Urmel-inventor Max Kruse is dead: Goodbye, soul-Fant – THE WORLD

Who has always crowing Urmel – and who does not know the Urmel? -, It is hard to believe, and yet: Max Kruse was the quietest person who I’ve ever met. His e-mails arrived in huge blue letters, but sat to him in his bright living room in Bavarian Penzberg opposite, he said, especially in breaks and looked rather shy as reluctantly back on a life that German unimaginably far back into the cultural history handed.

Because this great man with the characteristic beard had been sitting in front of Hiddenseer Lietzenburg on Gerhart Hauptmann’s lap, he had seen a white-bearded father, just said how he and the early days had worshiped as a great artist.

Max Kruse senior had become famous stage built for Max Reinhardt, Nietzsche had for him Model sat – and yet was the fame of his father nothing against the celebrity of the mother who gave her name to the Käthe Kruse dolls

interocular painters and toy dealers

Little Max – child of the Weimar Boheme and the youngest of eight children in a time when people still said “youngest” – grew up in Bad Kosen between eyes painters and representatives of the New York toy trade on. It should be clear that one as he re-invented the German-language children’s book immediately after the war.

Photo: dpa / picture alliance Max Kruse, 1921-2015

“The lion is going on”, his first novel, appeared almost as soon as the young Max Kruse had moved his mother’s factory in the West. But the safe future as heir apparent in the mother doll empire took place without him. Dear Max Kruse went as a copywriter to Munich, where there was with him, Michael Ende, Otfried Preußler and James Krüss something like the group 47 of the Children’s Literature: Four young men who denazified the children’s book by anknüpften where never a Nazi had been.

With “Don Blech” Max Kruse wrote against militarism, with its Karl May parody “Lord Schmetterhemd” against a now happy forgotten youth book canon. And with the “Urmel” he wrote not only one of the most influential children’s classic of the Bonn Republic, but – although he was too reluctant to talk about it – even about yourself

You can find Max Kruse in soul-Fanten who sings all alone on a rock island Titiwu “in the midst of the Equator” his songs; But we must it also be thought of as a student of Professor Habakkuk Tibatong, of not just animals – Ping, the Penguin, or Wawa, the dragon -. but also his quiet, shy author teaches speaking

“My greatest pain”

Anyone who wants can the Urmel, the thawed primal beings, understood as anticipation of “Jurassic Park”. But even more hidden in Urmel the desire to see the dead.

Photo: dpa / picture alliance The Urmel as dolls Crate Star. Total Max Kruse wrote twelve Urmel books

“My greatest pain,” Max Kruse said that if you asked him about his son Stefan, who was killed in an accident in April 1968 by bike. “Stefan,” it says in the epilogue by Max Kruse, carried by Proust’scher melancholy autobiography, “witnessed the filming by the Puppet no longer”.

That he films the “Augsburger Puppenkiste” owe his success, Max Kruse has not tired of repeating. That he had also helped himself a little to this success, he was far from believing, however.

For too long he had taken the glory of mother lay claim he wrote more than those who knew him for a long time knew that it was time for him to take his own fame in claim: Max Kruse wrote children’s book story – at the end he has hopefully also himself believed

I have recently a few weeks ago heard of him. In a joint letter, we asked children’s authors to write to his 95th birthday next year a Urmel history. On Friday Max Kruse died in Penzberg. I would like to have done him the immortality of his creatures again in mind.