The jackhammer slams down every year

Every year the jackhammer rushes down is a picture portfolio by the Swiss artist Jörg Müller from 1973. It illustrates the seemingly unstoppable "concrete overlay" of a fictional landscape in the canton of Aargau in times of economic growth.

She made the illustrator Müller known straight away. The seven pictures always show the same section of a landscape as the seasons change at intervals of just three or four years. The criticism of the belief in progress at the time of its creation, which was soberly non-pedagogical expressed in the pictures, made the portfolio, which received the German Youth Book Prize in 1974 , a novelty in the field of picture books . A second portfolio of images by Müller, Here a house is falling, there is a crane and the excavator tooth is forever threatening (1976), shows the change of a city as unstoppable construction progress in similarly detailed images.

In 1976 Wolfgang Söring composed music for Müller's pictures. Ute Blaich and Gert Haucke wrote texts for each of the large-format works. Music and text made up audio sequences that appeared on a record.

Book editions

• Every year the jackhammer rushes down or the change in the landscape . Sauerländer, Aarau / Frankfurt am Main 1973; New editions: 2007, ISBN 978-3-7941-5177-6 ; Fischer Sauerländer, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-7373-5449-3 .
  • as audio book: Every year the jackhammer rushes down or the landscape changes: listening sequence with music , text by Ute Blaich and Gert Haucke, Teldec 1976, DNB 1004832311 ; Phonogram, Hamburg 1981, DNB 820037974 (record 33 / min, stereo; 30 cm, Philips 6449033 / audio cassette, no.7143033).
• Here a house is falling, there is a crane and the digger tooth or The Change of the City is forever threatening . Sauerländer, Aarau 1976 (8 A. 1995), ISBN 3-7941-1499-X .

Web links

• Illustration on the website of the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur on the occasion of the exhibition from September 2 to October 21, 2007