- ChLA International Committee
ChLA 2018 International Panel Abstracts
With two weeks until the 45th Children's Literature Association's annual conference, the ChLA International Committee is pleased to present the abstracts for the 2018 International Panel focusing on German Children's Literature. Please join us Friday, June 29th in Anita Moss from 11:00-12:15pm to hear these thrilling papers!
Comedy in German Children’s Literature
Dr. Ute Dettmar, Distinguished Speaker, Goethe Universität Frankfurt
Admittedly, comedy is not a specifically German phenomenon - some would even say the opposite. Creating and having fun are part of an aesthetic potential which has been exploited in children’s literature in various eras and cultures. Within this global framework, however, specific cultural and literary traditions can be identified. Internationally successful classics of children's literature such as Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter or Wilhelm Busch's Max and Moritz make clear that specific forms and functions of comedy can be found in German children's literature. Looking at the history and presence of comic forms, genres and media types one can find central positions, historical moments and trends that characterize the development of German children's literature in general: from didactic literature towards a wide variety and complexity of aesthetic forms in the 20th and 21th centuries. The different narrative strategies employed to make child readers laugh – in other words, the functions and scope applied to elements of comedy – refer to another important point: The connection between specific images of childhood, the cultural view on childhood and the modernization of children’s literature.
In this paper, Ute Dettmar starts with a brief survey of historical traditions, especially the picture story and its forms of visual comedy. Based on theoretical approaches to comedy, humor and the culture of laughter which have characterized in particular German research into children’s literature, she then considers forms and aesthetic developments by using selected examples. She addresses different narrative strategies and discusses the underlying changing cultural constructions of childhood. Finally, current literary developments of German children's literature will be discussed, including the growing importance of intermedial references and the comedy success stories increasingly rooted in a global entertainment culture and a society ever more dominated by visuals and the media.
Refugee Children at Sea: Kinder auf der Flucht Then (1939) and Now (2018)
Dr. Daniel Feldman, Bar-Ilan University
Two historic waves of child refugees frame German public memory about asylum: the Kindertransport that sent Jewish children away from Nazi Germany in the months leading up to World War II, and the mass migration of young, predominantly Muslim asylum seekers toward democratic, multicultural Germany in recent years. Though separated by nearly eighty years and dissimilar in scale, the two events are intrinsically related. Germany’s response to the latter crisis is, in part, a response to the first. Both put Germany at the center of geopolitical catastrophes epitomized by the ordeal of child refugees threatened by state violence and cast across perilous waters toward safety on foreign shores. In the case of the Kindertransport, Germany was the source of danger that resulted in the flight of Jewish refugee children to the United Kingdom. Since 2015, by contrast, Germany has been a haven, accepting more child refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other areas of conflict than any other country.
German children’s literature has emerged as a crucial site of engagement with these events. Reading children’s accounts of the Kindertransport against books about the current refugee crisis opens an indispensable window into changes in German norms surrounding identity. This paper sets these texts in conversation while attending to the significance of international borders, linguistic hybridity, and cultural assimilation in books about the Kindertransport, such as Postkarten für einen kleinen Jungen (2013) by Henry Foner and Ich war ein Glückskind (2013) by Marion Charles, and the refugee criss, such as as Bestimmt wird alles gut (2016) by Kirsten Boie and Djadi, Flüchtlingsjunge (2016) by Peter Härtling. Through picture books and young adult novels, these texts portray the tribulations of young asylum seekers who survive harrowing maritime crossings and shed light on how the story of child refugees has become a symbolic narrative exemplifying modern German ideals.
Somewhere In Berlin: Film Portrayals of Youth From Weimar to the Berlin Wall
Dr. Ada Bieber, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Almost 30 years ago after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a generation has come to adulthood, and images of childhood in East Germany have faded into the background. This talk turns back to urban childhood in the ‘other Germany’ through the lens of East German film for youth. It focuses on Berlin as a space of historical change, and argues that film allows for a revealing investigation of childhood under political restrictions—from the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, the post-war period, and finally Germany behind the Iron Curtain. The first film for children produced by the East German film company DEFA came out 1946 under the title Irgendwo in Berlin (Somewhere in Berlin), and portrays the psychological wounds that mark youth after the war. Lamprecht, director of the famous adaptation of Emil and the Detectives (1931), resumes the cinematic style from the end of Weimar, but now portrays childhood in ruins. In the later films, the city became a touchstone for the political downsides in a divided country, mirroring the propaganda of a socialist society as well as a youth lost after the socialist state has turned oppressive. Sheriff Teddy (1957) portrays a troubled, rebellious youth. The motif of the fraternal feud drives the question which German state offers the best alternative to fascism. Later, the Berlin Wall marked an end to ideals of humanism, and film turned to adaptations of proletarian literature of Weimar Berlin to question new political pathways. Filmmaker Dziuba captured best the lost generation of youth at the beginning of the last decade of the GDR. His childhood classic Sabine Kleist—7 Years (1982) and Zschoche’s Island of Swans (1983) foresee the end of the ‘other’ Germany with characters that wander alone the modern but cold streets of East Berlin without hope for an integrative future.
Abstracts from all of the papers that will be presented during the ChLA 2018 Conference in San Antonio are now available on the ChLA website.
For more information about our distinguished panelists and the 2018 International Committee panel, please visit our conference page. We look forward to seeing you in two weeks in San Antonio!
If you livetweet or Instagram a panel or other conference-related event, please use the #chla18 hashtag so that others can find your posts.