Disney's Donald Duck shaped the humor of several generations, but complex questions remained unanswered, such as: "Maybe if I sit here and stare at the moorhens that swamp around in the swamp, I'll avoid all trouble?"
The new book by Donaldist Hans von Storch comically explores Duck's role in our everyday lives and society. In an interview with WELT, the researcher provides insights into the fascinating duck universe, its great mysteries and surprising implications for our world.
WORLD: Mr. von Storch, the "Bild" once asked in a headline related to your capacity as a Donaldist: "Mr. Storch, do you have a tit with your duck?" With all due respect, do you?
Hans von Storch: Oh, I don't think so, but the article in "Bild" back then, around 40 years ago, was very nice, and the headline was wonderful too.
WORLD: What is so fascinating about Donald Duck?
Von Storch: He's a duck like you and me.
WORLD: You are one of the leading climate researchers in Germany. Did you have to justify your unusual hobby to your colleagues, the publicly celebrated interest in duck comics?
Von Storch: No, that's why I was never put under any pressure. On the contrary, Donald Duck stories empower you for life.
WORLD: To what extent?
Von Storch: If, for example, I met a man whose beak had been bitten by a turtle, then thanks to the Donald degree I would know what to do.
WORLD: What would that be?
Von Storch: I would look in my nephew's scout handbook. All the essential answers can be found in Donald's nephew's Boy Scout Handbook. What gives us food for thought is that while the Scout Handbooks contain all the essential answers, they certainly don't contain all the questions. For a long time it remained unclear what the Boy Scout manuals could have meant. Then the smartphones came out and it was clear. Reading Donald anticipated what would be invented in our world. With Duckburg you can predict how our world will develop.
WORLD: Duckburg is ahead of our world?
Von Storch: Take, for example, the story in which a ship is lifted using ping-pong balls. The system was copied in our world a few years later. But it was rightly not granted a patent because it had been invented in Duckburg. I recently read that cube-shaped melons are being bred to stack them more effectively. That doesn't surprise us Donaldists, in Duckburg there are cube-shaped eggs from cube-shaped chickens.
WORLD: How is that possible?
Von Storch: We haven't figured that out yet, the data situation is difficult. What is clear is that the chickens originate in remote valleys in the Andes, where they disguise themselves as rocks when local residents go for their eggs.
WORLD: Did you research that?
Von Storch: Yes, in 1977 we founded the D.O.N.A.L.D. founded, the German organization of non-commercial supporters of the louder Donaldism, to research Duckburg. We still meet every year around April 1st for the Donaldist conference. I had discovered two Donaldist magazines in Copenhagen in the mid-1970s and learned from them about Jon Gisle, a Norwegian religious scholar who had done research as a Donaldist. I wanted to do that too. As a mathematician, I was interested in strange systems, guided by the question: If I have an assumption, what statements result from it? That's how I researched Duckburg.
WORLD: You still couldn't solve the puzzle of the cube-shaped chickens.
Von Storch: The question of whether there are toilets in Duckburg has also had to remain open so far.
WORLD: How do you answer these questions?
Von Storch: The basis is always the reports by Carl Barks...
WORLD: So his comics, Barks was the illustrator of the Donald Duck stories.
Von Storch: With the help of translator Erika Fuchs, Barks has documented what he thought he knew about Duckburg, and our task is to find out what the records mean. Barks and Fuchs themselves didn't know that, we asked them, they were just willing accomplices from Duckburg.
WORLD: Duckburg seems to be quite advanced as a science location. Gyro Gearloose, for example, developed a machine that can translate animal sounds. Will it come to our world soon?
Von Storch: That's unclear, because the machine revealed that birds don't say anything at all, just chirp happily. The result showed that promises made by science cannot always be kept.
WORLD: An allusion to Homo Faber, to the misconception of scientific omnipotence?
Von Storch: Simply the result of good research, which you can tell from the fact that it doesn't bring anything at all at first.
WORLD: Have you already found out whether the same laws of nature apply in Duckburg as we do?
Von Storch: It seems that the world works similarly there, except for the second law of thermodynamics, which says that nothing becomes orderly by itself. In Duckburg, Donald Duck tears up a map on a bridge and throws it into the river, and the map puts itself back together at a bridge downstream where Gustav Gans is standing.
WORLD: What follows from this?
Von Storch: Our world appears to be a subspace of Duckburg, which appears to be larger than our world. That means Donald could come around the corner at any time while we can't show up in his world.
WORLD: Where is Duckburg?
Von Storch: That has not yet been clarified. Possibly everywhere. The mayors in Duckburg are pigs, that's a starting point. I once talked to a Hamburg mayor about it, but his physiognomy didn't fit, and we didn't get any further.
WORLD: The spatial component would be clarified, what about time?
Von Storch: The time in Duckburg is different. There is no memory there, no references across the stories. While time runs sequentially with us, it seems to run parallel in Duckburg. This is comparable to climate simulations: in climate research, we run equivalent future scenarios in parallel.
WORLD: Is Duckburg a better world?
Von Storch: No, just another world. There too there is meanness, envy, deceit, violence and many other human qualities. Donald's high spirits also repeatedly lead him to over-the-top actions. He can use the plane to change the local weather, leading him to unleash a storm to get revenge on others. A moral cannot be derived from the work, but when Donald peels potatoes at the end, that's not bad.
WORLD: Donald is also greedy.
Von Storch: Yes, he even produces a million eggs on a mountain to wait for the egg price to rise. But an earthquake shakes the eggs down, they bury a village that can only be saved by burning it down and rebuilding it under the name Scrambled Eggs.
WORLD: Your role model Jon Gisle, the Norwegian religious scholar, came up with the theory that Duckburg was the center of the world, with its axis running right through Scrooge McDuck's money store.
Von Storch: Yes, it's all about the money. Once the tank crackers succeed in capturing Dagobert's money because Dagobert stored it in a reservoir. The tank crackers attack the dam wall, the money breaks out on a piece of land for the tank crackers who, at the invitation of Scrooge McDuck, also want to bathe in it, but perish because only Scrooge has this gift. But he can only own money or bathe in it, not spend it, and when he does have to get rid of money, Donald offers to spend money on Scrooge for a fee.
WORLD: Was it the amoral thing that used to raise people against Donald Duck stories?
Von Storch: I have no idea. In any case, in order to denounce the enemies of Donaldism, we put together the documentary film “The crimes of German housewives against Donaldizing children”. In it they are all exposed: vulgar Donaldists, anti-Donaldists, commercialists who trampled on Donaldism's approach to education. Worst of all were the German teachers, who tried to enforce a Goethe compulsion on Donald Duck, and housewives who, obsessing over order, took away their children's books, which many Donaldists confirmed. But after our film came out, the housewives and teachers just ducked.
WORLD: Did Duck literature still have an influence?
Von Storch: Even demonstrably. To study the influence, a long-running experiment began in the 1950s. A country was divided into a region with Donald Duck literature and a zone without it. Germany was selected for the experiment. In fact, the part without Donald Duck perished in the late 1980s, while the other didn't.
Von Storch, H., 2022: A Day in the Life of Donald Duck, 140 pp.
