The Whole World on One Page—Wimmelbooks: An International Perspective

84 | BOOKBIRD The two German artists who immediately come into mind when talking about wimmelbooks are Ali Mitgutsch and Rotraut Susanne Berner. But there are many other creators of wimmelbooks to be discovered, both nationally and internationally! The genre of the Wimmelbuch was born when illustrator Ali Mitgutsch published the now-classic picturebook Rundherum in meiner Stadt (All around My City) in 1968, although he did not particularly like the term. In wimmelbooks, there are lots of people or animals teeming across doublespreads, and although the books are textless or have little text, the juxtaposition of events and their rich detail develop a great narrative power: the wimmelbook invites readers to look more closely at its action-packed illustrations and to invent stories about what they see (Rémi 158). In the books of Mitgutsch as well as in those of Flemish illustrator Tom Schamp or German illustrator Britta Teckentrup, the city, the mountains, and even the water function as thematic brackets: they visually contain and connect (proto)typical crowded places with high recognition value such as marketplaces, construction sites, parks, sledding hills, fairgrounds, beaches, and airports, featuring scenes that everybody is familiar with. Very often wimmelbooks appeal to the senses: you can literally hear the lively chatter of the people and the clatter of the machinery in the scenes depicted. This vividness is one of the hallmarks of Ali Mitgutsch’s timeless illustrations. At the same time, however, they do reflect the context in which they were created. Most pages show only a few women, most often wearing an apron or pushing a stroller, thus giving an outdated image of gender roles. When it comes to the technical side, Mitgutsch favors a hybrid point of view: half bird’s-eye view, half frontal view. The resulting perspective merges the front view with the one from above, levels the foreground and the background, and depicts almost every object on the double-spread the same size. The visual abundance is structured by colors and shapes as well as by groups of figures and by routes like paths or streets, which add direction and movement. Movement of time and space and motion of the different characters are central in narrative wimmelbooks such as Rotraut Susanne Berner’s stories from a town called Wimmlingen. The individual characters and story lines of the books develop both The Whole World on One Page—Wimmelbooks: An International Perspective