The Romantic creative writers, on the other hand, believed that each age, however far
it may be from the beginnings, commanded a sufficient poetic gift to renew the
traditional genres creatively. The late-Romantic fairy tale was from the outset a genre
that mixed the old and the modern. It deals with a distant world of miracles, a child-like
and poetic existence; but it deals with the present too. This latter is done in Brentano’s
Italian Fairy-Tales, an adaptation of a number of tales by Basile for German children,
particularly in the narrative mode; though perception of the pervasive irony here is
perhaps possible only for the adult reader. In Tieck’s children’s fairy tale Die Elfen [The
Elves] (1812) the modern world is made explicit on the level of the action—though only
in allegorical form. In the popular fairy tale, our world and the wondrous world co-exist
unproblematically. Tieck sees them as being in an antagonistic relationship, which he
endows with a new function: it is the metaphoric representation of the antagonistic
contrast in modern life between the child’s sense of the numinous and the rationality of
the adult. Together with E.T.A.Hoffmann’s elf-story Das Ffremde Kind [The Little
Stranger] (1817), Tieck’s tale inaugurates modern fairy tale literature for children. These
writings, copious in the nineteenth and even stronger in the twentieth century, generally
express the abyss between poetic child mentality and prosaic reality in a symbolic or
allegorical manner.
In E.T.A.Hoffmann’s tale Nußknacker und Mäusekönig [The Nutcracker and the King of
the Mice] (1816), realistically shown modern actuality replaces the conventional ordinary
world of the traditional fairy story, and a psychologically realistic child figure takes the
place of the child-like fairy tale hero. The child’s continuing belief in the wondrous
remains unsatisfied until the potential experience of a second, an other world, is turned
into reality. In a temporary stay in such an other world, or in the temporary presence of
a figure from the other world in our world, all the limitations that the child’s imagination
(in particular the sense of the wondrous) suffers in modern actuality are removed. E.T.A.
Hoffmann makes the child an inhabitant of two worlds; and thus he enables the young
reader to sharpen his sense of reality without having to suppress his pleasure in the
improbable and the fantastic which co-exists with his sense of reality. With his
children’s story Nußknacker und Mäusekönig, Hoffmann founded the genre of the
fantastic children’s story, a genre which was to become the central component of
children’s literature in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
In German children’s literature from 1770, the year of Basedow’s Elementarwerk, to
1819, the date of the second, much altered edition of the Kinder—und Hausmärchen, the
basic patterns of modern, child-orientated children’s literature, which remained
dominant into the late 1960s, are found already developed and to some extent
exemplified in classic works. But an oddity of the development of German children’s
literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is that the heritage both of the
philanthropic and of the Romantic reforms was to a considerable degree squandered.
With the regrowth of literary production from the end of the 1820s,
children’s literature in Germany largely ceased to be a vehicle of programmatic intentions
and reforming ideas; it became increasingly a pure business matter and thus had to
adapt to the traditionalistic, in some cases decidedly anti-modern, ideas of the buyers.
Children’s poetry almost succeeds in being an exception to this rule. The rhymes, songs
and poems for children by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), Wilhelm Hey (1789–1854),
730 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE