Christine Busta and Das Kinderlied: An Exploration

Abstract

The vigorous interest shown by German poets in the last twenty years for the writing and collecting of children's poetry is a phenomenon recalling a similar enthusiasm among the Romantic poets over 150 years ago. Once again, a large number of serious German authors, like their forebears, Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano with their selection of Kinderlieder in Des Knaben Wunderhorn, are writing or collecting for both adults and for children. To be sure a number of poets have done the same since that time, but who today knows about Eichendorff, Mdrike and even Brecht as writers of poetry for children? The renewed contemporary interest in children's poetry has not escaped scholarly attention in Germany nor, although to a far lesser degree, in the United States. In the past twenty years a significant body of scholarship has focused on the definition and evaluation of modern children's verse as well as on its historical context.' In 1979 Kurt Franz' valuable monograph Kinderlyrik offered an extensive bibliography of