Monday, October 27

Childhood relived during The Office

So, last night we were watching Season 3 of The Office (the episode when all the Stanford people start at Scranton), and I almost died when Dwight started presenting a portion Struwwelpeter as part of orientation. I laughed so hard Trey had to pause the DVD. I know that some of you have seen this before (I think I brought a copy to UD to show people who didn't believe it existed) but probably not all, so I'll explain.


For those who are unfamiliar, Struwwelpeter is the title story in a collection of short stories for children. A bit of research yielded that they originally appeared in 1845 after psychologist Heinrich Hoffmann was unable to find what he considered a suitable book for his grandson. Growing up German we obviously had many cultural items for children, and this book was one of them. Many of the stories are a bit....unorthodox? Harsh? Can't seem to find a good word to describe them.


My favorite story was always the one about the little girl who plays with matches and then burns down, probably because the last illustration is of two cats crying into her ashes (we didn't have any pets, I really liked cats, and I thought these were especially cute to be so sad over the girl who something as stupid as play with matches). Anyway, there are several other stories, like the one (Dwight used a picture from) where the guy with the really big scissors comes to cut off the thumbs of the kid who was told not to suck his thumb, and the one of the kid who won't eat his dinner so it's set in front of him each night until he eventually dies because he doesn't want to eat it.


To us, this kind of thing was perfectly normal and though I never really gave it much thought, I guess I assumed everyone had books like it. It wasn't until I was in college that I realized how a lot of people could think of it as bizarre and even distressing for children. Despite that, I don't think you can argue that it's brilliant in terms of getting kids to behave.


For anyone who's interested, here are a couple of other links (the one at the top of the page will take you to side-by-side German & English versions of each story):
-The Wikipedia page, translated into English
-The actual Struwwelpeter book online with all of the illustrations, in English

This weekend we had Schlachtfest at club, and some visitors - Trey's Meme and his sister Kaitlin from Fort Worth - but I'll write all about that later in the week.

6 comments:

Eva said...

Having grown up with Stuwwelpeter myself, I didn't realize how um...politically incorrect it realy was.

I do have a new copy of the book with English translation by Mark Twain.

Fun to read and remember my childhood.

And I must say, none of my children continued to suck their thumbs once they were read the story of Daumenlutscher Conrad.

Karen said...

sounds like this is 241-KIDS material for sure!

i smiled that you had to pause the DVD due to laughter. :)

Katrin said...

Aww... memories of struwwelpeter. But he wasn't the worst stories we were told. I remember many a night when I was lying awake at night frightened to death about "Geisterstunde" when the ghosts would come and get you if you weren't asleep.

Martha said...

Um, yea, that would be traumatizing. How could that be normal? Death is the effect of everything, apparently. That's not morbid.

I obviously did not grow up with those books. I would enjoy them now. :)

Finlands finest said...

LOL! I have never heard of these stories but they sound great! Full of important lessons!

Viki said...

Actually Martha, death is only the effect of some of the bad things. There are others...
-Don't pay attention to where you're walking: fall into the river
-Take responsibility for dangerous things and don't keep an eye on them: get chased down a well at rifle-point
-Suck your thumbs: a man with a really big pair of scissors will come and cut them off

On that note - Trey pointed out last night that the referece in the Office was actually during the "Take your daughter to work day" episode, and the picture was actually the man with the really big pair of scissors.

Finally, I've realized that the online book is missing a page: the middle page in the second story is missing. Let me know if you're confused at all...

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