434 Johann Peter Hebel (II)

humor collects huge sums in pennies. He is exemplary in his storytelling as a whole, as well as inexhaustible in every detail. One of his Sfories opens with the words, "It is well kltown that once upon a time an old mayor of Wasselnheim complained to his wife that his French would bring him to an

early grave." This expression "well known" is enough to fill in the sterile gulf that separates history from private life in the mind of every philistine. To say nothing of that twenty-line historical excursus in "Unverhofftes Wiedersehen" [Unexpected Reunion] which contains the whole of Hebel in a nutshell. Hebel's artistry is as nondescript as emperors and victories appear to be in those twenty lines of world history. It is ail difficult to evaluate, right down to the level of linguistic detail, for the use of dialect seems to swathe its power in a veil of mystery rather than provide a source of energy. The minute scale of his work is the guarantee of his survival in even the most alien environment. A bishop's crozier that is handed down in a family from one generation to the next may one day be thrown away because it has become as great an embarrassment as a Jacobin's bonnet rouge. But no one will throw away that inconspicuous brooch on which a crozier is crossed with a bonnet rouge.

Written in 1926; published in Die literarische Welt, 1926. Translated by Rodney Living­stone.

Notes

1. johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) was a journalist and author; he was much esteemed for the use of dialect in his writings, a practice that had fallen prey to eighteench-cencury enlightened universalism. A5 editor and chief writer of the Badischer Landkalendar, an annual publication not unlike the American Old Farmer's Almanac, Hebel produced an enormous volume of prose and poetry. A typical calendar would include a cosmology embellished with anecdotes and stories, practical advice for the homeowner and farmer, reports on crime and catastrophe, short biographies, riddles, and, finally, political observations on the y ear just past. Hebel's narrative persona, the "Rhenish Family-Friend," narrates and comments; Sterne-like ironic interjections are not infrequent.-Trans.

2. Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), Austrian writer whose shoit prose and novels are characterized py an unusually graceful style and a reverence for natural proc­ess.-Trans.

3. Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) is remembered for a series of wildly extravagant novels chat are indebted co Sterne. He, like Goethe, was one of Benjamin's favorite authors; Schiller, on the other hand, plays vinually no role in Benjamin's canon.­Trans.

A Glimpse into the World of Children's Books

A soft green glow in the evening red.

-C. F. Heinle

In one of Andersen's tales, there is a picture-book that cost "half a king­dom." In it everything was alive. "The birds sang, and people came out of the book and spoke." But when the princess turned the page, "they leaped back in again so that there should be no disorder." Pretty and unfocused, like so much that Andersen wrote, this little invention misses the crucial point by a hair's breadth. The objects do not come to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, the gazing child enters into those pages, becoming suffused, like a cloud, with the riotous colors of the world of pictures. Sitting before his painted book, he makes the Taoist vision of perfection come true: he overcomes the illusory barrier of the book's surface and passes through colored textures and brightly painted partitions to enter a stage on which fairy tales spring to life. Hoa, the Chinese word for "painting," is much like kua, meaning "attach": you attach five colors to the objects. In German, the word used is anlegen: you "apply" colors . In such an open, color-bedecked world where everything shifts at every step, the child is allowed to join in the game. Draped with colors of every hue that he has picked up from reading and observing, the child stands in the center of a masquerade and

.joins in, while reading-for the words have all

come to the masked ball, are joining in the fun and are whirling around together, like tinkling snowflakes. "'Prince' is a word with a star tied to it," said a boy of seven. When children think up stories, they are like theater­producers who refuse to be bound by "sense." This is easily proved. If you give children four or five specific words and ask them to make a short sentence on the spot, the most amazing prose comes to light: thus, not a glimpse into but a guide to children's books. At a stroke, the words throw

436 The World of Children's Books

on their costumes and in the twinkling of an eye they are caught up in a battle, love scenes, or a brawl. This is how children write th�ir stories, but also how they read them. And there are rare, impassioned ABC-books that play a similar sort of game in pictures. Under Plate A, for example, you will find a higgledy-piggledy still-life that seems very mysterious until you realize what is happening and what Apple, ABC-book, Ape, Airplane, Anchor, Ark, Arm, Armadillo, Aster, and Ax are all doing in the same place. Children know such pictures like their own pockets; they have searched through them in the same way and turned them inside out, without forgetting the smallest thread or piece of cloth. And if, in the colored engraving, children's imagi­nations can fall into a reverie, the black-and-white woodcut or the plain prosaic illustration draws them out of themselves. Just as they will write about the pictures with words, so, too, will they "write" them in a more literal sense: they will scribble on them. Unlike the colored pictures, the surface of the black-and-white illustration seems to be incomplete and hence in need of additions. So children imaginatively complete the illustrations. At the same time as they learn language from them, they also learn writing: hieroglyphics. It is in this spirit that the first words learned are supplemented with line drawings of the objects they refer to: "egg," "hat." The genuine worth of such straightforward picture-books is far removed from the ra­tionalist crudeness that caused them to be recommended in the first place.­"The way the child makes itself a little horne," explores its picture landscape with its eyes and finger, can be seen in this paradigmatic nursery rhyme from an old picture-book, Steckenpferd und Puppe [Stick-Horse and Doll], by J. P. Wich (Nordlingen, 1843):

In front of the little town, there sits a little dwarf, Behind the little dwarf, there stands a little mountain, From the little mountain, there flows a little stream, On the little stream, there floats a little roof, Beneath the little roof, there stands a little room, Inside the little room, there sits a little boy, Behind the little boy, there stands a little bench, On the little bench, there rests a little chest, In the little chest, there stands a little box, In the little box, there lies a little nest, In front of the little nest, there stands a little cat, That's a lovely little place, I'll make a note of that.

In a less systematic, more whimsical and boisterous way, children play with puzzle-pictures in which they set out in pursuit of the "thief," the "lazy pupil," or the "hidden teacher." Though such pictures may seem related to those drawings full of contradictions and impossibilities which nowadays are used for tests, these are likewise really only a masquerade: exuberant, impromptu games in which people walk upside down, stick their arms and

The World of Children's Books 437

legs between tree branches, and use a house roof as a coat. These carnivals overflow even into the more serious space of ABC-books and reading primers. In the first half of the last century, [Paul] Renner in Nuremberg published a set of twenty-four sheets in which the letters were introduced in disguise, as it were. F appears as a Franciscan, C as a Clerk, P as a Porter: The game was so popular that variations on these old motifs have survived to this day. Last, the rebus rings in the Ash Wednesday of this carnival of words and letters. It is the unmasking: from the midst of the resplendent procession, the motto-the gaunt figure of Reason-gazes out at the chil­dren. The rebus (a word that, curiously, was formerly traced back to rever instead of to res) has the most distinguished origins: it descends directly from the hieroglyphics of the Renaissance, and one of its most precious books, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, may be described as its letters patent. It was perhaps never so widely known in Germany as in France, where around 1840 there was a fashion for charming picture collections in which the text was printed in the form of picture writing. Even so, German children, too, had delightful "educational" rebus books. By the end of the eighteenth century at the latest, we see the publication of Sittenspruche des Buchs jesus Sirach fur Kinder und junge Leute aus allen Standen mit Bildern welche die vornehmsten Worter ausdrucken [Moral Sayings from the Book of Ecclesiasticus for Children and Young People of All Classes, with Pictures that Express the Most Important Words]. The text is delicately engraved in copper, and wherever possible all the nouns are represented by small, beautifully painted illustrative or allegorical pictures. As late as 1842, [Benedictus Gotthelf] Teubner published a Kleine Bibel fUr Kinder [Little Bible for Children], with 460 illustrations. And in children's books, even children's hands were catered to just as much as their minds or their imaginations. There are the well-known pull-out books (which have degen­erated the most and seem to be the most short-lived as a genre, just as the books themselves never last for long). A delightful example was the Livre jou-jou, which was published by Janet in Paris, presumably in the 1840s. It is the story of a Persian prince. All the incidents of his adventures are illustrated, and each joyful episode where he is rescued can be made to appear with the wave of a magic wand, by moving the strip at the side of the page. Similar to these are the books in which the doors and curtains in the pictures can be opened to reveal pictures behind them. And finally, just as a novel has been written about the doll you can dress up (lsabellens Verwandlungen oder das Miidchen in sechs Gestalten: Ein Unterhaltendes Buch fur Miidchen mit sieben kolorierten beweglichen Kupfern [Isabella's Transformations, or The Girl with Six Outfits: An Entertaining Book for Girls, with Seven Colored Pictures that Move]; published in Vienna), so, too, you now find in books those beautiful games in which little cardboard figures can be attached by means of invisible slits in the board and can be

-

438 The World of Children's Books

Figure 1 Aesop's Fables, second edition. Published by Heinrich Friedrich Muller, Bookseller, Kohlmarkt 1218, Vienna, no date. Collection of Walter Benjamin.

rearranged at will. This means that you can change a landscape or a room according to the different situations that arise in the course of the story. For those few people who as children�r even as collectors-have had the great good fonune to come into possession of magic books or puzzle books, all of the foregoing will have paled in comparison. These magic books were ingeniously contrived volumes that displayed different series of pictures according to the way one flicked through the pages. The person in the know can go through such a book ten times, and will see the same picture on page after page, until his hand slips-and now it is as if the entire book were transformed, and completely different pictures make their appearance.

... ..ts

The World of Children's Books 439

Figure 2 Moral sayings from the book by Jesus Sirach, Nuremberg. Collection of Walter Benjamin.

440 The World of Children's Books

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Figure 3 The Book of Tales for Daughters and Sons of the Educated Classes, by Johann Peter Lyser. With eight copperplate illustrations. Leipzig: Wigand'sche Verlags-Expedition, 1834. Collection of Walter Benjamin.

Books such as these (like the quarto from the eighteenth century in the hands of the present writer) seem to contain nothing but a flower vase, or again a grinning devil, or some parrots, followed by all black or all white pages, windmills, coun jesters, or pierrots. Another one has a series of toys, sweets for a well-behaved child, or, again, when you turn it round, a series of punishments and frightening faces for the child who has been naughty.

The heyday of children's books, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was not just the product of an educational philosophy (which was in some respects superior to that of today), but also emerged simply as an aspect of the bourgeois life of the day. In a word, it was created by the Biedermeier period. Even the smallest towns contained publishers whose most ordinary products were as elegant as the modest house furniture of the time, in the drawers of which their books lay untouched for a century. This is why there are children's books not just from Berlin, Leipzig, Nuremberg, and Vienna; for the collector, works published in Meissen, Grimma, Gotha, Pirna, Plauen, Magdeburg, and Neuhaldensleben have a much more promising ring. Illustrators were at work in almost all of those towns, though the

The World of Children's Books 441

Figure 4 The Magical Red Umbrella: A New Tale for Children. Neuruppin Primers, and Verlag von Gustav Kuhn. Collection of Walter Benjamin.

442 The World of Children's Books

majority have remained unknown. From time to time, however, one of them is rediscovered and receives a biographer. This was the case with Johann Peter Lyser, the painter, musician, anq journalist. A. L. Grimm's Fabe/buch [Book of Fables] (Grimma, 1827), with Lyser's illustrations, the Buch der Mahrchen fur Tochter und Sohne gebi/deter Stande [Book of Fairy Tales for Daughters and Sons of the Educated Classes] (Leipzig, 1834), with text and illustrations by Lyser, and Linas Mahrchenbuch [Lina's Book of Fairy Tales] (Grimma, n.d.), with text by A. L. Grimm and illustrations by Lyser, contain his most beautiful work for children. The coloring of these lithographs pales beside the fiery coloring of the Biedermeier period, and matches better the haggard and often careworn figures, the shadowy landscape, and the fairy­tale atmosphere which is not without an ironic, satanic streak. The crafts­manship in these books was fully committed to the ordinary life of the petty bourgeoisie; it was not there to be enjoyed but was to be used like cooking recipes or proverbs. It represents a popular, even childlike variant of the dreams that assumed their most exaggerated forms in the works of the Romantics. This is why Jean Paul is their patron saint.1 The central-German fairy-world of his stories has found expression in their pictures. No writing is closer to their unpretentiously colorful world than his. For his genius, like that of color itself, is based on fantasy, not creative power. When you look at colors, the intuitions of fantasy, in contrast to the creative imagination, manifest themselves as a primal phenomenon. All form, every outline that man perceives, corresponds to something in him that enables him to repro­duce it. The body imitates itself in the form of dance, the hand imitates and appropriates it through drawing. But this ability finds its limits in the world of color. The human body cannot produce color. It does relates to it not creatively but receptively: through the shimmering colors of vision. (Anthro­pologically, too, sight is the watershed of the senses because it perceives color and form simultaneously. And so, on the one hand, the body is the organ of active relations: the perception of form and movement, hearing and voice. On the other hand, there are the passive relations: the perception of color belongs to the realms of smell and taste. Language itself synthesizes this group into a unity in words like "looking," "smelling," "tasting," which apply intransitively to objects and transitively to human beings.) In short, pure color is the medium of fantasy, a home among clouds for the spoiled child, not the strict canon of the constructive artist. Here is the link with its "sensuous, moral" effect which Goethe understood entirely in the spirit of the Romantics:

In their illumination and their obscurity, the transparent colors are without limits, just as fire and water can be regarded as their zenith and nadir .. . The relation of light to transparent color is, when you come to look into it deeply, infinitely fascinating, and when the colors flare up, merge into one another,

The World of Children's Books 443

arise anew, and vanish, it is like taking breath in great pauses from one eternity to the next, from the greatest light down to the solitary and eternal silence in the deepest shades. The opaque colors, in contrast, are like flowers that do not dare to compete with the sky, y et are concerned with weakness (that is to say, white) on the one side, and with evil (that is to say, black) on the other side. It is these, however, that are able . .. to produce such pleasing variations and such natural effects that .. . ultimately the transparent colors end up as no more than spirits playing above them and serve only to enhance them. 2

With these words, the "Supplement" to the Theory of Color does justice to the sensibilities of these worthy colorists and hence to the spirit of children's games themselves. Just think of the many games that are concerned with pure imaginative contemplation: soap bubbles, parlor games, the watery color of the magic lantern, watercoloring, decals. In all of these, the color seems to hover suspended above the objects. Their magic lies not in the colored object or in the mere dead color, but in the colored glow, the colored brilliance, the ray of colored light. At the end of its panorama, the glimpse into the world of children's books culminates in a rock covered with Bied­ermeier flowers. Leaning on a sky-blue goddess, the poet lies there with his melodious hands. What the Muse whispers to him, a winged child sitting next to him puts into a drawing. Scattered around are a harp and a lute. Dwarves fiddle and toot in the depths of the mountain, while in the sky the sun is setting. This is how Lyser once painted the landscape, and the eyes and cheeks of children poring over books are reflected in the glory of the sunset.

Written in 1926; published in Die literarische Welt, 1926. Translated by Rodney Living­stone.

Notes

1. Jean Paul Richter ( 1763-1825) is remembered for a series of wildly extravagant, highly imaginative novels that combine fantasy and realism; they are indebted to Sterne. -Trans.

2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Farbenlehre, ed. Hans Wohlbold (Jena, 1928), pp. 440-441.-Trans.

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