The Whole World on One Page—Wimmelbooks:An International Perspective This article was originally published in German as "Die ganze Welt auf einer Seite," in the periodical JuLit, March 2020. 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 Most pages show only a few women, most often wearing an apron or pushing a stroller, thus giving an outdated image of gender roles.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 [End Page 84] throughout each of the five volumes (one for each season and one for nighttime) as well as across the whole series of these books. Berner's figures cross their town of Wimmlingen from left to right with every page turn (following Western reading direction). Readers accompany the various characters from the outskirts of the town to the center and back again, and follow their different encounters and experiences. The flashy wimmelbook 50 Geschichten aus Mamoko (50 Stories from Mamoko) by Polish graphic designers Aleksandra Mizielińska and Daniel Mizieliński works in a similar way. As a textless book, Mamoko—like almost every wimmelbook—is internationally accessible. Here the title reveals how many stories are to be discovered in the book, in which every double-page shows a different urban space, each in a different color: numerous anthropomorphized animals go about their jobs, run errands, or are having fun on their own or with others. The conclusions of the different story lines on the last page prove to be provisional since new twists and turns surface, thus opening them up to new possibilities. The book has an open ending, or more precisely, no ending at all. Place and time are changing and evolving in Rotraut Susanne Berner's Wimmlingen books or in the Mamoko book. In the case of Berner, the pages of her books can be put together seamlessly, like a filmstrip. But a development over time can become visible even if the spatial setting remains the same: this is true for the mischievous wimmelbook Hallo Byen! (Hello City!) by Norwegian illustrator Anna Fiske. While the setting stays the same, the lighting conditions, the number of...