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"Puzzle King" Peter Schubert
Photo: Marian Lenhard / DER SPIEGEL
On the morning of January 15th, around 9:30 a.m., Peter Schubert placed the 53,999th piece in the largest series-produced puzzle in the world on the kitchen table of his apartment in Hallerndorf in Upper Franconia and closed his eyes.
Schubert says it was a sad moment.
He did feel a certain amount of joy - after all, he was one of the first people to put the "Travel around Art!" Together, 54,000 pieces, 108 individual panels measuring 8.64 by 2.04 meters, a puzzle larger than the side of a 20- Foot sea containers.
Nevertheless, there was a void in him.
He had been doing the puzzle for more than four months.
It was, he says, like waking up from a dream in which everything was easy for him.
He didn't want it to be over.
Schubert is 52 years old, he has white hair and a beautiful Franconian dialect, when he says "puzzling" it sounds like "pusln".
Now he calls himself the puzzle king.
Schubert works in shifts to repair machines in a sawmill, otherwise he puts puzzles together.
He has a website on which he shows photos of his work, on the rear window of his Ford Focus is the Internet address and the somewhat puzzling inscription "The giants from the puzzle world puzzled".
Schubert was on local radio seven times and on television nine times, for example on the afternoon show "We in Bavaria".
“The push,” he says, is his destiny.
It used to be just a little light, nothing special.
Now he's the puzzle king.
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