(from 1921), Lisa Tetzner Hans Urian (1929). Karl Aloys Schenzinger (1886–1962)
produced a National Socialist city novel for children, Der Hitlerjunge Quex [Quex, the
Hitler Youth] (1932). After the National Socialists took power socially critical children’s
literature was forced into exile; from this phase of production Lisa Tetzner’s children’s
Odyssey Die Kinder aus Nummer 67 [The Children from Number 67] (9 vols, 1933–1949)
and Kurt Held’s (1897–1959) Die rote Zora und ihre Bande [Red Zora and her Gang]
(1941) stand out.
The post-war situation in West Germany and Austria is characterised by a paradox.
On the one hand a withdrawal into the private and unpolitical domain occurred,
explicable as a reaction to the way children’s literature was forced into propaganda
service in the Third Reich; thus socio-critical traditions failed to reestablish themselves
and critical treatment of recent German history was prevented. On the other hand there
was unprecedented openness to the children’s literature of other nations, particularly
the Anglo-American area and Scandinavia. The English and American classics of fantasy
literature were read; Scandinavian authors, especially Astrid Lindgren and Hans
Peterson, became influential. Thus German children’s literature was confronted with its
own traditions as mediated by England and Scandinavia. This could not have occurred
had not Germans reversed that negative attitude of principle—characteristic of a large
section of the German educated elite since the nineteenth century—toward all writing
specifically for children. This anti-modernism in the field of children’s literature reached
its climax in the völkisch and National Socialist camps’ propagation of true Germanic
folk poetry as the sole legitimate reading matter for children. One may see in this one of
the most serious hindrances to the development of German children’s literature. For the
first theoretical attempt to put specific children’s literature on a footing of legitimacy
since the Philanthropists and the Romantics, we have to wait for the 1950s and the
work of the literary scholar Anna Krüger (1904–1991), whose approach has been
followed by most contemporary theorists. She opened up the whole field; the fifteen
years from 1955 or so were one of the most productive eras of German children’s writing
ever. Here Germany caught up with all the elements of modern children’s literature,
both in the philanthropic or reforming educational trend and in the romantic tendency,
that it had so far missed or been prevented from exploring. A literature that set out from
the experiential perspective and the viewpoint of the child, that allows infant wishes to
have their way, and that largely refrains from didacticism and over-protectiveness,
flourished: a literature of sanctuaries for children situated outside society.
First we may mention an apogee of modern German children’s verse. Joining the
traditions of Biedermeier and turn-of-the-century verse, this poetry is naïve and
expressive in style; it is nature-lyric too in the sense that only nature is capable of
reflecting the childlike spirit. On one hand the new verse is very close to
popular traditional rhymes (Friedrich Hoffmann: Ole Bole Bullerjahn (1857)), on the
other hand it picks up elements of the modern adult (nature) lyric (Josef Guggenmos:
Lustige Verse für kleine Leute [Happy Verses for Little People] (1956), Was denkt die
Maus am Donnerstag [What does the Mouse Think on Thursday] (1967); Christine
Busta: Die Sternenmühle [The Starmill] (1959); Elisabeth Borchers: Und oben schwimmt
die Sonne davon [And the Sun floats away on Top] (1965)). Another thread, traceable
back to Erich Kästner (Das verhexte Telefon [The Bewitched Telephone] (1932)), consists
GERMANY 733