Struwwelpeter
Der
Struwwelpeter ("shock-headed Peter" or
"Shaggy Peter") is an 1845 German children's book
by Heinrich Hoffmann. It comprises ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly
about children. Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous
consequences of misbehavior in an
exaggerated way.[1] The title of the first story provides the title of the
whole book. Der Struwwelpeter is one of the earliest books for children
that combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, and is considered
a precursor to comic books.[2]
Der
Struwwelpeter is known for introducing the
character of the Tailor (or Scissorman) to Western literature. Some researchers
now see the stories in the book as illustrations of many child mental
disorders that we know about today.[3]
Background and publication history
Hoffmann
wrote Struwwelpeter in reaction to the lack of good books for children.
Intending to buy a picture book as a Christmas present for his three-year-old
son, Hoffmann instead wrote and illustrated his own book.[4] In 1845 he was persuaded by friends to publish the book
anonymously as Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön
kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren ("funny stories and
whimsical pictures with 15 beautifully coloured panels for children aged
3–6"). The book was one of the first uses of chromolithography (a method of making multi-colored prints) in a children's
book.
For
the third edition, published in 1858, the title was changed to Struwwelpeter,
the name of the character in the first story. The book became popular among
children throughout Europe.
Struwwelpeter has been translated into several languages. In 1891 Mark
Twain wrote his own translation of the
book, but because of copyright issues Twain's "Slovenly Peter" was
not published until 1935, 25 years after his death.[5]
British
twin illustrators Janet and Anne
Grahame Johnstone provided new illustrations for an
English translation published in 1950.
Stories
- Struwwelpeter describes a boy who does not groom himself properly and is consequently unpopular.
- In Die Geschichte vom bösen Friederich ("The Story of Wicked Frederick"): A violent boy terrorizes animals and people. Eventually he is bitten by a dog, who goes on to eat the boy's food while Frederick is bedridden.
- In Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.
- In Die Geschichte von den schwarzen Buben ("The Story of the Black Boys"): Nikolas (or "Agrippa" in some translations)[6] catches three boys teasing a dark-skinned boy. To teach them a lesson, he dips them in black ink.
- Die Geschichte von dem wilden Jäger ("The Story of the Wild Huntsman") is the only story not primarily focused on children. In it, a hare steals a hunter's musket and eyeglasses and begins to hunt the hunter. In the ensuing chaos, the hare's child is burned by hot coffee and the hunter falls into a well.
- In Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher ("The Story of the Thumb-Sucker"): A mother warns her son Konrad not to suck his thumbs. However, when she goes out of the house he resumes his thumb-sucking, until a roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.
- Die Geschichte vom Suppen-Kaspar ("The Story of Soup-Kaspar") begins as Kaspar (or "Augustus" in some translations), a healthy, strong boy, proclaims that he will no longer eat his soup. Over the next five days, he wastes away and dies.
- In Die Geschichte vom Zappel-Philipp ("The Story of Fidgety Philip"): A boy who won't sit still at dinner accidentally knocks all of the food onto the floor, to his parents' great displeasure.
- Die Geschichte von Hans Guck-in-die-Luft ("The Story of Johnny Look-In-The-Air") concerns a boy who habitually fails to watch where he's walking. One day he walks into a river; he is soon rescued, but his writing-book drifts away.
- In Die Geschichte vom fliegenden Robert ("The Story of Flying Robert"): A boy goes outside during a storm. The wind catches his umbrella and lifts him high into the air. The story ends with the boy sailing into the distance.
Music, film and stage adaptations
A
British production of Shockheaded Peter, with Kate Bishop,
Lawrence Grossmith,[7] George Grossmith Jr., Beatrice
Terry, and the 11-year-old Marie
Lohr, was produced in London at the Garrick
Theatre in 1900.[8]
Geoffrey Shaw's Struwelpeter, produced in 1914, featured the song
"Conrad Suck-a-Thumb" by Martin Shaw.
A
ballet of Der Struwwelpeter with music composed by Norbert
Schultze was produced in Germany before
World War II.
A
live action film based on the book was released in Germany in 1955. Directed by
Fritz Genschow,
in this adaptation there is a "happy" ending where the characters'
bad deeds are reversed.
Little Suck-a-Thumb (1992) is a psychosexual interpretation of the infamous
cautionary tale. The short film by writer/director David Kaplan stars Cork
Hubbert and Evelyn Solann, with Jim Hilbert
as the Great Tall Scissorman.[9]
"The
Misadventures of Stuwwelpeter"
for tenor and piano (also orchestrated for chamber ensemble) was composed by Michael
Schelle in 1991. Five of the stories are
included in the original bersion with piano. "Inky Boys" is included
only in the chamber version.
Struwwelpeterlieder (1996) is a setting of three of the stories for soprano,
viola and piano by American composer Lowell
Liebermann.
German
composer Kurt Hessenberg
(a descendant of Hoffmann's) arranged Der Struwwelpeter for children's
choir (op. 49) later in his life.
Shockheaded Peter (1998) is a British musical opera by The
Tiger Lillies.[1] that combines elements of pantomime and puppetry
with musical versions of the poems with the songs generally following the text.[10] It won a number of British theatre awards in the years
following its release.
Composer
Kenneth Hesketh's
2000–1 work, Netsuke (from the Japanese miniature sculptures called netsuke) comprises five short movements inspired variously by Saint-Exupéry's Le
Petit Prince, Struwwelpeter, and a poem
by Walter de la Mare.
"Hilf Mir" is a song
by Rammstein released in 2005; it is based on Die gar traurige
Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug.[1]
Comics adaptations
German
comics artist David Füleki
has created a number of manga-style
adaptions of Struwwelpeter.:[1]
- Struwwelpeter: Die Rückkehr (2009, Tokyopop)
- Struwwelpeter: Das große Buch der Störenfriede (2009, Tokyopop)
- Struwwelpeter in Japan (Free Comic Book Day comic; 2012, Delfinium Prints)
The
Scissorman story is adapted into comics form by Sanya Glisic in The
Graphic Canon, Volume 2, published in 2012.[11]
Media influences
Literature
One
of the stories in the 1896 edition of Max
Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland ("A Vain Child") centres around the story of
"Johnny Look-in-the-Air"; the narrator summarises the story, goes to
Germany to look for his scarlet book, and ends with the story being taken from
the allegorical point of view concerning the narrator's eventual downfall from
journalism.
English
author Edward Harold Begbie's first published book, The Political Struwwelpeter
(1898), is of British politics, with the British Lion
is as Struwwelpeter, "bedraggled, with long, uncut claws."[12]
W.
H. Auden refers to the Scissor-Man in his
1930 poem "The Witnesses" (also known as "The Two"):
And
now with sudden swift emergence
Come the women in dark glasses, the humpbacked surgeons
And the Scissor Man.
Come the women in dark glasses, the humpbacked surgeons
And the Scissor Man.
Adolf
Hitler was parodied as a Struwwelpeter
caricature in 1941 in a book called Struwwelhitler, published in Britain
under the pseudonym Dr. Schrecklichkeit (Dr. Horrors).[1]
The
"Story of Soup-Kaspar" is parodied in Astrid
Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (1945), with a tall story about a Chinese boy named Peter
who refuses to eat a swallow's nest served to him by his father, and dies of
starvation five months later.
Josephine
Tey, in The Man in the Queue
(Macmillan, 1953), describes a scene in which a character's hair is
"spread round it by the force of gravity into a Struwwelpeter
effect."
English
illustrator Charles Folkard's
imaginative study "A Nonsense Miscellany," published in 1956 in Roger Lancelyn Green's anthology The Book of Nonsense, by Many Authors,
is a seaside scene that incorporated Baron
Munchausen, Struwwelpeter, and a
variety of characters from the works of Lewis
Carroll and Edward
Lear.[13]
Agatha
Christie references Struwwelpeter in
her novel Curtain
(Collins Crime Club, 1975). The story's narrator, Arthur Hastings, describes another
character, Stephen Norton: "He had a habit of running his hands through
his short grey hair until it stuck up on end like Struwwelpeter."
In
Angela Carter's
Nights at the Circus (1984), a hermit living by a frozen river in Siberia is
described as having fingernails "as long as those of Struwwelpeter in the
picture book".[14]
Jamie
Rix said that the book inspired him to
create Grizzly Tales for
Gruesome Kids when his publisher asked him to
write more short stories about rude children.[15] His mother had given him the book as a child and the
stories gave him nightmares.[15] Rix wanted to create a similar series of books for his
children's generation.[15]
Der
Fall Struwwelpeter ("The Struwwelpeter
Case"), 1989 (ISBN 978-3821821856), by Jörg M. Günther is a satirical treatment in which the
various misdeeds in the story - both by the protagonists and their surroundings
- are analyzed via the regulations of the German Strafgesetzbuch.
The
Jasper Fforde
fantasy/mystery novel The
Fourth Bear (Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)
opens with a police sting
operation by the Nursery Crime Division to
arrest the Scissorman.
Comics
Comic
book writer Grant Morrison
references "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher" in the first story arc
of his Doom Patrol
run with the recurring line, "The door flew open, in he ran / The great,
long, red-legged scissorman."[16] Doom Patrol member Dorothy
Spinner, who has the ability to bring
imaginary beings to life, considers among her imaginary friends the characters
Flying Robert (a ghost baby balloon thing) and The Inky Boys.
The
2000 AD
strip London Falling
(June–July 2006), by Simon
Spurrier and Lee
Garbett, explores bogeymen from English
folklore and mythology wreaking havoc in a modern-day setting. Two of the
characters, Peter Struwwel and The Tailor, are taken from Der Struwwelpeter.
In
the Wildstorm Comics
series Top 10,
one of the officers in the precinct is called Shock-Headed Pete, ostensibly in reference to his electrical powers.
Film and TV
In
a 1991 edition of the Thames
Television detective series Van der Valk, entitled "Doctor Hoffman's Children," the
detective, played by Barry Foster,
solves a series of murders after finding the book in the bedroom of his house,
when his wife relates the tale of the scissorman to their granddaughter. The
murders were all done in the style of events in the book.[17]
Brief
references are made to the book in the film Woman in Gold
(2015), when the central character reminisces about her youth in Vienna during the Anschluss.
The Office references the book in Season 2, Episode 18: "Take Your Daughter
to Work Day" (2006). Dwight
Schrute reads "the Story of the
Thumb-Sucker" to the children, but is interrupted by a horrified Michael Scott.
Family
Guy references the "Story of
Little Suck-a-Thumb" in a cut-a-way gag in "Business
Guy,"[1] the ninth episode in the eighth season, produced in 2009.
In
Doctor
Who Season 10 Episode 3 "Thin Ice" (2017), The Doctor reads part of "The Story of
the Thumb-Sucker" to the children of 1814 London.
Music
The
German Group Ost+Front have on their album Adrenalin (2018) the song "Hans
guck in die Luft". It is about a person's outlook on his past life and
death. The song starts with a similar line as the poem.
The
German Group Rammstein
have on their album Rosenrot
(2005) the song "Hilf Mir" "(Help Me)" .[1]
It is about a child whose parents are not at home. She discovers matches and
sets herself on fire and burns completely. In the story, the girl's name is
Pauline.
References to health conditions
The author, Heinrich Hoffmann, worked as a physician and
later on as psychiatrist. Some of his stories describe habits of children,
which can be in extreme forms signs of mental disorders.[19] Attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder is called Zappel-Philip-Syndrom (Fidgety-Philip syndrome)
colloquially in Germany. The story of the Suppen-Kaspar (Soup-Kaspar) is a case
example of anorexia nervosa. Uncombable hair
syndrome is also
called Struwwelpeter syndrome, after the book title.
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