Claudius Seidl HELMUT DIETL

About the evening

The man in the white suit

With his television series from the 1970s and 1980s, director and screenwriter Helmut Dietl painted a lovingly ironic portrait of Munich and its people, beyond all the clichés of lederhosen and white-blue skies. His creations, the Monaco-Franze and the gossip reporter Baby Schimmerlos, are still unforgotten today. With “Stonck” and “Rossini” he made films that achieved cult status. Now Claudius Seidl, a first-class connoisseur of German film, tells about the nonconformist and heartthrob who died in 2014 and who spent part of his childhood in Gräfelfing (“The libertine from Rottenbucher Strasse”). Later, Dietl was a well-known face of Munich's bohemians and became their satirical chronicler. Seidl knowledgeably manages to revive the atmosphere of that time when Munich became the “secret capital of Germany”.

Claudius Seidl, born in Würzburg in 1959, began his journalistic career in the 1980s as a film critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die ZEIT and Tempo. Later editor at Spiegel, from 2001 to 2020 head of the features section at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, since then a freelance journalist. He lives in Berlin and Munich. Numerous book publications, especially films. His biography of Helmut Dietl was published in autumn 2022.