Der Struwwelpeter
Heinrich Hoffmann: Paving the Way to the Comic Book
It started as a Christmas present. The year was 1844, and
Heinrich Hoffmann, a Frankfurt doctor, wanted to give his son
Carl a children's book for the holidays. He went shopping, but
what he found in the bookstores were "long tales, stupid
stories," unfit for the lively imagination of a child, he later
explained. He finally came home, having made just one purchase:
a blank notebook.
Hoffmann's idea was to create the book himself, bringing colorful pictures and words together to tell a vivid tale. He set to work drawing a character he had used to entertain his younger patients, Der Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter), who did not want to comb his hair or cut his nails. The first version of Hoffmann's book contained five poems and a picture illustrating the boy's appalling grooming habits. When his friends read the book, they encouraged him to publish it. He added more tales about bad children, each taking a moral lesson to an absurd extreme, and each illustrated with a series of images from which the thread of the narrative could be drawn. Hoffmann published the book in 1845, under a title that translates as "Funny Stories and Droll Pictures with 15 Beautifully Colored Plates for Children Ages 3 to 6."
Those who have read Hoffmann's stories might be surprised to
hear them described as "funny." They tell of children whose
faults are punished by torture or death: a thumb-sucker loses
her thumbs to a bogeyman with giant scissors, a girl plays with
matches and is burned to ashes, a boy doesn't eat his soup and
dies of malnutrition. Yet something about this first "comic
book" struck a chord with children. Eventually republished as
Der Struwwelpeter, with pictures by a professional illustrator,
it has been reprinted hundreds of time and been translated into
some 30 languages. The book has also served as an inspiration to
many other children's authors, including the popular American
writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. "Graphically," Sendak
once said of Hoffmann's work, "it is one of the most beautiful
books in the world."
Text and images from Der Struwwelpeter can be viewed at the website of a museum dedicated to Hoffmann at www.heinrich-hoffmann-museum.de. An exhibition of books and other works drawing on the Struwwelpeter theme is on display in Korbach (Hessen) through January 12.
(Originally published in The Week in Germany, November 8, 2002. For some time it was posted in the online archives but it seems to have been removed for good... Usually, most contributions appeared in both the English and the German edition [Deutschland Nachrichten], however, I am not aware of a German version of this feature.)