Inspiring Young Readers
Max and Moritz : a German children’s classic that never quite made the crossover
As a university tutor I have recently been doing some work with two German students who are in the UK on an Erasmus exchange scholarship. By the nature of these things, students from other European countries who come to study in English – what may be a second or third language for them – are often the more able and the most confident of their home cohort. However, in the course of preparing for an assignment about the changing ways in which society has thought about and represented childhood, these two students have done some exceptional work on the changing representations of gender in children’s books. One of the things they have made me think a lot more about is the way in which books do or don’t cross national boundaries – what gets translated and picked up across lots of different countries and different cultures and what remains largely indigenous and confined to a ‘home’ audience.
The example they have highlighted for me are the stories of Max and Moritz which were written and illustrated by Wilhelm Busch and published in Germany in 1865. The books are written in rhyming couplets and the sub-title tells you what you need to know : A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks. Presented in an almost comic strip format, the tales are essentially stories of elaborate pranks played by the two boys and many of them seem to be variations on the activities of the German classic prankster, Till Eulenspiegel. The pranks are not nursery level tricks either but dangerous and even life threatening ones - filling a pipe with gunpower instead of tobacco, finding themselves being put in a bread oven or being put in a corn grinding mill for example.
All of the stories are accompanied by drawings that illustrate the pranks and show the boys themselves as puckish scamps with nothing but an eye for mischief. But although there have been a number of English language translations of the Max and Moritz stories, they have never, in my view, crossed over into the English children’s literature canon in the way that other foreign language story collections such as Hans Andersen, the Brothers Grimm or even Struwwelpeter have managed.
I wonder why that might be?
A number of other websites that give some space to the Max and Moritz stories comment on the fact that the stories never really became popular in the UK but without really offering any explanation for why that was ( and still is ) the case and I too struggle to explain it. The drawings and the depictions of the characters certainly look very European but that hardly seems a reason to reject them – other characters from Europe have been popular while having the same sort of cultural traits as Max and Moritz. The violence of the cautionary tales can hardly be a reason why they haven’t captured UK imaginations either – in fact we seem to like our fairy tales pretty bloody if you stop and think about it and a good many of those have their roots in what we now call modern day Germany. I also don’t think it’s down to slack marketing or poor presentation because there have been a number of attempts to launch reprints of the stories here in the UK and although the presentation and graphics have been great but still we seem able to resist.
So, ultimately I have no logical answer to the question of why Max and Mortiz never became stars of UK children’s literature. I can only say it’s down to that mysterious thing we call ‘chemistry’ – which is just another way of saying that it’s impossible to guess what will fly and what wont when it comes to storytelling. What Max and Moritz do tell us is that there is no formula that can be followed and no guarantee of success in capturing young imaginations that can be packaged in order to have a well-loved children’s book.
Maybe this is something that should give all those television personalities pause for thought as they line up to be the next big thing in the world of children’s literature?
Terry Potter
December 2016