Wimmelwelt in the backyard
At night, the Susanne kisses Tom with flowered pants. Yes, just that, with the blond curls and the beard. In the spring, summer, autumn and winter with his red Vespa roars through the small town. Susanne kisses him secretly. For there is Armin, the bookseller with the round glasses, the gray hair and the blue and white striped shirt. Susanne's good friend. Susanne often visits him in his little shop. How are the two going? Who knows?
In real life, they are a couple. The illustrator Rotraut Susanne Berner, 60, and Armin Abmeier, her husband. In fact, she does not wear floral pants and funny hats that are constantly lost to her. But, as today, a black turtleneck sweater and a gray mottled tweed skirt. Very simple. It's already colorful enough in her head. Rotraut Susanne Berner is a master in storytelling. Stories without words. Stories with pictures, which lightly linger between fantasy and reality like the characters in their now world-famous Wimmelbüchern. The experience on eight large panorama pages the small and big adventures of life. So in passing.
Rotraut Susanne Berner likes it, if not everything is crystal clear
After all, it's a big romance cycle, says its publisher. Not without irony. But you like her. Mrs. Berner likes it, if not everything is explained crystal clear, if space for own thoughts remains. She has an unerring sense of what children like, namely, "making sense of something". In 2006, the native Swabian was awarded the special prize of the German Literature Prize for her complete works. 80 text and picture books? some of them also written by yourself? and she has illustrated about 800 book bindings for children and adults, including as diverse as texts of the literary robbery Charles Bukowski and the "Zahlenteufel" by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. She is the inventor of Hasen Karlchen, whom especially small children love heartily.
To humanize animals is actually frowned upon by educators. But Rotraut Susanne Berner has been fighting for years against the argument that children's books must be simple and transparent. On the contrary. "The world is not like that," she says, "so boring, kids love nonsense." For example, elves with nickel glasses, enamored hyenas, princes in swimming trunks or rabbits who like to play football. Success proves you right.
The humor in her illustrations is as quiet, tender and quiet as his creator. She takes a lot of time to look at, listen, tell. "It's wonderful to watch people," says Rotraut Susanne Berner. From this second view, which she throws on the world, also her characters live. So loving, so cheerful, so virtuoso, but always with a wink. That's why her drawings, which she puts to paper with crayons, pastels and gouache, are also great fun. Still, she was never satisfied with just one thing. Rotraut Susanne Berner wanted to write more, for example. "At age 47, I did my first book, The Adventure." It was an adventure for her as well. In 14 days, without telling anybody about it, she wrote, drew, copied, bound and laid out the book for her husband. Armin Abmeier, an avid comic-art collector and publisher of illustrated books, is the one who sees their stories for the first time, "my most important critic, which can sometimes be very harsh." She smiles as she says that. But what he says is invaluable to her, "simply because he has such a good sense."
Everyone would fall in love with the studio of Rotraut Susanne Brenner
Rotraut Susanne Brenner
The Wahlmünchnerin just has to put her head out of her small backyard studio in Schwabing, and she has the whole world of space under her nose. In the afternoon, the neighborhood kids are playing around, in the mornings you can hear the school noise next door. There is a florist, a kiosk and the Italian around the corner. A good place for the little adventures of everyday life. One can imagine her stepping out the door and meeting them all: Gabriela, the ice cream seller; Ina, always bored at home; Silva with the kindergarten children or Manfred, the jogger, who constantly loses something and maybe even finds something big? love, that is. They all seem so familiar, could live right next to one around the corner. Or like a little fan once wrote to her: "I think it's great that you painted a lot of people I know, my friend Gesa, for example, and the girl on the bike with the man next to it, that's me with my dad when I was little. "
Even in her studio, every child would fall in love instantly.In the steep wooden staircase with the colorful drawings on the walls and in the large desk full of paints, pens, tubes and brush. On the walls, books are stacked up on the shelves. An enchanting place where stories are just bustling, painted and written. A place to dream away from the world out there, which seems as tiny as a dollhouse and incredibly comfortable. The small and the big. A fascinating contrast, which also plays an important role in Berners own life. She grew up in the countryside near Stuttgart with her sisters. A shy, tender girl with thick pigtails and big brown eyes. Her parents were strict and Protestant, intellectual and liberal. At the weekend, the father and his daughters liked to make trips to the Stuttgart State Gallery.
There, Susanne fell in love with the pictures of Picasso, "someone who baffles me again and again". Even today, when she thinks she knows all his pictures inside out. At the age of three, she became so ill that she was quarantined for weeks. Locked away in a sterile hospital room, surrounded by noisy strangers. Nobody was allowed to visit her. The little girl delivered to the great unknown? a feeling that has burned deep into her memory. "But I somehow lived with this fear." Overcoming is an important issue in childhood, she says, "but that's the same with everyone". Even then it had magically attracted them, the scary-beautiful. "My favorite painting was The Dead Island by the painter Arnold Böcklin."
The fear was an engine for many things.
The afternoons are unforgettable, too, when, with the old family Bible with the copper engravings, she crumbled all alone into a quiet corner. "Love, power, greed and jealousy, these archaic primal stories are about everything that still moves people today." Goosebump wars were the stories of Absalon hanging by the hair, or Samson the Strong, tearing down a temple with his muscles. "Fear has been a powerful engine for many things."
She herself has no children. Perhaps that is precisely why the closeness to their own childhood experiences and feelings is still so present, so unclouded. "Although I've grown up a little longer, I can still remember the feelings I had when I was a little girl." To the fears, but also to the tingling when something was not so easy to fathom. So it is in their stories and pictures. Some things are easy to grasp, many things want to be found, and many things remain mysterious. Like life. It's not always that easy to understand. Rotraut Susanne Berner likes secrets? also in their Wimmelbüchern. So it happens that only she alone knows what the chimney sweep is called and with whom the bus driver is married.
