1955 First year at school with the Roman Catholic "School-Brothers".
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1954 His father gives him one of the first German Disney comic-books.
And Helnwein has his Damascus experience:
"Opening my first Donald Duck comic book felt like seeing the daylight again for someone who has been trapped underground by a mine-disaster for many days. I squinted cautiously because my eyes hadn't gotten used to the dazzling, bright sun of Duckburg yet, and I greedily sucked the fresh breeze that came drifting over from Uncle Scrooge's money bin into my dusty lungs. I was back home again, in a decent world where one could get flattened by steam-rollers and perforated by bullets without serious harm. A world in which the people still looked proper, with yellow beaks or black knobs instead of noses. And it was here that I met the man who would forever change my life - a man who, as the Austrian poet H.C. Artmann put it, is the only person today that has something worthwhile saying: Donald Duck." ...

Helnwein spends his childhood going back and forth between depressed post-war Vienna and the farm of his grandparents in the countryside of rural Lower Austria.
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His father Joseph Helnwein works in the Austrian post administration, and his mother Margarethe is a housewife.
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Born October 8, 1948 in Vienna.
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