War and Peace in Recent German Children's Literature

Abstract

War and Peace in Recent German Children's Literature Winfred Kaminski (bio) Translated by J. D. Stahl (bio) Translator's note: The legacy of two world wars has profoundly if unconsciously shaped the outlook of the present younger generation in Germany. Before and even after World War II, the codes of Prussian militarism, based on an all-pervasive ideology of hierarchy and control, were reinforced by a tightly structured educational system. Romantic representations of military history, often in sumptuously illustrated volumes, depicted the uniforms, weapons, and battle formations of European wars. The abdication of responsibility implicit in an ethos which demanded exact fulfillment of duties strictly defined by one's superiors has been traced by some critics to the implications of Enlightenment philosophy. The concept of duty, though it demanded the loyalty of individuals to collective ideals, did not carry a reciprocal obligation of the state to the individual, nor did it permit subordinates to consider the broader social consequences of their actions. (The central character of Siegfried Lenz's Deutschstunde [The German Lesson] disturbs the social order when he responds to a school essay assignment to write on "the joys of duty"—for he honestly considers the ironic and painful moral consequences of a wrongly conceived "duty.") To replace the earlier hierarchical yet fundamentally individual definition of duty, many postwar Germans have sought to develop a philosophical rationale for a political and social morality. Their analysis sees every feature of society, including children's literature, as participating in or criticizing the maintenance of power by the dominant class(es). Winfred Kaminski, who is engaged in a major research project at the University of Frankfurt concerning German children's and youth literature since 1945, here employs such an approach to examine the representation of war and peace in that literature. He identifies the same issues in novels for young people about the Vietnam War, and he questions their distortions from the same viewpoint. Que serait le récit du bonheur? Rien, que ce qui le prépare, puis ce qui le détruit, ne se raconte. —André Gide, L'Immoraliste Literature for children and young people has rarely been in step with current events, but it has led the field in examining the contemporary peace movement and its related concerns. The literature of [End Page 55] peace is the clearest expression of contemporary political consciousness in children's literature; its concerns include fear of war, opposition to willful destruction, and a desire to mitigate the power of technology. How effectively children's books deal with these issues is another question, but is is a hopeful sign that they do so at all. Discussion of peace necessarily entails a consideration of war—indeed, many authors attempt to define peace by describing war. But there are as yet no novels about World War II comparable in quality to Grimmelshausen's work on the Thirty Years' War, Tolstoy's on the Napoleonic Wars, or the antiwar novels written during the Weimar Republic. This lacuna exists not only because many writers feel that modern, technological warfare, with its mass destruction, lies beyond description, but also because many authors doubt that their desire to write in the cause of peace will be received by the readers in the intended spirit. As Marieluise Christadler has recognized, even antiwar portrayals of war contain exciting moments of adventure and trial; a serious war novel can be read as breathlessly as a dime thriller. Horror has its own aesthetic dynamics that first make the reader receptive and then teach him to find horror enjoyable, even if he shudders (Christadler 5). Undoubtedly, we must keep the ambiguous nature of readers' responses in mind. The problem of anticipating young readers' responses to the literature of peace is also related to the question of the criteria we should use to evaluate it. We may, for example, attempt to evaluate the "success" of this body of literature in light of traditional "aesthetic" criteria such as coherence, subtlety, or vividness; we may look for a protagonist with whom readers can identify or the psychological depth and narrative force that hold the interest of the reader. But these criteria, of course, are not truly "objective...