Adorjan I. de Gaffy, and Mr. | Milorad M. Drachkovitch at the Hoover | Institution and Archives for assisting me in locating some valuable research materials pertaining to my topic. Also, I sincerely thank Mr. H. Shields from the Children’s Book Division of the Library of Congress for guiding me through a maze of relevant literature.
A Research Professorship Grant from Central Michigan University enabled me to travel to various libraries in connection with this project, while it provided me for one semester with released time from teaching responsibilities. I have deeply appreciated this unique opportunity and thank President Harold Abel, Vice Provost Ernest Minelli, Dr. Hans Fetting, and the Committee on Research and Creative Endeavors for their encouragement on this behalf. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Park Library at Central Michigan University, \to Mary Moses (Smith),\ to Carol Swan, and Carole Pasch for some technical assistance.
Finally, I wish to extend a word of gratitude to my husband, Ihor Kamenetsky, for having alerted me to the ideological schemes of totalitarian states that undermine individual moral responsibility and critical judgment. To my sister, Alice Breyer, and to Jürgen, her husband, I acknowledge with thanks their warm interest in this work throughout its creation, and also their loan of some rare-books from a private collection.
PART I
Literary Theory and Cultural Policy
1
The Roots of Children’s Folk Literature in Pre-Nazi Germany
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, children’s literature in Germany in many respects resembled that of other countries in Europe. First, there were didactic books that were specifically written for children with the intent of teaching them religious lessons along with secular morals and manners. Secondly, there were the “classics,” many of which were originally written for adults but were later adapted for children. Finally, there was folklore in various forms: ballads, folk songs, myths, legends, and folktales of many lands, which German children enjoyed both in the oral tradition and in the printed versions.
In didactic literature for children, stories usually served as a means to another end, and the sermons were often longer than the plot—if plots were present at all. Some of these books contained tales about the saints, including religious legends, but others were merely illustrated catechisms or children’s sermons. The secular literature included ABC books, works on geography, history, and science, as well as handbooks on manners and morals designed to instruct “young ladies” and “young gentlemen.” The style of such works was often stilted and artificial, or else, dry and rather factual. In both cases, children could count on a moralistic ending.
In the eighteenth century, children particularly enjoyed those works that were richly illustrated, regardless of whether they were didactic in nature or of even older origin. Thus, Goethe in his childhood read Comenius’ Orbis Pictus (The World of Pictures), and Raff’s Naturgeschichte (Natural History).1 At that time Bodmer’s works, too, enjoyed great popularity, in spite of their didactic tendencies, as did Weisse’s first German children’s journal, Der Kinderfreund (The Children’s Friend).2 In 1787 Friedrich Gedike observed that, for his taste, there were too many types of books for children on the market, such as almanacs, story anthologies, poetry books, sermons for children, novels, comedies, tragedies, books of history, geography, biography, letters, and instructional conversations. Unfortunately, he wrote, most of these had been composed by “scribblers” with limited skills in writing. Children’s book publishers, too, had cared more for their own financial profits than for good quality.3 It appears from the context of Gedike’s complaint that he objected primarily to stylistic flaws and the shabby paper on which these works had been printed—not to the didactic tendencies present in most of them. Obviously, both the didactic content and the moralistic tone of books for children was taken for granted in those days. Humor, imagination, and adventure were rare commodities in children’s literature of the eighteenth century, as the authors placed instruction far above entertainment.
Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that children in Germany and elsewhere turned to the “classics.” Here, at last, they found what their own books denied them: above all, a good story with a convincing plot. Some of the most popular works among the classics were the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer, including the myths and hero tales of classical mythology. Further, they enjoyed reading Aesop’s Fables, the tales of the Arabian Nights including Sinbad the Sailor, the epic tales of Roland and Siegfried, the romance of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and, of course, the Bible. They either read these works in an unabridged form, skipping whatever they didn’t like or didn’t understand, or their parents read aloud to them at family gatherings. The case was different with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as an all-time favorite with children, as Campe had successfully prepared the first German children’s edition of this work as early as 1720. During the course of the eighteenth century four more adaptations of the book appeared in Germany, but Campe’s remained the most popular one until the twentieth century.4 Goethe read it in his childhood—alongside with other works not written for children: Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg (Island of Rock Castle), Lord Anson’s Reise um die Welt (Journey Around the World) and most of the other classics.5
In the nineteenth century, German children very much enjoyed reading, in addition, Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter), and the jolly picture stories in verse by Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz (Max and Moritz) and Hans Huckebein (the story of a mischievous raven). Even though these stories were still “moralistic,” they presented, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, a grotesque kind of humor that appealed to children. In the last decades of the nineteenth century children also became acquainted with some of the finest newer books from abroad. In German translation they read Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. These were works that appealed to their sense of imagination and adventure, as they had plots, themes, and characters with whom they could identify. One of the most popular works with children and adults alike was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even though literary critics had reservations about it on account of its sentimental style, they did not deny its humanitarian spirit. Children liked it, above all, not because it “taught” them the principles of brotherhood and Christian love, but simply because it moved them to warm compassion, particularly for “Uncle Tom.”6 Here and in the other classics there were concrete stories, not abstract lessons.
A third category of books available to German children in earlier centuries dealt with folklore. In this genre, German children were especially well supplied with works appealing to their sense of adventure and imagination at a relatively early date when moralistic trends in England, for example, still dominated the scene. Herder and the Brothers Grimm initiated an interest in native as well as international folklore collections that eventually would fascinate all of Europe. Even before the Brothers Grimm printed their Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, German children had enjoyed, in addition to the oral tradition, the German Volksbücher (folk books or chapbooks) dating back to the Middle Ages. Among them were the tales of Dr. Faustus, Magelone, Till Eulenspiegel, Siegfried, Genoveva, and Reynard the Fox.7 Goethe rewrote a number of these chapbooks which even Musäus, Brentano and the Brothers Grimm read with pleasure in their childhood.8 In the wake of Romanticism Görres published Die Teutschen Volksbücher (The German Chapbooks) and thus made the bulk of them available to young people in an anthologized form.
When
