As of: February 13, 2024, 9:47 a.m
By: Carina Blumenroth
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Children are the decision-makers of tomorrow - the stories they grow up with can influence authors.
Some are self-critical.
Escaping into foreign worlds, simply dreaming away or letting go – books can be a comfort to the soul in a wide variety of situations.
You can educate yourself or get to know unknown cultures.
Children especially benefit from being read to.
For example, you can learn to read yourself more quickly and your imagination will be inspired.
Children's book authors enrich the world of children both young and old and can have a lasting impact.
Some of them
recently appeared critical and concerned about the increasing right-wing extremism in Germany in a joint guest article on
Zeit.de.
Prepare children's literature differently?
Cornelia Funke practices self-criticism
Children's book authors are concerned about increasing right-wing extremism in Germany.
© Zoonar.com/Kasper Ravlo/Imago
Cornelia Funke is one of the most successful German children's and young adult authors.
Among other things, she created the ink world.
Only last year she published the fourth volume in this series, “The Color of Revenge”.
In the guest article she and several other authors appear dismayed and self-critical.
For a long time she believed that Germany was immune to fascism, she remembers the book burnings and all the pain of the many people and concludes: “This must be a powerful vaccine that kills every right-wing virus immediately.
Wrong thought.”
She works with refugees herself, listens to their stories and helps them tell them.
Funke wonders whether “our stories haven't told enough about the fact that everything is so much easier with each other instead of against each other?” The author also asks whether the heroines and heroes of the stories should have spoken a different language more often.
Together we can tell completely new stories, richer and deeper, with new colors.
Stories that convince our children that strange and different always holds a promise: that you can understand the world a little better through encounters.
Cornelia Funke via Zeit.de
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Paul Maar with children's books against ghosts of the past
The wish points and Sam, who lives with Mr. Taschenbier, have accompanied generations of children into adulthood.
These figures were written by Paul Maar.
The author was born in 1937 and experienced the Second World War as a small child.
Lying in bed with your clothes on, always being ready to escape into the protective bunker and see the burning houses when you have left the shelter.
That does something to you: “If you, like me, experienced and suffered a war as a child, you react much more emotionally to all the wars that are currently taking place,” he writes in Die
Zeit
.
Ghosts arise in the head and the fear remains that they will return. Maar believes that he wanted to shake off the fear through the children's books he wrote.
In the hope that children feel cared for and safe with his works.
As a child, he often retreated into a fantasy world with books.
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Just a dystopia or soon a historical novel?
The author Martin Schäuble wrote, among other things, the dystopia “Endland”, in which he created the “National Alternative”. The model at the time was the AfD.
He researched this and a fiction emerged.
“I wanted to show where these right-wingers and right-wing radicals could lead us,” he writes.
Now he's worried that his dystopia will become a historical novel.
Language in children's books: Why old books should be changed
Language develops over the years and undergoes change.
The background is, among other things, people's values.
With a certain choice of words, language can be inclusive but also limiting.
There is therefore always criticism of wording in old children's books by Michael Ende, Astrid Lindgren, Otfried Preußler and Roald Dahl.
Sometimes the books are changed and adapted.
The actress Anke Engelke tells the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
that she thinks this is good.
However, she rejects a ban on the books.
“It's better to use an existing template and say: the core is fine, everything is there.
“Let’s see if we can’t make it a little more modern,” Engelke tells
SZ
.
There are changes, among other things, in the works of Lindgren, who stated during her lifetime that she would have written some things differently.
In consultation with Lindgren's family, some terms were changed to "Pippi Longstocking".