Читать книгу Heimat - Liv Hambrett - Страница 12

The other day, I was visiting a friend, and, as I am apt to do there because Silke is the mother of two delightful little Mädchen and my German is of a similar standard to her three-year-old’s, idly flicking through a children’s book. The book followed the trials and tribulations of a small girl and her various pets and seemed to hinge on the fact this little girl’s mouth was round, presumably because Mund and Rund rhyme. Anyway, the actual story is immaterial because what really grabbed my attention, about halfway through the book, was a carefully illustrated turd. I said, ‘oh gosh, look at that, a shit.’ Sure, it was in a potty and no doubt part of the plot (it escapes my memory indeed how, I just remember the dialogue being quite forceful) but the vivid depiction of its form and colour gave me a little jolt. Silke looked at me and said, in a manner which conveyed a level of coolness with neatly spiralled toddler turds in picture books, ‘of course.’ And then she said, ‘haven’t you heard of ‘Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat?’ I politely asked what it was the mole had found on his head and Silke said, ‘a shit.’

For those unfamiliar with it, the story follows a mole who, upon popping up out of his burrow to start the day, finds he has become, at some point, the recipient of an anonymously donated crap, deposited directly atop his head. Unimpressed, he goes in search of the careless culprit and, happening upon a succession of farm animals – a cow, horse, pig, goat and rabbit etc - asks if they are to blame for his headdress. All of this transpires while the turd remains undulating on his head. Each animal essentially says, ‘how could I have done it? My crap looks like this …’ and then gives the mole an impromptu example of the differing form their excretion takes. In each case, the mole waits patiently at the rear end of the animal, inspects what is expelled and goes on his way. The shit, in case you were wondering, still neatly coiled on his head. Ultimately, the mole comes across a pair of flies perched upon the cow pat and the flies agree to sample the shit on the mole’s head and upon doing so tell him it almost certainly came from a dog. The mole, with fresh purpose, sets off for the dog’s kennel. Somewhere near the dog’s kennel, the shit slides off the mole’s head, as if, now certain of the soul responsible, he no longer needs the physical evidence. The dog is sleeping when the mole arrives to confront him, providing the mole with the perfect opportunity to take revenge. An eye for an eye. A shit for a shit. The end.

To be honest, I have long been out of the English speaking children’s books scene, so there may well be a counterpart to the mole who was crapped on, but I am not aware of it. Indeed, crap may well form an integral part of children’s literature, which is a perfectly logical thing, kids have to learn about it somewhere. But something tells me there is something so … German about the tale of the mole hunting down an animal that crapped on his head. A Teutonic level of candour with bodily functions. An element of detail that can only come from a country that is home to the toilet inspection self.

Moving away from the toilet, the German children’s literature landscape is littered with gems. If you, like me, have ever wondered why Germans are so good at abiding by rules, I am going to posit the theory it’s because they grew up on a steady diet of stories promising an agonising death if they didn’t eat their soup or stop rocking backwards on their chair.

I refer, of course, to Heinrich Hoffman’s seminal Struwwelpeter (scraggly/shaggy Peter) which is actually a volume of ten rhyming stories detailing various naughty children, their naughty escapades and their somewhat disproportionate punishments – most often death and on occasion, the loss of a limb. A couple of notable inclusions are Suppen-Kasper (Soup Kaspar) who refuses to eat his soup for dinner and consequently dies of starvation; Flying Robert who, against advice, goes outside into a storm and gets blown away to meet his untimely death; and the thumb-sucker who sucks his thumb despite his mother’s disapproval and has his thumb snipped off by a tailor who happens to be in the area. No overweight bears with a fondness for honey and his bumbling pals here, folks, just ‘The Dreadful Story of the Matches’ about a girl who plays with them and burns to death.

The Brothers Grimm, of course, loom large. Despite their tales not originally being intended for a young audience, they have become some of the most vital stories for children ever written. Albeit cleaned up by a brother himself, for younger audiences – although not scrubbed and polished nearly as much as in the sanitisation carried out by Disney – the stories from the Brothers Grimm are extremely dark. Wolves eat grandmothers, witches fatten up children in order to eat them, jealous stepmothers order the deaths of their prettier stepdaughters. These stories, collected from all over Europe, told and retold, passed to the brothers and given their magic dust, have come to form a core part of German literary identity and they’re about kids and they’re scary.

And what about Max und Moritz? The 1800s spat them out as well as the Brothers Grimm and Struwwel Peter’s badly behaved pals. (Struwwel Peter, I have omitted from telling you thus far, was guilty of being unkempt – he didn’t comb his hair or cut his nails – and as a result, had no friends. So he got off lightly.) But Max and Moritz were a most wicked pair, their crimes reaching beyond refusing to eat their dinner or brush their hair. They played a series of pranks on unsuspecting villagers – like putting gunpowder in an old man’s pipe and watching him light up and knock himself unconscious – narrowly avoided getting baked to death after falling into a vat of dough mid-prank on the baker, and ultimately met their match in a homicidal farmhand. While, irritatingly one must admit, slitting grain sacks in a farmer’s mill, Max and Moritz are caught out by the farmhand, put in sacks themselves and popped through the mill. Their remains are fed to the ducks.

Just some light bed-time reading before one heads off to the land of nod, night lamp on.

I mean, look, English literature has produced its fair share of dark children’s stories. I was flipping terrified of witches and checked every woman for shell shaped nostrils and signs of an itchy scalp. I gave a great deal of thought to the utter endlessness of being a mouse forever, even if I did have a cool Nana who would keep me in her purse and feed me and my fat friend bananas. But I don’t remember walking away from Roald Dahl thinking I would get turned into a mouse if I was naughty … only if I was unlucky enough to get sniffed out by a witch. As a kid, it was my job to be cunning and alert and outsmart the witches. And I cannot for the life of me remember a story book that so accurately detailed the colour, texture and form of different kinds of animal shit.

But, still, my theory remains: if you want to know why Germans are such direct, frank people with a deep appreciation for rules and the consequences of breaking them, look no further than their bedtime stories. The ones they read after the Sandmann sprinkles that magic dust in their little eyes.