at all!”
(Adolf Hitler)
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a neo-Romantic wave inspired the writing of a number of regional and historical novels concerned with German ethnicity, the German peasant, and the Nordic Germanic past. Among the historical novels were those of Dahn and Freytag, and among the peasant novels, the works of Keller, Raabe, and Storm. Whereas the first focused on the peasant and warrior of Germanic times, the second glorified the mysterious powers of the landscape and the life of the sturdy German peasant. At the same time there emerged a number of regional novels concerned with the theme of man’s kinship with the soil and his home, namely by Löns, Sohnrey and von Polenz.34 These works were “Volkish,” yet unpolitical in the sense that they served no political interest groups and advocated no national policy for Germany’s cultural reform. Still, the Nazis felt they were well suited for the promotion of their Volkish ideology.
According to Martin Broszat, the word “Volkish” involved a conglomerate of divergent meanings. “Hardly another word, due to its glittering power of association has so well paved the way for National Socialism as the word ‘Volkish.’ Indeed, under this term we find all kinds of ideologies from anti-semitism to ideas about the folk community; from blood-and-soil theories to the new Germanic mythos.”35
The history of the children’s literature reform movement around the turn of the century well illustrates the diverse directions which the Volkish movement itself had inspired in this area. In response to the writings of Langbehn and to their own professional conscience as educators, Lichtwark and Avenarius in Hamburg were instrumental in founding the German Art Education movement, the so-called Kunsterziehungsbewegung. They also founded the journal Der Kunstwart (The Art Guardian), and through its pages advocated the revival of art and folklore within the school curriculum and in German cultural life in general, so as to help the nation in its realization of becoming a genuine folk community. Through art and folklore they hoped to cure German civilization from insensitivities and a superficial and fragmented life style developed under the stress of a purely prosaic life. Heinrich Wolgast was a member of this movement and adopted its aesthetic principles for the field of children’s literature, while appealing to educators, writers, illustrators and publishers of children’s books in order to implement his reform suggestions.36
In 1896 Wolgast published Das Elend unserer Jugendliteratur (The Troubled State of Our Children’s Literature),37 in which he deplored the declining quality of children’s books while setting up new literary and artistic standards for their possible improvement. Wolgast was not alone in his plight. The German Jugendschriften-Bewegung (Youth Book movement or Childrens’ Literature Association) was formed by educators a few years earlier, and in 1893, the various branches of this Association in Augsburg, Berlin, Coburg, Bremen, Frankfurt a.M., Hamburg, Hildesheim, Königsberg, Nördlingen, Wiesbaden and Zerbst jointly issued the first professional children’s literature journal, the Jugendschriften-Warte (Youth Literature Guardian). At the beginning, it was published as a supplement to a major pedagogical newspaper, but then became independent under Wolgast’s editorship. Throughout its existence, until the time when the Nazis took it over for their own ideological purposes in 1933, it maintained its position beyond political interest groups while fighting for standards in children’s literature.38 Wolgast’s work set the major guidelines for the editorial committee, at least for the first decade or two. Later, an inner struggle of different reform ideas developed, in the course of which Wolgast came under attack and was partially overruled, but even today it is recognized that he laid the cornerstone of a literary criticism that elevated children’s literature from a subservient position to a well respected genre.39
The first targets of Wolgast’s criticism were publishers, writers and illustrators who for the sake of improving their income had lowered their standards to the degree that they had produced what he called Schundliteratur (trash). Under this term he grouped a great variety of books that he considered to be in poor taste by being overly sentimental, overly didactic, too trite, too “incredible” as far as their plots and characters were concerned, or merely shabby in their style and illustrations. Among these he counted not only works cheaply printed for “mass consumption” (often given away in department stores as advertisements) but also mystery, adventure and detective stories characterized by sensationalism and clichés, as well as the popular girls’ books patterned in a sentimental style after Richardson’s Pamela but within a German upper-class setting. Children would fare much better without reading these “trivia,” said Wolgast, as they were quite unrelated to good taste.
Wolgast was the first critic who called for quality control in children’s literature on the basis of literary, and artistic standards. He appealed to writers, illustrators and publishers to show their respect for the child by producing their very best. Writers should abstain from “talking down” to the child, artists should not “scribble,” and publishers should not look for business first. Significantly, Wolgast was also the first critic to voice his objection against didacticism in childrens’ literature. Gedike, Menzel, and others, in spite of their critical views, had taken for granted that childrens’ books were primarily there to teach certain things. Wolgast called the didactic trend an “abuse” of children’s literature. Whenever an interest group, be it religious, educational, political, or economic in nature, used the child’s book as a means to another end, thus reducing the story itself to a carrier of his message, it showed little respect for literature and less for the child. Children deserved respect, insisted Wolgast, and therefore, he demanded for them the best that national literature and world literature had to offer. Good quality books were meant to develop good taste in the child and to bring him in touch with humanity as a whole.40
Wolgast made a particular point of attacking children’s books that taught chauvinism. In one of his reviews he pointed out that one story character had been eager to forgive his friend the sins of lying, cheating, and stealing, but that he had been pitiless in his judgment when he found out that he had faltered in his loyalty to the fatherland. Wolgast expressed his dismay at the discovery that a writer should have placed the value of loyalty to the nation above that of respect for the Ten Commandments. This was pure chauvinism, he wrote, which was as misplaced in children’s literature as were religious and secular didacticism, business interests, or political ideologies.41
Due to Wolgast’s initiative, children’s book authors, publishers and illustrators worked together to produce several series of inexpensive paperback editions with tasteful designs and in attractive formats. These were intended to bring to young people the very best of national and world literature, thus providing a bridge for human understanding through literature. Among others, he published Schöne Kinderreime (Beautiful Children’s Rhymes), the folktales by the Brothers Grimm, a new edition of the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs), tales by Hebel and Hauff, medieval chapbooks, memoirs of the Napoleonic wars and a children’s book version of Wilhelm Tell (William Tell), in addition to a number of children’s classics from other lands. In 1909 the Hillger Publishing Company brought out a series entitled Deutsche Jugendbücherei (German Youth Book Library), and between 1903 and 1910 the Kunstwart Publishing House, representing the Art Education movement, issued the series Der deutsche Spielmann (The German Organ Grinder), all of which contributed much to raise the quality and respectability of children’s literature in Germany. Above all, these publications showed that it was perfectly possible to combine an emphasis on national literature and folklore with a genuine interest in world literature. Wolgast’s various writings were pioneering also in regard to the development of children’s book illustrations in Germany, for in the wake of the Children’s Literature movement such famous illustrators as Ernst Kreidolf, Fritz Kredel, Else Wenz-Viëtor, Elsa Eisgruber and others produced the very best of their works.42
On several accounts Wolgast was strongly challenged, however. One of the major criticisms was voiced by Lichtenberger, on the basis that Wolgast had gone “overboard” by advocating “art for art’s sake” in children’s literature. It was
