Bollmann-Bildkarten-Verlag

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Bollmann-Bildkarten-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG

logo
legal form GmbH & Co. KG
founding 1948
Seat Braunschweig , Germany
management Sven Bollmann
Number of employees 12
Branch cartography
Website www.bollmann-bildkarten.de

The Bollmann-Bildkarten-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG is a cartographic publisher from Braunschweig . The family company was founded in 1948 and since then has been producing the “Bollmann picture cards”, a kind of three-dimensional city ​​map , created using a special technique and named after him .

history

When the trained graphic artist Hermann Bollmann (1911–1971) returned to the heavily destroyed Braunschweig from Soviet captivity in 1947 ( Allied bombing raids had destroyed 90% of the city center), he had the idea of ​​creating an independent contemporary document in the form of a completely to create another city plan. During the war, Bollmann had made troop maps in a so-called " military perspective" for a staff in the east and now meticulously transferred this technique, which he later called " helicopter perspective", to city maps and the like. This is how the "Rubble Map No. 1" was created, a city map of Braunschweig on a scale of 1: 3,000, which has meanwhile become of importance for the history of the city as it reflects the immediate post-war situation in the city. The idea of ​​the company founder developed into a trademark and unique selling point of the "Bollmann picture cards" with a drawing style that has since been protected worldwide .

During the Cold War period (until approx. 1990), aerial photos were only allowed to be published after they had been individually checked and approved by a corresponding state authority. The Western Allies feared that the Bollmann maps could be misused by the Eastern Bloc for espionage purposes because of their accuracy and timeliness . However, a special regulation was made for the Bollmann company: Since it would have been far too time-consuming to check every single aerial photograph, the company's draftsmen had to submit a new police clearance certificate to the authorities every year, which now includes well over a million black and white photos and Films had to be locked in a bunker - inaccessible to the public - where they are still to this day.

The managing director of Bollmann-Bildkarten-Verlag is Sven Bollmann, grandson of the company's founder, who is the third generation to run the family business.

The Bollmann picture cards

Bollmann picture cards show buildings in a special form of bird's eye view (oblique parallel projection) like example c). Their base area is perspective undistorted, as seen directly from above.

The city plans from Bollmann are characterized by their unusual perspective: while the plans show the city at every point directly from above, as is customary in cartography, i.e. without distorting the perspective, all buildings (but also trees or similar) in the plan are three-dimensional, oblique Seen from the front and above, drawn in so that windows, doors and chimneys are also visible. Their height is shown exaggerated by 1.5 to 1.8 times . In order to be able to represent building facades better, streets are shown slightly wider. Due to the high level of detail in the colored drawing, the viewer has the impression of looking at the city from a bird's eye view . For this reason, Hermann Bollmann was soon referred to as the “ Merian of the 20th century” by various specialist journals .

technology

The technology used and protected to create the Bollmann picture cards has hardly changed since 1948. In the first years of the company, Hermann Bollmann actually walked around the cities. He needed eight days for Goslar , two months for Frankfurt am Main and three months for Amsterdam , which he drew in 1955, and sometimes he worked up to 16 hours a day. He drew the first 22 plans himself, using the data and documents of the respective land surveying offices to ensure that neither the structural structure of a city nor its true-to-scale floor plan were falsified. In 1958, streets and squares were driven for the first time with a specially converted VW Beetle , in which a camera specially developed by Hermann Bollmann was installed. The camera was mounted on the roof and automatically took a photo every few meters. These photos were then transferred in great detail by the draftsmen. The Beetle has now been replaced by a modern small car. In addition, a company-owned Cessna 170 B has been used for aerial photography since 1958 .

The draftsmen need an average of 20,000 photos and around a year of working time for each city map. An updated plan appears approximately every five years. For the 1962 map of New York , however, around 67,000 photos (50,000 ground and around 17,000 aerial photographs) were necessary, for Jerusalem around 40,000. There are now around 80 plans from German and international cities, including Bethlehem , Celle , Graz , Copenhagen , Lüneburg , Trier and Zurich , as well as two from entire districts, namely from Peine and Düren . In addition, Hermann Bollmann made a ski and hiking map of the Harz Mountains .

literature

  • NN: Hundred picture cards: 20 years of Bollmann-Bildkarten-Verlag , Bollmann-Verlag, Braunschweig 1969
  • Städtisches Museum Braunschweig (Ed.): Hermann Bollmann , exhibition May 22–26. June 1966, Braunschweig 1966

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Braunschweiger Zeitung (ed.): The bomb night. The air war 60 years ago , special issue No. 10 (2004), Braunschweig 2004, p. 8
  2. ↑ a b c Horst Knape: A modern Merian , In: Braunschweig - Reports from the cultural life , issue 1/1958, Georg-Westermann-Verlag, Braunschweig 1958, p. 17f
  3. ↑ Städtisches Museum Braunschweig (ed.): Hermann Bollmann , exhibition May 22–26. June 1966, p. 7
  4. ↑ Hake, Grünreich, Meng: Cartography , 8th edition, Walter de Gruyter, Göttingen 2002, p 188
  5. ↑ Diagonally from above , article in DER SPIEGEL, No. 14/1964, p. 100
  6. ^ Lutz Philipp Günther: The pictorial representation of German cities: From the chronicles of the early modern times to the websites of the present , p. 139
  7. ↑ Florian Rinke: Since 1948: Street View made in Braunschweig. August 22, 2010, accessed October 11, 2010 .
  8. ↑ Photo of the Bollmann-Cessna 170 B


Coordinates: 52 ° 18 ′ 55.7 ″  N , 10 ° 33 ′ 33.1 ″  E