Katrien Vloeberghs (Antwerp) p.57-65
2002 Issue 2
Abstract
It is generally acknowledged that German nineteenth century children’s literature represents an intact and harmonious world in which conflict situations, particularly those involving parental authority, are avoided. Within the parental rule of law, the disobedient child embodies a potential disturbance. In an attempt to control this danger, enlightened pedagogics and the corresponding children’s literature insistently affirm the norms concerning proper behaviour and attitude toward authority.
This model however does not seem entirely adequate where the picture-books by Heinrich Hoffmann and Wilhelm Busch are concerned. Their greater complexity may explain why they were not only internationally successful during their author’s lifetime but are still widely read today.
The obvious content of Busch’s famous stories Max und Moritz, Fipps der Affe and Eispeter and Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter provides author and reader with a moral agreement and thereby assures the educator of their pedagogic legitimacy: Hoffmann’s and Busch’s tales can then be read as traditional and typical examples of ‘intimidation-stories’: Disobedient children experience a cruel but justified punishment. Playing with matches leads to death by fire, refusing to eat your soup to fatal starvation and sucking your thumb to eventually losing it. After having punished the rebels, order is restored. The lesson seems straightforward enough, but a closer analysis shows that this pattern functions primarily as a protective layer hiding a different story. Subliminally, Busch’s and Hoffmann’s tales hide a disorienting and even subversive attitude.
Of the many levels on which such an alternative meaning can be detected, two are discussed in my analysis: the first concerns the action and the characterization of the protagonists, the second the reliability of the narrating instance. On one level, the protagonists continuously demonstrate their untiring flexibility, anarchic vitality and an archaic, triumphant resistance against instrumentalization and domestication. The motivations of their actions prove to be essentially free of egotistic interest and are clearly invested with the sympathy of the authors for joyful ‘Übermut’, an excess of untamed energy. On a second level, the stern and moralizing narrator is robbed of his authority. His language and his reasoning are riddled with false conclusions, logical contradictions and references to conflicting paradigms.