imaginative worlds such as a cat’s town or among dwarfs in a wood. They were far away
from the political life in the period and are still reprinted.
After the war, in 1949, the Austrian Children’s Book Club was founded, offering authors
and publishers a wide readership and encouraging the development of a distinctively
Austrian children’s literature.
Characteristic authors in the 1950s and 1960s were Mira Lobe, Vera Ferra-Mikura
and Karl Bruckner; all three were concerned with social problems, war and peace and
problems of living together. Mira Lobe (1913–1995) is considered to be one of the leaders
of children’s literature in Austria: she wrote highly imaginative books (Die Omama im
Apfelbaum [The Granny in the Apple Tree]), texts for picture books (Das kleine Ich bin ich
[The Little Me is Me]) and also turned to such controversial themes as violence against
children (Die Sache mit dem Heinrich [The Thing that Happened to Heinrich] (1989)).
Vera Ferra-Mikura (b. 1923) is an important figure in the development of children’s
poetry (Lustig singt die Regentonne [The Water-Butt Sings Merrily]). Her series of picture
books about Die drei Stanisläuse has been widely read by many generations of Austrian
children.
Karl Bruckner became world-famous with Sadako will leben [The Day of the Bomb]
(1961) which was one of the very first books dealing with the Second World War. It
describes the sad story of the Japanese girl Sadako, who dies about ten years after the
first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima. This book has been translated into twenty-seven
languages.
The problems of the war have also been dealt with in later books. In 1963 Winfried
Bruckner published Die Toten Engel [The Dead Angels], which tells the story of a group
of children in the Warsaw ghetto. Das Schattennetz [The Net of Shadows] (1965) by
Käthe Recheis is set in Austria and deals with the break-up of a concentration camp and
the destinies of the people involved. The book is based on the author’s own experience—
she had helped her doctor father care for the people released from a camp; it was
criticised for its sharp focus on one particular viewpoint, and today is reprinted under
the title Geh’ heim und vergiβ alles [Go Home and Forget Everything] and recognized as
one of the most interesting contributions of children’s literature about World War II. In a
later book, also partly autobiographical, Lena: Mein Dorf und der Krieg [Lena: Our Village
and War] (1987), Recheis describes how a young girl and her village in Upper Austria
experience hardship during the war, but also shows the fascination that Hitler’s regime
had for young people. Renate Welsh’s In die Waagschale geworfen [Thrown into the
Scales] (1988) consists of stories about the resistance movement and recreates the
atmosphere of fear and uncertainty and the suffering experienced during the war by
both adults and children. These stories are often criticised for providing too little
information about events and for not being sufficiently objective. They are, however,
literary works and are not intended to be textbooks stuffed with facts; it is the emotional
impact which is important.
In the 1970s and 1980s there is hardly any topic which has not found its way into
Austrian children’s books. Authors write about social conditions, war and peace, and
the problems of everyday life.
Two collections of short stories, Mädchen düren pfeifen—Buben dürfen weinen [Girls
may Whistle, Boys may Cry] (1981), and Omageschichten [Grandma Stories] (1988), were
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