Life rages on in Ali Mitgutsch’s Wimmel books. People enjoy themselves in the swimming pool and in the zoo, they climb the mountains, work on farms and construction sites or live wall to wall in an apartment building. With a sharp eye and cheerful irony, the famous draftsman captured everyday life with all its beautiful, but also treacherous moments. Now, according to the Süddeutscher Zeitung , the author died at the age of 86.
“For me, drawing was an infinitely long, often arduous, but always one happy journey through life that only remains for me to look back on, ”said Mitgutsch once to the German press agency. Around 70 books, posters and puzzles have been created, including many hidden object books. In Germany alone, more than five million copies were sold, abroad more than three million.
Mitgutsch’s first success was more than 50 years ago: It was the hidden object book “All around in my city”, for which he received the German Children’s and Young People’s Literature Prize in 1969. A motley panorama unfolds on every double page: the construction site, the harbor, the folk festival, the sledge hill. And it is teeming with people. “Long before Instagram he showed how you can only communicate with pictures,” wrote the online portal “welt.de”.
Human stories from everyday life
It is worth taking a closer look, as two-year-olds already know. Because Mitgutsch tells very human stories from everyday life and there is so much to discover, sometimes funny, sometimes sad or gleeful. A man with an urgent need is desperately waiting outside a toilet block. A girl happily watches as a hiker slips on a cow dung. A woman knocks on the ceiling with the broomstick because the party is too loud above her. On the beach, a child pours a bucket of water over his sunbathing mother. And then? Children and adults love to spin the stories on. Then the crying child can laugh again, the woman picks up the shopping she has dropped and the pancakes that are thrown into the air lands safely in the pan.
Mitgutsch’s mother awakened the joy of telling in her son Alfons . “She literally enveloped us with her words, and we gave ourselves up to them completely and felt secure in them,” writes the artist in his childhood memories “Herzignünder”. “No matter how steep the path was, whether it was very hot or bitter cold or what misery our little family was just being hit by – mother protected us in her very own way with her stories and lured us into another, wondrous world with them.”
“I dreamed two friends”
In 1935 Mitgutsch was born in Munich as the youngest of four children. The Second World War, hunger, homelessness and hardship shaped these years. Big brother died at the front in Russia. Towards the end of the war, the family fled from the bombs in the Allgäu. There, shy Ali suffered humiliation from other children. “I wandered through the meadows and the forest alone and dreamed of adventures that I didn’t really have because I had no friends,” recalls 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, Munich became an adventure playground for him. The children wandered the streets with curiosity, climbed over rubble and explored bombed-out cellars. Mitgutsch graduated from secondary school, began an apprenticeship in lithography and later studied graphics. He discovered traveling and experienced Lapland, North Africa, Russia, Japan and India.
The sensitivity to impressions paired with a precise power of observation make the images of the Artist, who received the Federal Cross of Merit in 2018, so special. “The individual stories in my hidden objects are based on my own observations. I always have a small pad and a pen with me and quickly draw sketches that I will work with later, ”said the man from Munich a few years ago.
A childhood memory was formative: Auf der Auer Then he was allowed to ride the Ferris wheel. The view from the gondola delighted him. “So much happened at the same time, the stories never ran out: people ran across the square, came together in groups, disbanded again, children chased one after the other, carts were pulled, a woman collected her shopping from the pavement and a boy climbed one Lamppost up “, he noted in his book.
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