The winding paths of happiness

Biographical notes
“Born on 24 April 1936 in the home of the well-known midwife Mrs Reiser, just like Johann Georg Lang and many others, right up to Christian Stückl. I was then baptised at St Peter and Paul’s near the gravestone that already bears my name (and has done so since 1792).
My father was a barrel painter for the late Lang. Erben, though only for as long as wooden figures were still painted in bright colours. Then came the ‘wood-tone’ era, for those were hard times and my father had to leave Oberammergau (taking me with him). And my father, the barrel painter (and incidentally the grandson of a Catholic chaplain who remains anonymous), never painted a wooden figure again and has been buried near Leningrad since I was six years old.
At the age of ten, my uncle Melchior Breitsamter (a godfather to whom I also owe my first name) instilled in me a passion for the theatre in the prop room of the Passion Play theatre: that backdrop! Those costumes! And the colossal bunch of grapes for the Living Picture! So I became a stage designer, and the curtain rose not just every ten years (as in Oberammergau), but every four weeks in South America as well as in Munich.
I changed – as you might guess – careers, became a dramaturg, directed for television, wrote books and 42 radio plays, including the award-winning (‘Radio Play of the Decade’) CORDOBA OR THE ART OF BATHING.
Not too many words; this is about my paintings. Which I now, at the end of my life, finally have time to paint. And never again in that gloomy wood-tone.”
(MS, June 2021)

Last edited on 05.05.2026