Episode 22 establishes a turning point in the evolution of Fräulein Rottenmeier. First of all, the viewer learns that she has a sister (in the previous depictions of the character nothing was known about her private life or her life prior to her working for the Sesemanns); a sister who has fallen ill and who is in need of care. Rottenmeier travels to look after her and, on her return, announces that she will leave the Sesemann’s household and accept a new position where her sister works, since Clara has found a new companion in Heidi. This causes quite an upheaval for both Heidi and Clara, who is terribly upset. When Heidi decides to leave the house to grant Rottenmeier the space she had next to Clara, Rottenmeier realizes how much she is needed. The affection she receives from the children has an effect on her: she is able to position herself both physically (she kneels down) and emotionally (hugs them) at the children’s level (Gonnard, Mouscadet, 2015: episode 22, 21:30).
Nonetheless, the main transformation of the character takes place – as expected – in the mountains. Rottenmeier accompanies Clara on her trip to the Alps to visit Heidi, once the young child leaves Frankfurt after falling ill with homesickness. Even if the governess finds it difficult to come to terms with the sparseness of the cabin and the roughness of mountain life, she is able to overcome all sorts of “complications” and even shows herself willing to adapt to this new environment and to incorporate new manners and habits. She, as a city dweller, is nonetheless able to predict the arrival of a storm, even before the grandfather does (Gonnard, Mouscadet, 2015: episode 34, 04:30). It is precisely the storm episode that portrays Fräulein Rottenmeier in a new light, since she shows her courage when she goes up to the mountain on her own to find the children and the grandfather, who, she believes, are in danger, and she is even able to impress both Heidi and her grandfather with her ability to relate to the wild surroundings, finding a refuge and lighting a fire on her own (Gonnard, Mouscadet, 2015: episode 34, 19:54).
As suggested above, Rottenmeier’s past is also retrieved in the series through the appearance of an old friend of hers, Friedrich, who shows up at the mountain cabin looking for work. Although he is able to recognize her, she initially refuses to acknowledge her past or their friendship and threatens to leave the cabin and return to Frankfurt with Clara. Later, we learn that as a young woman Vera Rottenmeier, whose first name is mentioned here for the first time, had left her village, as she wanted to lead a better, more sophisticated life in the city. But, as she herself admits, she had left her heart in that small town. The mention of “heart” here could allude to a loving relationship with this “dear friend”, Friedrich, but also shed light on Rottenmeier’s bitterness and uptightness. In this respect, it is also remarkable that, as the two children try to escape and Clara hurts herself when Rottenmeier decides to leave for Frankfurt, she kneels down once again at the child’s level and exclaims: “It is all my fault” (Gonnard, Mouscadet, 2015: episode 36, 19:03).
One is left wondering if this “fault” and the regret linked to it refers to the whole course of her life and the void left by the denial of her feelings in favor of her goals. This reading would somehow challenge the more feministic approach of the series with relation to, for instance, the transformations in the characters of Clara’s grandmother or Dete, but would, however, fit into the (still) dominant perception of women as individuals subjected to the sphere of emotions, who unnaturally enter the realm of ambition, on the one hand, and authority, on the other hand, traditionally associated with masculinity. This gendered approach still defines contemporary television for children nowadays (see, among other studies, Martin, 2017) and, in spite of the attempts mentioned above, Heidi 3D is not an exception.
Besides this consideration of gendered categories, the evolution of Fräulein Rottenmeier through the centuries also reflects certain developments within the field of pedagogy and education, which have witnessed the displacement of more authoritarian methodologies in favor of approaches that place the child in the center of the learning process, question the use of punishment and obligation and grant children more scope for their own development. Parallel to the evolution of teaching practices, interactions between children and adults also changed drastically throughout the twentieth century, and nowadays attitudes and manners towards children, such as the ones shown by the original Rottenmeier would be frowned upon and condemned by society.
The evolution of this character is thus the result of both historical changes in the realm of education and also of a subtle form of censorship which has shaped audiovisual products for young children in recent years. In accordance with a tacit understanding between society and media, young viewers are meant to believe that the world is an idyllic place in which adults – above all, parents or guardians – would never be unkind to them. In this respect, unlike its hypotext(s), which showed the existence of threatening characters in the private realm, Heidi 3D is yet another example of a process of sugar-coating adult-child relationships in media for children and grants healthy interpersonal relationships the healing power that Spyri had attributed to nature in the 1880s.
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