In the eighteenth century, children particularly enjoyed those works that were richly illustrated, regardless of whether they were didactic in nature or of even older origin. Thus, Goethe in his childhood read Comenius’ Orbis Pictus (The World of Pictures), and Raff’s Naturgeschichte (Natural History).1 At that time Bodmer’s works, too, enjoyed great popularity, in spite of their didactic tendencies, as did Weisse’s first German children’s journal, Der Kinderfreund (The Children’s Friend).2 In 1787 Friedrich Gedike observed that, for his taste, there were too many types of books for children on the market, such as almanacs, story anthologies, poetry books, sermons for children, novels, comedies, tragedies, books of history, geography, biography, letters, and instructional conversations. Unfortunately, he wrote, most of these had been composed by “scribblers” with limited skills in writing. Children’s book publishers, too, had cared more for their own financial profits than for good quality.3 It appears from the context of Gedike’s complaint that he objected primarily to stylistic flaws and the shabby paper on which these works had been printed—not to the didactic tendencies present in most of them. Obviously, both the didactic content and the moralistic tone of books for children was taken for granted in those days. Humor, imagination, and adventure were rare commodities in children’s literature of the eighteenth century, as the authors placed instruction far above entertainment.
Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that children in Germany and elsewhere turned to the “classics.” Here, at last, they found what their own books denied them: above all, a good story with a convincing plot. Some of the most popular works among the classics were the Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer, including the myths and hero tales of classical mythology. Further, they enjoyed reading Aesop’s Fables, the tales of the Arabian Nights including Sinbad the Sailor, the epic tales of Roland and Siegfried, the romance of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and, of course, the Bible. They either read these works in an unabridged form, skipping whatever they didn’t like or didn’t understand, or their parents read aloud to them at family gatherings. The case was different with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as an all-time favorite with children, as Campe had successfully prepared the first German children’s edition of this work as early as 1720. During the course of the eighteenth century four more adaptations of the book appeared in Germany, but Campe’s remained the most popular one until the twentieth century.4 Goethe read it in his childhood—alongside with other works not written for children: Schnabel’s Insel Felsenburg (Island of Rock Castle), Lord Anson’s Reise um die Welt (Journey Around the World) and most of the other classics.5
In the nineteenth century, German children very much enjoyed reading, in addition, Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter), and the jolly picture stories in verse by Wilhelm Busch, Max und Moritz (Max and Moritz) and Hans Huckebein (the story of a mischievous raven). Even though these stories were still “moralistic,” they presented, in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, a grotesque kind of humor that appealed to children. In the last decades of the nineteenth century children also became acquainted with some of the finest newer books from abroad. In German translation they read Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. These were works that appealed to their sense of imagination and adventure, as they had plots, themes, and characters with whom they could identify. One of the most popular works with children and adults alike was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Even though literary critics had reservations about it on account of its sentimental style, they did not deny its humanitarian spirit. Children liked it, above all, not because it “taught” them the principles of brotherhood and Christian love, but simply because it moved them to warm compassion, particularly for “Uncle Tom.”6 Here and in the other classics there were concrete stories, not abstract lessons.
A third category of books available to German children in earlier centuries dealt with folklore. In this genre, German children were especially well supplied with works appealing to their sense of adventure and imagination at a relatively early date when moralistic trends in England, for example, still dominated the scene. Herder and the Brothers Grimm initiated an interest in native as well as international folklore collections that eventually would fascinate all of Europe. Even before the Brothers Grimm printed their Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, German children had enjoyed, in addition to the oral tradition, the German Volksbücher (folk books or chapbooks) dating back to the Middle Ages. Among them were the tales of Dr. Faustus, Magelone, Till Eulenspiegel, Siegfried, Genoveva, and Reynard the Fox.7 Goethe rewrote a number of these chapbooks which even Musäus, Brentano and the Brothers Grimm read with pleasure in their childhood.8 In the wake of Romanticism Görres published Die Teutschen Volksbücher (The German Chapbooks) and thus made the bulk of them available to young people in an anthologized form.
When the Brothers Grimm first began to record the oral tradition of German folktales, these stories still circulated freely among the more conservative peasant folk in the countryside. By this time, however, the Grimms noted that many of the city folk and the educated elite looked down upon them as “superstitious stuff” not worthy of the printer’s ink. With their publication of the folktales, and especially with their prefaces to the various editions, the Brothers Grimm contributed much to the acceptance of folktales as literature, for they built up a new understanding for the grace and poetry contained in their simple language, vivid imagery and sense of justice.9 The very fact that the work became an instant success in Germany and was reedited several times in expanded editions shows that the German readers warmed to their folktales to an unexpected degree.
Nevertheless, some parents remained skeptical toward the folktale. In 1828, the literary historian Wolfgang Menzel observed: “They are afraid that folktales might implant into their children’s souls some superstitions, or, at any rate, that reading folktales might lead them to be preoccupied with realms of fancy—something that would be detrimental to their schoolwork.”10 Evidently,\these skeptics overrated the role of factual instruction as much as they underrated the role of the creative imagination. Menzel felt that their views reflected a certain narrow-minded attitude and also bad taste. It was a pity, he wrote, that in many cases children were given such moralistic and prosaic stories to read as “Poky Little Franzi” and “Curious Little Lotti,” while their parents kept them away from the rich world of poetry and imagination that lay waiting for them in the world of folktales. We know that similar attitudes prevailed in Great Britain at approximately the same time. In both cases, parents tended to rate “useful” information, explanatory remarks, and a character’s “reasonable” behavior—at least at the end of a given story—far above the “fanciful” adventures of the mind.11
In Germany, the acceptance of folk literature as an integral part of children’s literature, and simultaneously, a greater appreciation of the literary fairy tale, began in the era of Romanticism. Writers such as Tieck, Arnim, and Brentano, for example, not only warmed the general public to collected folktales but also to fantasies, many of which were read by both children and adults.12 To that era also belonged such writers as Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), de la Motte-Fouqué, von Chamisso, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Mörike, all of whom, in their own unique ways, explored the fairy tale for their literary purposes while contributing to the creative growth of children’s literature. The undercurrent of didactic trends was not strong enough to halt the new wave of interest in folklore and works of the creative imagination.13
The Nazis glorified Herder, the Brothers Grimm, and the Romantic movement as a whole, but mainly for their contributions to the discovery of the “healthy folk reality”—not for their discovery of free imagination. Consequently, they would pay tribute to the collectors of German folklore, yet they would largely ignore the