Dorfen - Anton Empl is an art teacher, set designer, refugee helper and, above all, a family person.
He tells from his eventful life.
They are a young couple in their early twenties when Anton Empl and his wife Resi decide to become foster parents of four children. Her biological son Christian was a year old at the time. Within a few years, the four siblings between the ages of six and 15 became orphans; they are on the verge of being separated and divided into different families. Anton Empl is currently a student at the art academy in Munich. In order to finance his studies, he works in Waldwinkel near Aschau am Inn in a home for young people with environmental disabilities. The family drama happens in the neighborhood, the young Empls still live in Schwindegg. At first they only look after the orphaned children on the weekends. “When it said in the room that the siblings should be separated, we couldn't stand it,” says the 70-year-old.They quit their apartment, move to the children's house in Aschau and take over the care. But the house is too small. So, with the help of relatives, they build a small cube. They live there as an extended family for twelve years, their son Quirin was born in 1985.
You are in your early twenties when you take on the care of four children
A large family is not unusual for Anton Empl. He was born as the second son of a total of nine siblings in Wimm, a remote farm near Schwindkirchen. Very close to the great artist Johann Georg von Dillis, who was born in 1759 in neighboring Gmain. "My father showed me the grave in the cemetery and told me about it full of admiration," says Anton Empl. He attended elementary school in Schwindkirchen. "The first twelve years of my life were a dream for me," remembers the Dorfener. “Our parents weren't strict at all.” With regard to manual skills, the siblings are encouraged. Empl laughingly recounts an experience: "Once an engine broke down in the yard, it couldn't be repaired." The father dragged it into the living room and provided the children with tools."He didn't even put a blanket under it," says the 70-year-old, shaking his head. The boys completely dismantle the engine, are smeared with oil, but happy. “We were also allowed to work with the fretsaw in the living room,” says Empl. That's why my father changed the linoleum floor every year.
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Anton Empl when he started school in 1958.
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A "second mom" still lives on the farm.
A refugee woman who, like a maid, spends her entire life in Wimm.
"It was cultivated there," says Empl.
The siblings would have enjoyed this site too.
Twelve years of wonderful childhood
Anton discovered his creative gene in elementary school. Using clay and plasticine, he and his siblings modeled figures and formed their own world.
He also portrayed his parents back then.
“As a second grader I was allowed to create Maria and Josef for the nativity play, that was an incredible impulse for me,” he says.
But artists are not initially planned as a professional career.
One day, Anton is in the fourth grade, a priest comes to school - looking for future pastors.
Anton is selected and comes to the Salesian monastery in Burghausen at the age of twelve.
“A common path for farmer's children,” says Empl.
The order represents the teaching of Don Bosco - a holistic view of the development of young people.
“It was almost anarchist at the time,” says Empl.
Nevertheless, the rule in the monastery, where Anton sleeps with 20 to 40 other boys in a dormitory, is different from that in the yard in Wimm.
“I was very homesick, but didn't dare tell my mother.” He is only allowed to go home on special holidays.
He lacks his workshop.
He copes with school reasonably well.
“Always on the edge of the abyss,” says the future high school teacher with a wink.
"That's why, as a teacher, I had a lot of understanding for the weaker students."
Father recognizes his talent
But then he gets a kind of "special position" in the boarding school.
While the classmates watch the sports show on television, Anton can pursue his passion in a practice room.
The only condition: he must create sacred art.
He is even allowed to have a little longer hair.
A priest, who himself studied at the art academy, is at his side.
Among other things, the young Anton makes a Corpus Christi carpet out of colored sawdust.
Empl still enjoys working with this material today.
His talent is recognized in the boarding school.
"That's why I don't quarrel with this time in retrospect."
In the tenth grade the decision is made: priest or not?
“Under the bench I read“ Summerhill ”with enthusiasm." Freedom instead of coercion, self-determination instead of obedience to authority, is what pedagogy propagates.
It is the time of hippies, new beginnings, revolution and free love.
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A heart for asylum seekers: Anton Empl (right) supports refugee families in the district.
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During this time he met Resi Sonnleitner from Reiberstorf near Schwindegg.
"We were both with the rural youth, and it sparked on a trip to France," recalls Resi Empl.
Anton's mother wasn't that enthusiastic at the time.
"If you have a love, you won't pass the Abitur," she feared.
In 1973, at the age of 22, Empl took his school leaving examination. “Of course I also repeated a year,” he says mischievously.
Community service: work with young people who are harmed by the environment
His community service takes him to Waldwinkel.
There he can let off steam artistically.
He gets a barrack of the former ammunition labor camp as a studio.
He sets up art projects together with young people with environmental disabilities.
The work there accompanies him throughout his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he will later work as a lecturer himself.
He was immediately accepted at the academy, and after school everything “everything went like clockwork”.
“Of course I also thought that I would be a great artist,” says Empl with a smile.
Fortunately, in addition to his diploma in painting, he also passed the state examination in art education.
Nevertheless, he designed exhibitions - at the Kirta exhibition in Dorfen as well as in the Haus der Kunst in Munich.
After his legal clerkship, he became an art teacher at the grammar school in Dorfen.
“I was very, very happy to be a teacher,” he looks back today.
“Discipline without screaming” has always been his claim.
He never had to fight for it, if it got too loud, he simply read to the students.
At that time the Empls still lived with their foster children in Aschau - until the youngest is 18, then they have to leave the house, this is stipulated by inheritance law.
They move to Dorfen, initially to rent, two of the foster children come with them.
Finally they get hold of a building site.
With a lot of personal effort, they build their extraordinary wooden house, in which they still live today.
Over 40 sets for villages
Empl's time at the Dorfener Gymnasium was shaped by the congenial collaboration with German and French teacher Gerhard Häußler, who was responsible for the theater performances at the time. Häußler describes his friend and former colleague as "an incredibly creative person". Empl has an "almost endless variety of possibilities for artistic expression". The art educator is present at every theater rehearsal. For ten years the duo has allowed language, drama and imagery to merge into a single unit. "Anton and I thought very similarly." It was a one-time, unrepeatable collaboration, said Häussler, who then said goodbye to the grammar school in Dorfen and went abroad for eight years.
Empl's theater sets are remembered.
He stages over 40 plays, including for the "Opera Inkognita", in Dorfen.
The district honored this with the culture award in 2016.
In his laudation, District Administrator Martin Bayerstorfer particularly emphasized the “Antigone”, which was performed in the ice rink in 2001.
"With our award winner, there is actually no clearly identifiable difference between work and leisure," said the district administrator.
That runs through Empl's entire life.
“My husband knows no idling,” says Resi Empl.
“He's a jack of all trades.
I think that's totally crazy, sometimes he draws, sometimes he sits at the computer, or he plays squeezing. ”There is no such thing as“ I can't do that ”with him.
34 years teacher at the grammar school in Dorfen
In 2016, Anton Empl will retire after 34 years at the grammar school in Dorfen. On the same day, his son Quirin starts teaching art at the Gars am Inn high school. Son Christian is a trained photographer, but has now taken over the day work shop in Dorfen, which his mother ran for a long time. The foster children all ended up in Munich. You work as a patent attorney, master carpenter, IT consultant and lawyer. Twice a year everyone comes together in Dorfen, at Christmas and Easter.
The Empls are happy and also a little proud that they got all the children off to a good start. “The guardian always assured us that he would help us, but we wanted to do it on our own,” says Resi Empl. The foster children were "an absolute gain" for the biological sons. “They always got along well, there was no jealousy,” says Anton Empl, but of course there have also been conflicts.
Anton Empl has been retired for five years.
In the first few years he mainly used his free time to help refugees.
“I brought the first family to fled Afghanistan to Lindum,” he says.
At that time he got involved in refugee work “naively”.
“I find it very difficult to endure certain forms of rejection,” he explains his decision.
With his large day-to-day bus he takes on trips for shopping, to the doctor, to the children's hospital and moves.
A heart for refugees
The encounters with the refugees bring him back to reality. “I have seen young people in Waldwinkel who are difficult to educate, but the problems of the refugees are of a completely different nature.” As a teacher, he wants to design art projects with the refugee children, but he soon realizes that they are not free for them. “Since they learn the language much faster, they often take responsibility for their parents.” Franz Leutner, Chairman of the Dorfen Refugee Aid, admires Empl for his commitment: “Anton is absolutely reliable. What Anton has put into refugee aid for a lifetime is enormous. "
The Empls also suffer strokes of fate themselves. A niece and a nephew die in quick succession. The 18-year-old in a car accident, the 17-year-old in a fire in the house. Resi Empl's single-parent sister remains behind with three children. From one day to the next she is homeless and grieves for her son. The Empls step in again. Without further ado, since the district administrator was very unbureaucratic, they add a small apartment to their wooden house, where the family can stay.
In the meantime, Anton Empl has withdrawn a little from helping refugees, but a new project has taken hold of him: his niece runs a horse farm, where there is always need. “Driving in a wheelbarrow and mowing is meditation for me,” he says, in contrast to painting, where he acts very spontaneously. “In my painting, the unfinished and fleeting is intentional and even a principle.” So in his pictures there are repeatedly unprocessed areas that reveal the wall behind through the painted acrylic film and bring reality to mind. Pictures have their own reality, but they can never replace reality, explains Empl.
When the grandfather and great-grandpa have time besides family, refugee aid and painting, he dedicates himself to the biography of the artist Dillis. “He fascinates me,” says Empl, who in 2019 will be juxtaposing his works with Dillis's in an exhibition. The two have a lot in common: their origins, their view of the unadorned and fleeting in nature and their social commitment - Dillis painted in the poor house and also helped his sister's children. Perhaps Anton Empl will even come a little closer to his role model in his research.
