"Heilbronn wimmelt" is a special book about a city that most people would consider an ugly duckling. The inner city was destroyed by English firebombs and was rebuilt with housing in mind. When I started this project, I reached out to the residents of Heilbronn on Instagram, "What do you love about Heilbronn?" I've worked their responses into this search-and-find activity book.
Discover what Heilbronn has to offer - culture, wine(!), good food, family-friendly outings and wonderful inhabitants.
Meet the Corn Mice, the little Martians, The Rockabilly Dancers, the Majorettes, and many more hidden figures and real citizens of Heilbronn in this search-and-find Wimmelbook.
The Martian characters came to me as I was grocery shopping. The experimenta, a technical museum, has an observatory on its roof. I knew that these little figures needed to be key figures in the book, simple, not scary, having childlike appeal with round bellies and belly buttons, able to explain different situations to children.
At the same time, they needed to be easy to be drawn repetitively. The character on the moon is a friend of theirs (second image). You can find them shopping, eating ice cream while taking selfies, discovering the Train Museum, in a pod on the playground of the former National Gardens Show, discovering what products are made of salt in the Heilbronn Salt Mines and hidden on other pages of the book.
Most German cities have a weekly farmer's market. Because I researched this book in the midst of the pandemic, I relied on my camera and on a little imagination, as well as what information some of the residents gave me. In the image on the left, you can see the historical market clock, which is very elaborate. The girl flinging herself out of a window is "Kätchen (Katy) von Heilbronn", a figure from the play of the same name. I couldn't just let her fall – and in the play she doesn't really hurt herself after jumping out the window – so I let the floating clown give her a balloon.
On the roof of the city hall, I placed rock-a-billy dancers. This is to honor the reconstruction efforts, energy and hope that marks the post-war citizens of Germany, but particularly of Heilbronn, which was a city of ashes.
The next double-paged spread is of the Suedwestdeutsche Salzwerke AG - or simply known as the Heilbronn salt mines. One big challenge to this piece was that the salt mines stretch many kilometers from Heilbronn to Bad Friedrichshall. The mines are not only rich in salt, but rich in history.
When wars prevailed, Heilbronn hid many of its cultural treasures in the mines. They managed to save the valuable alter from St. Kilians Church, made by Hans Seyfer, that way. However, it was also a place where workers from concentration camps were forced to labor during WWII. I needed to find a sensitive balance. The memorial to those forced to labor in the mines is accessible via the family museum at Bad Friedrichshall. Some say, children shouldn't be exposed to such subjects, but I do think knowledge is power that can prevent terrible things from repeating themselves in the future.
Other reasons for including the salt mines are simply the fascination we have with caves and mines. Children and adults alike are amazed at the size of the mining machines, and that you can travel underneath the earth through the myriad of tunnels from Heilbronn to Bad Friedrichshall.
Salt is essential to all of us. The Suedwestdeutsche Salzwerke AG supplies about 90% of the salt used to make roads safe in winter in Germany. Their salt has other uses, too. If you look closely, you will find two scenes of how salt is used. The first is in the miners' parade, where they carry food conserved with or containing salt. The second is in the lit exhibit of every day products that rely on salt for their production.
The Suedwestdeutsche Salzwerke AG was so pleased with this scene that they acquired the rights to show it in their company magazine and to have a copy made to be hung in their main office.
"Heilbronn wimmelt" is published in
Silberburg-Verlag, Tübingen, Germany
ISBN 978-3-8425-2333-3
