For the first time, Michael Mittermeier speaks publicly about his family’s drama: he and his wife Gudrun Allwang had to cope with four stillbirths. Why he’s turning tragedy into comedy now.
“Humor and tragedy are so close together,” said Michael Mittermeier on Friday evening on the “NDR Talkshow”. If you only know the comedian how he makes the crowd laugh on stage, he struck more serious tones in conversation with Barbara Schöneberger and Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt.
Michael Mittermeier: “My wife and I had four stillbirths”
When asked by Schöneberger about his new program “#13”, Mittermeier revealed the sad fate his family had to endure. “My wife and I had four stillbirths,” he explained, adding that no one in the public knew about it until now. Now it was time for him to incorporate this very personal story into his program on stage. People do ask him if you “have to take dead children on stage with you,” says Mittermeier. “I had it with me every day. I always had it with me,” he said.
About ten years ago he saw a comedian’s show in Edinburgh, who incorporated exactly the topic into his stage program. It was a “crass” program, so Mittermeier. What surprised him at the time was that he himself laughed about it as he was affected. “It’s my tool,” he said on Friday night’s talk show. “I go on stage with a sense of humor to drive out the darkness for me, too,” he said.
Catholicism drove him to despair
Mittermeier also told how, as a Catholic, he struggled with his faith after the stillbirths. In religion, life begins at conception, he said, which made it all the more difficult for him to hold a dead baby in his arms that had everything except a heartbeat. “The first thing that came to mind was kind of to the doctor, ‘Can we bury it.’ He said to me: ‘No, we can’t, that’s not baptized.’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck, like now? When should I have had him baptized, should I have pumped in holy water during the amniocentesis?’ It’s tough. You can laugh or not laugh,” said the Bavarian.
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After the Vatican revised a centuries-old rule in 2007, according to which unbaptized babies end up in limbo, Mittermeier’s uncertainty was all the greater. Because he and his wife Gudrun Allwang had two of the stillbirths before 2007. No one could tell him whether these two children were now in limbo.
Many people would not talk about the tragedy of stillbirth. He can only do that today because he has incorporated it into his program. “My wife was inside and my daughter was there too. My wife hugged me afterwards and said, ‘You did a great job, this is probably the best program you’ve ever done,'” he recalled the reaction of his family.
source: “NDR talk show”
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I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
