50 years ago, when books moved into children’s rooms. But they by no means look old-fashioned, because the interpersonal in them has not changed. To this day, people are gleeful, malicious, dogged, disappointed, curious and happy.
With pad and pen by Schwabing
Mitgutsch got food for his pictures on forays through the city, especially through his beloved Schwabing. “I always have a small pad and a pen with me and quickly draw sketches that I will work with later,” he once said in an interview with the German Press Agency.
Mitgutsch, who was born in Munich on August 21, 1935, was a good observer even as a child, with a keen sense for moods and sensitivities. His talent for drawing was also evident early on. But life was hard: The Second World War, homelessness, hunger and bitter need shaped his childhood. His beloved big brother was killed at the front in Russia.
When Munich was bombed in the last years of the war, the family fled to the countryside. There they were unloved, bitterly poor refugees. The shy boy, whose real name was Alfons, suffered from the humiliation of other children: «You’re just a stinky pig, Mitgutsch! One can only run away from you! “
So he set off on his own: “I wandered through the meadows and the forest alone and dreamed of the adventures that I really didn’t have because I had no friends,” remembers the artist. “I dreamed of two friends, a big, big, strong one who helped me, and a smaller, bolder, smarter one who always whispered the best excuses to me. I then experienced my adventures with them. “
After the war, the situation of the baker’s family with two daughters and one son hardly improved. Hungry but brave, the children recaptured the city: They played between rubble and in bombed-out basements, looked for scrap metal and fought gang fights.
They even explored the basement of the destroyed Gestapo headquarters in Munich, past broken filing cabinets and empty prison cells. Their loot: a box full of Nazi mother crosses, which they sold to American soldiers for chewing gum and chocolate. Alfons often returned from such forays completely filthy – like “Ali Baba and the 40 robbers”, he once explained his nickname Ali.
The mother’s rich imagination
What particularly fascinated him during this difficult time were the stories of his mother. Although she could not offer her children a wealthy home, she could offer her rich imagination. “She literally enveloped us with her words, and we gave ourselves up to them completely and felt safe in them,” wrote Mitgutsch in the childhood memories “Herzignünder”.
“No matter how steep the path was, whether it was very hot or bitter cold, or whatever hardship our little family was just experiencing – Mother protected us in her very own way with her stories and lured us into another, wondrous world with them.”
The world from above
A defining experience: the ride on the Ferris wheel at the Auer Dult fair in Munich, a rare joy for Ali and his sister. What the boy saw from the gondola fascinated him. “They were pictures with lots of details, so much happened at the same time, the stories never ran out: people ran across the square, came together in groups, broke up again, children chased one after the other, carts were pulled, a woman collected her shopping off the pavement and a boy climbed up a lamppost, ”recalled the future student of the Graphic Academy.
The Ferris wheel can be found in the first “All around in my city” book from 1968. “The supervision of things and situations remained an exciting topic for me throughout my life: It became the perspective of all my hidden objects.” More than 70 books, posters and puzzles were created, including many hidden object books. More than five million books have been sold in Germany alone, and more than three million abroad.
They impress with their colorful cheerfulness and the ironic view of small things and human weaknesses. A man slips on a cow dung, watched by a girl laughing gleefully. Another is lolling in the sun in the outdoor pool, not knowing that a cold shower of water will hit him soon. Joyful malice is written on the face of the Lauser planning this attack.
And what happens then? Even small children like to spin the stories on – that’s exactly what the illustrator wanted to achieve: “My Wimmel books are made to lead children into the gardens of imagination, so that they can carry on themselves.”