What a contrast: On the one hand, a motley Olchi world full of wit, love, care. And on the other hand your own childhood: strictness, shame, beatings. Erhard Dietl, who later makes generations of children happy with his Olchi stories, experienced anything but a happy family even in Regensburg. The successful author has now dedicated a book to his moody, violent father: “A father like mine” (Oetinger-Verlag).
Erhard Dietl is sitting in his studio in Munich-Haidhausen a few days after his 70th birthday. The shelves are filled to the ceiling with Olchi books, posters are hanging on the walls from which the cuddly green creatures look happily at the world. You don’t see his age in the author and illustrator, nor that working on the book could possibly have upset him.
What he wrote from his soul is quite disturbing. Affectionate, says Dietl, the father was only to the dachshund. His wife and children had to make tracks. “I could never forgive him for hitting my little sister, who was not yet three years old.” He himself is still being beaten when he is almost a young man. At 15, he remembers, he sneaked home with a bad report card. First he reaps a resounding slap in the face. Then the father freaks out completely. He hits his son with his fists and kicks him, even when he is already lying on the ground whimpering. “I was afraid he didn’t know what he was doing anymore and wouldn’t be able to stop until he finally beat me to death,” Dietl writes in the book. He often hated his father. And yet always struggled for his recognition. “I wanted to be able to show something that he thinks is good.”
He is currently working on the second Olchi feature film, the next book
The father died more than 20 years ago, Dietl no longer remembers the exact date. He has long distanced himself. As he sits there and talks, he seems relaxed, laughing again and again during the conversation. He is currently working on the second Olchi feature film, the next book. There are Olchi picture books, stories for the first few hours of reading, games, puzzles, handicraft sets. For 30 years, the Munich artist has been drawing the little green creatures with the three horns on their heads and inventing funny stories for them. There are more than 40 books to date.
Olchis have also found their way into reading classes – even if they fart, curse and stink.
(Photo: Alessandra Schellnegger)
If you don’t know the Olchis yet, let me tell you: They live on a rubbish dump in Schmuddelfing, they fart, curse, stink, they eat shoe soles, drink bicycle oil, bathe in the mud and can’t stand order. But they are a happy extended family. Everyone cares about each other, they care little about the law.
“Yes, of course,” says Dietl now, “it’s obvious that I’ve created an ideal world that I didn’t have myself. In which children experience trust and security.” The arch-catholic Regensburg of the 1950s and the unhappy marriage of his parents are the surroundings that shaped him. The church kindergarten his mother wants to put him in is in the dark coal cellar of a town house. Little Erhard refuses to go there and has trouble sleeping out of fear. The mother gives him thalidomide as an antidote.
Next to Dietl’s drawing table is his guitar. He has just recorded a CD entitled: “Oide Buidl”. Dedication: “For my father.” “Out of defiance,” says Dietl and laughs, “because such a dispute never ends.” And while the book is oddly unemotional, written almost in the manner of a protocol, the songs are all the more touching. Dietl has a deep, Bavarian, lyrical voice when he sings. The music for the five-piece band, in which his son plays, is arranged in a variety of ways. He also recites a few of these songs at his readings. For example, that of the devil: “I must know the ten commandments by heart, the devil spuit is Liad like a pied piper. He spuits so softly on a glowing trumpet, and I go to confession and to pray.”
A picture of the Pope hangs in the grandmother’s living room. From time to time the children are allowed to play “Holy Mass” there: “With my church equipment I moved over to my grandparents’ living room, made a niche in the dark walnut sideboard to the altar, read my little prayer book and prayed for better school grades and against it heart stabbing of my father”, writes Dietl in the book. And at the monthly confessions in the church, the pastor always asks: Have you been unchaste?
It took him a long time to shake off his guilty conscience and constant shame, says Dietl. But there are also small escapes from this narrowness. The grandparents who live nearby are generous. The grandfather teaches the grandson sheepheads and listens to him. “He was like a friend to me and he always had time,” says the author. “Some kids are missing that these days.” And then there were the long afternoons on the Danube. “We children were really free there, no adult knew what we were doing.”
He illustrated books by Kirsten Boie, Christine Nöstlinger, Joachim Ringelnatz and Erich Kästner
When he is 16, the family moves to Munich. Dietl discovers the music clubs and smokes his first joints in the English Garden. Go to the “Steppenwolf” concert in the Circus Krone. Because he has always drawn very well, he leaves high school and goes to graphic design school, after which he is admitted to the art academy. He also earns money with drawings for children’s magazines. “Sesame Street” will soon be there, as well as the “Sternchen” from Stern magazine. He illustrates books by Kirsten Boie, Christine Nöstlinger, Joachim Ringelnatz, Erich Kästner. And one day in 1990 he is sitting in front of a white sheet of paper – and the Olchis spring from his pen.
Did his father ever acknowledge his success? “Maybe he was proud of me, but he didn’t show it.” The father is a freelance editor, later a photographer, always without money. “When I was 15,” Dietl remembers, “I earned 600 marks with my first holiday job.” In the pickle factory, a tough job. The teenager wants to buy an electric guitar. Then his father, who is once again short of cash, urges him to lend him the money. “I never saw it again.” The head of the family drowns his frustration in alcohol. In Munich he took photos for the CSU for a few years, allegedly became close to Franz Josef Strauss and earned extra money by spying for the GDR. But all of these remain indications. “I regret that I never managed to talk to him about his life,” says Dietl.
Most of what he knows comes from stories told by his mother. She also wrote down a lot, that was her outlet, because the bigoted woman doesn’t dare to protest. She accepts that the father brings his beloved home and explains to her: “Tonight you will cook cream schnitzel because Eva is coming. She hasn’t had anything sensible to eat all week.” To compensate, the mother invites the pastor to a Sunday roast. “She continued to have nightmares long after her father died,” says Dietl, “for fear he might come back.”
“I can only advise everyone: write down your story. You’ll feel better afterwards.”
Writing has freed him. “I can only advise everyone: write down your story. You’ll feel better afterwards.” His own family must have helped him too. He has two children from his first marriage and three grandchildren, and a twelve-year-old daughter with his second wife – “that’s very lucky. I tried to do everything else with my own children.”
Every week the Olchi creator gets mail from his little fans, by letter or email. “I answer everyone,” he says, and grins. “Otherwise they would get angry.”