During my preparations for moving, “Arbeit und Struktur” by Wolfgang Herrendorf accompanied me. Not necessarily the happiest of reads, but at least one in which I found myself emotionally. At one point the author tells how he re-reads his old youth books, on the one hand to see how far they have held up and on the other to see what kind of person he was back then. It’s still a bit early for the youth books for me, I still remember many of them, but as I was just sitting in front of my old children’s books, I did the same.
However, the retrospective on one’s own person was ruled out quite quickly by one’s taste in books. When in doubt, my horizon only went as far as my already filled bookshelf or the book I was looking at. How the books came to be on my shelf I only questioned much later. Which in turn led me to other questions in the present.
What stories did my parents think so highly of that they gave them to their child to read? What values did they want to impart to me at that time? Did I remember the books well or badly? Was I able to remember them?
Let’s start from the back. I could still remember most of the books, mainly because only the most beautiful ones were left. Another detail that almost jumped out at me was that animals played the main role in most of the stories: rabbits, dogs, cats, bears (especially bears), beavers, turtles, pigs, cows, birds and sometimes insects. What was the reason for that? Probably not only because of my mother’s love of animals, because when I thought of my youth books, I could think of significantly fewer stories in which animals were given a role with agency. Whereas with adult books it became more again…
Without further ado, I forgot the first half of my questions and wrote to all the literary scholars in my extended circle of friends. What was it with all the animal stories for children… why were there so many fewer for young people, and why were there so many more for adults? Two answers were particular helpful.
Adults write children’s books primarily so that they learn something. The learning process is easier if the child can identify with the characters in the story. What already rules out adults as main characters is that they are still too emotionally distant. This leaves only other children or even animals, especially the latter are easily stereotyped and are very well suited as a projection screen for certain behaviours or character traits. Similar to the fable, which also used animals to present various moral convictions.
However, these stories were not only intended for children at that time. In today’s bookshops, one finds fewer stories like „The Tortoise and the Hare“, but the allegories remain. Either to freshen up what is actually quite a thread plot or to be able to deal with heavy topics more easily, such as “Animal Farm” by Georg Orwell or “Maus” by Art Spiegelmann.
So much for why I owned so many non-scientific animal books. Let’s get back to my initial questions. What values did my parents want to teach me back then? Before I asked my mother, I looked to see if I could divide the respective actions into groups. This is what came out:
Being separated from family/home and finding your way back home again
First times
Resolving social conflicts
Illness
Christmas
Were these supposed to be the big issues that had preoccupied me as a child? My mother’s statements confirmed my suspicions. It had been important to her not to sort by gender, that there was a lot of craft in the stories, and that the characters all had high social skills. Later, when I became a more self-directed reader, she made sure that she followed my wishes. If there were topics that didn’t interest me, they weren’t found on my bookshelf. To what extent did the values of the children’s books now have a „lasting influence“ on me?
While I would give more weight to everyday parenting and the behaviour of friends or classmates, at least I could make and find compromises if I wanted to. Wanting, or rather not wanting, was usually the bigger problem. I always thought handicrafts, or rather making or repairing things myself, was very cool, it’s just that no one taught me. I can even support „genderless“ reading when I look at books. Funnily enough, books were the only thing in my life that wasn’t gendered, even later in puberty. For one thing, I then chose the books myself (even then there was never any eye-rolling) and for another, there were no stupid comments even when I put Polish sci-fi, Russian dystopias or non-fiction on the wish lists. That’s the only way it should be, in my opinion.
All in all, I can say that I won’t be giving away many of the books in the boxes just yet. Maybe later, maybe some of them will go to my first flat, or maybe completely different possibilities will open up. I am at least very happy to still have them and not to have to fill my shelf with pointless guidebooks.