EThere really is a god of books. And the number of its believers presumably exceeds that of all other world religions. In an act of literary epiphany, he always lets you stumble across exactly the book at the right moment, plays exactly the book into your hands that you particularly need.
There was such an apparition the other day. Enclosed as one is in Germany during pandemic times, locked in with oneself and in the middle of the chaos of a half-dissolved household, while packing the moving boxes. In a seemingly hopeless world.
A book with thick cardboard pages. A village on top of it without a shadow. With a church and fire brigade pond and farmhouses and rolling hills. It could be anywhere in the Allgäu. Where we were on vacation for a decade.
There were horses and cows and tractors, a dog yelped, an old woman scolded, somewhere a boy peed in the forest. Everything viewed from above. Like from a drone. Or from a ferris wheel.
The pictures are bursting with micro-stories. You could call it idyllic. If you don’t look very carefully.
Ali Mitgutsch, born in Schwabing in 1935 and just died in Schwabing, painted it, this world, which is not an understatement to describe as the German Bullerby. A world of images that heals everything, that gives you back your confidence in the self-healing powers of the world outside, no matter what is raging out there.
Drawing by Ali Mitgutsch
Quelle: picture alliance / dpa
Probably everyone from the generation of the first seers can confirm that there is nothing that the hidden objects of Ali Mitgutsch do not help against. If there is a club that was rescued by Ali Mitgutsch, I’m finally happy to join them. Or create it herewith.
But now we’ve got ourselves a little bit confused in the exuberance of memories. The curable world of Ali Mitgutsch is the result of escaping from an apparently hopeless one. Nights in the bomb bunker, evacuated into the Allgäu as a city child, beaten up by teachers and classmates, a dyslexic school failure who was saved by drawing, a lonely man who invented a world in which no one was lonely.
His mother once said to her Alfons that he looked like Ali Baba when he came back from a playground that we imagine to be one of his books. Ali then stayed (that Ali Mitgutsch with his wanton seal beard looks a bit like Günther Wallraff as Ali on the cover of “Ganz unten” is a stair joke of the book god).
He is still completing secondary school, but breaks off his apprenticeship in lithography. He travels the world, spending two or three months a year with a friend somewhere on the globe. His first book for children is being written in Mexico. It is called “Pepes Hut”.
In 1968, “Around in my city” appears. A child therapist Mitgutsch knew wanted what didn’t exist, a book for the very young, without words, bursting with stories that children tell themselves. Mitgutsch takes Breughel’s winter and peasant scenes and brings them into the present.
The view from which Mitgutsch paints is called a cavalier perspective. From the Chevaliers who watch a battle on horseback. Mitgutsch’s perspective awakening experience was not on horseback, but on a fair, from a ferris wheel. From above, the world seemed okay to him and it wasn’t.
Mitgutsch doesn’t like hidden objects
Ali Mitgutschh receives the German Youth Literature Prize for “Around …”. Hidden objects is called the genre he invents, a term he didn’t like.
Emancipatory bean counters (the term back then: dick counters) complain that there are more boys than girls who swarm around there. Psychologists warn (which is particularly funny in times of microsecond cuts in children’s films) against overloading the child’s imagination with the bursting images.
Mitgutsch continues to paint, more girls, explains ships and marinas and agriculture and cruise ships seasons. Seven million books are sold. Huge and pocket-sized hidden object books as a 150 piece puzzle. There is no city library – at least in the west – that has no credit in its holdings.
Mitgutsch empowers children to tell their own stories and to let their own picture films emerge in their heads. Stories that take time. Stories that tell of a time when children were outside without fear and boys were more visible than girls. Stories in which the idylls they seemed to show were broken again and again.
Ali Mitgutsch was always fond of drawing an ideal world; he was not interested in that. A curable one. Ali Mitgutsch believed that everything could turn out fine after all. That’s not the only reason we’ll miss him. After all, his pictures will remain. And comfort. If the book god plays them into our hands in time.
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