Children's Literature and the Politics of the Nation-State

These three works, with their very different foci, are all concerned with the problematic relationship between children's literature and the state, or, more specifically, with the position of the author of children's literature in society. They examine the political and economic positions that children's book authors occupy in nations as diverse as the Federal Republic of Germany and the People's Republic of China. Müller, Doderer, and Riedel probe these and related issues through the techniques of sociological investigationquestionnaires that quantify and categorize the social position of a more or less representative group of West German children's authors (Müller) or that examine the influence and social context of the Deutsche Jugendliteraturpreis, the only state-granted literary prize in West Germany (Doderer and Riedel). These two works appeared before German Unification, and reflect only the West German situation; Unification will naturally require new studies to meet the dynamics of the new situation. Diény's study examines a group of children's books purchased in China on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and uses this group of works as the basis for his analysis of the relationship between propaganda and art in Chinese society.

As varied as their approaches and materials are, these three books each raise the difficult question of what the role of government should be in the support, development, and control of children's literature. Müller criticizes West German cultural policy for surrendering children's book publishing to market forces that reduce literature to the status of commodity. Doderer and Riedel provide a sophisticated critique of the influence of the national children's literature prize in the context of its historical goal of reaching a broad audience, its actual effects, which tend to be confined to the educated and relatively privileged, and the inescapable pressures of the popular media that are altering if not threatening the whole culture of literacy. Finally, Diény brings into focus the conflict between art and propaganda in a nation-state in which all forms of art have become politicized, but he wavers between endorsements of the goals of the Chinese revolution and critiques of revolutionary art from an aesthetic perspective. These books raise the question of whether children's literature is ultimately a means of social control (even when its goal is liberation) or of subversion. If the state has a responsibility for promoting children's literature, does it have any right to influence the forms that literature takes and the ideas it expresses? The paradoxical nature of art as a social function is brought to light by these very different discussions.

Ironically, even the idea of a scholarly (and thus presumably state-funded) investigation into the conditions of life for children's book authors elicited resentment among those approached in the study conducted by Helmut Müller and a team from the Institut für Jugendbuchforschung at the University of Frankfurt. The appearance of a long, detailed, complex questionnaire in the mail of children's writers evoked some cries of protest, some (pointed?) silence, and even a sarcastic commentary on Bavarian radio. In an era of sensitivity to state control through data collection and supervision, such questions seemed to some an invasion of privacy. Yet the study itself suggested that West German children's book authors belong to a group that is not only intent on preserving its sense of privacy and individuality, but also lacking in any collective sense of itself as a group with common problems and interests. This is reflected in the tendency of publishers to shortchange if not exploit writers in their financial arrangements.

Though Müller's approach is partly...