- ‘They live with adults in a world full of conflicts and dissonances.’ This author’s
pioneering collection of short stories, Die grauen und die grünen Felder [The Grey Fields
and the Green Fields] (1970), confronts the young reader with this world’s multiplicity of
social and political problems—even at the risk of having a depressing effect.
Adults too, and their existential problems, can now become a subject for children’s
literature, opening up a series of new themes: problems in the parents’ relationship,
divorce, the mother’s striving for emancipation and career, the father’s unemployment,
aggressiveness, alcoholism and other forms of dependence, finally disability, sickness
and death, to name just a few of the new topics (Peter Härtling: Das war Hirbel [That
was Hirbel] (1973), Oma [Grandma] (1975), Fränze [Francie] (1989); Ursula Fuchs:
Wiebke und Paul [Wiebke and Paul] (1982). Then again the child’s subjectivity—its inner
life, mood-swings, feelings, dreams and fears—is now taken seriously. Being declared
responsible for themselves is a considerable psychological challenge and stress for the
children, so it is unsurprising that their interior life is unbalanced, tense and
dissociated. The place of the unworried, extrovert, generally cheerful and balanced
childish spirit in the previous literary era is now taken by the introverted child,
experiencing its own interior life and its rifts with some self-awareness, able even to
describe its inner life in a rudimentary way with the aid of psychological terms it has
picked up (Peter Härtling: Ben liebt Anna [Ben loves Anna] (1979); Gudrun Mebs: Das
Sonntagskind [Sunday’s Child] (1983); Christine Nöstlinger: Olfi Obermeier und der
Oedipus [Olfi Obermeier and Oedipus] (1984)).
A final element of equality is the right of children to a literature that is no different in
principle from that of adults. Since the 1970s authors have essayed a style very similar
to that of adult writing. The familiar demand that children be treated as human beings
is joined by the new one that one should write for them, basically, just as one would for
adults. The new narrative children’s literature of the 1970s views itself as cognate in
form and style with the modern novel. It takes over the complex techniques developed by
the latter in the nineteenth century. The psychological novel, with its predominance of
interior events and its themes of ego-stabilisation and self-finding, has become the
preferred form for new children’s narrative.
Thus the children’s literature of the western German-speaking countries has, since
the 1950s, increasingly joined the trends of north-west European and North American
children’s literature, in a way returning to its own beginnings in the early nineteenth
century.
2
The German Democratic Republic
Bernd Dolle-WeinkauffAfter 1945 children’s and youth literature in the area of the Soviet Zone of Occupation—
from 1949 the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—went its own way. In the 1940s and
1950s a system of literary production and distribution characteristically distinct from
that of the other German-speaking countries soon developed, following the Soviet
cultural-political model. In this system, state support and direction of the literary
industry played a vital role—as seen not least in the dominant position of two publishing
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