provides the first anti-authoritarian children’s book in German: Christian Adolf
Overbeck’s (1755–1821) collection of poems Frizchens Lieder [Freddie’s Songs] (1781),
where a child as lyrical subject is allowed to express itself extraordinarily freely for the
time. In the preface the author announces with visible pride, ‘Here, if I have done my job
well, it really is a child speaking. Overbeck’s volume, however, remained alone. The
philanthropists’ reform does attach children’s literature to the child’s world; but it
conceives of this world less as a free space, rather as a sanctuary, a didactic province
where educationalists have a definite place—and the final authority. The frame of
Campe’s Robinson Junior with the father as narrator and authority figure combined, or
the frame of the Moralisches Elementarbuch [Moral Primer] (1782–1783) of the second
great philanthropic children’s writer, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744–1811), are
examples of such sanctuaries.
With the philanthropic reform, German children’s literature freed itself from
dependence on the great French and English models (the latter generally known via
French intermediaries). Indeed, it can be argued that from this time, the history of
European children’s literature was largely written in Germany. German ideas radiated to
France and England, and to Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Even Jewish children’s
literature is indebted to the German Enlightenment. German children’s literature
retained this primacy for the next historical age: that of the Romantic reform of
children’s literature, which also started in Germany. Prepared by the young Herder, its
programmatic principles were first put forward in stray utterances, particularly by
Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis)—a form which effectively
prevented contemporaries from noticing them. Then in the first two decades of the
nineteenth century the great works appeared: the supplement of children’s songs to the
third volume of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The
Boy’s Magic Horn] (1808), Brentano’s Italienische Märchen [Italian Fairy Tales] (c. 1805–
1811), and in the second decade the fairy tales for children by Tieck, Contessa, Fouqué
and E.T.A.Hoffmann, and finally the Kinder—und Hausmärchen [Fairy Tales for Children
and Home] of the brothers Grimm (1812–1815). What a mass of immortal works—
appearing in a time of war and confusion, when literary production was not the least of
the things which almost entirely ceased!
The romantics too started by recognising the self-sufficiency of childhood; they too
demanded strictly child-orientated children’s literature, but they had a quite different
concept of both these criteria. What modern societies have produced and separated out
and designated as the space of childhood is actually, said the Romantics, the remains of
a past state of the world, just as children themselves are nothing but humans who are
close to their divine origin. To adopt the child’s standpoint meant, for the Romantic, to
transport oneself back into the past, which the child by its nature embodies; in respect
of children’s literature it meant to have recourse to the kinds of creative art which
originated in that past. Romanticism declared traditional national folklore, particularly
the popular children’s rhyme and the fairy tale, to be the true reading matter for
children. The brothers Grimm put this into practice by insisting that the poetry handed
down should reach its child recipients as far as possible in an unaltered form—that only
rhymes and tales, legends and humoresques of proven antiquity should be placed before
them. All additions from a more recent age were regarded as impurities.
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