Karl-Heinz Mauermann – A Picture Book for the Blind

The man is a loner, an oddball from childhood on. He grows up in a butcher's household in the Ruhr area. Images, literature, culture hold no value in his parents' home. Early on, he develops the plan to create an extensive archive of images. He pursues the idea with determination. He needs space for the images, and he finds it. The tunnels beneath the UNESCO World Heritage site Zollverein, Shaft XII, are just the beginning. There are so many more shafts, mining structures underground, places, crosscuts in the region, all interconnected. Family albums, posts on social networks, images under the skin, stamps, shiny picture sheets, cave paintings, picture icons in the mind. He collects all images. The archive beneath Zollverein grows. His archive grows. He draws his strength from the relationship with the blind woman. From the text: "There must have been a child, a boy. For the boy, images would have meant everything. There would have been detailed accounts of his childhood, of all that made him into what he eventually became. Reports would have been recorded that sounded so impossible and absurd that the people who read them would have said: That can't be. Someone must have made that up, someone who can't be quite right in the head. But everything that was told, all the stories, all the reports are true and will have been true." Karl-Heinz Mauermann is working in February at the artist's apartment in Soltau. In the Bleilaus, he presents his new novel "The Archive – a Picture Book for the Blind" and other literary and artistic works.