The children’s book author and Tabaluga illustrator Helme Heine is dead. The Berlin native died on Thursday at the age of 84 in Russell, New Zealand, said the Weinheim-based Beltz publishing group, citing Heine’s son.
“The Creation” was the name of one of his many picture books, which were translated into 35 languages and published in millions of copies. Although his characters such as fat Waldemar and the dragon Tabaluga are world-famous to the music of Peter Maffay, the illustrator and author himself preferred to stay in the background.
Helme had lived in New Zealand since 1990 and came up with his most creative ideas on his beloved wooden yacht “Kikitoo”, as he said in an interview with the German Press Agency in 2016. For the god figure he was inspired by a portrait of the painter Claude Monet.
Former Chancellor Kohl as godfather
For the fat Waldemar, who goes through thick and thin in the famous “Friends” stories with Johnny Mauser and Franz von Hahn and once acts as a plug to stop a leak in the boat, former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the inspiration, as Heine once said.
Developing characters sometimes takes years, as he said: “It’s like the ripening process of sauerkraut.” Appropriately, his work about an animal village with the domestic pig boar Mr. Eberle and the 200-year-old turtle Miss Turtel was also called “Sauerkraut. Almost an idyll”. One of his classics is the first book “Elephant Basics” about getting older.
First South Africa, then New Zealand
Heine thought it was nonsense that children couldn’t be expected to deal with serious topics. He refused to write explicitly for children: “I write books that I would buy myself.” He is a translator of complicated things. “And then every child understands that.”
Heine came from Berlin, but spent most of his youth in North Rhine-Westphalia. He studied business administration and art, traveled extensively and eventually emigrated to South Africa. He was a set designer and director with his own cabaret in Johannesburg. The name: “Sauerkraut”.
His first picture book was written in Africa in 1976, not a far leap from the stage, as he found: “Picture books are staged stories.” He then returned to Germany for twelve years before emigrating with his wife Gisela from Radowitz to Russell on New Zealand’s North Island in 1990.
Figures with all facets
He filled his characters with life without the details appearing later in the book. “What kind of music would Waldemar listen to, what kind of books would Johnny Mauser read?” Heine asked himself. Only a figure with all the imaginary facets can be authentic when painted.
“In the beginning there was nothing,” is how the creation story begins according to Heine. “There was no up and no down, no left and no right. There was no snowflake, no blade of grass, no firefly, not even the atom. There was only God – and eternity.”
“I know that my lifespan is limited, and I am grateful for that because it allows me to live more consciously,” was Heine’s philosophy. He called his life a picture-perfect career. “I know that all life originated from stardust. Death will not end the process.”