Civilizing Manners and Mocking Morality: Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter

More than 150 years have passed since Dr. Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter was first published in Frankfurt (Germany). Although it is no longer the best known and most influential German picture book—a position it held for more than 100 years—Struwwelpeter can still fascinate its intended audience of preschoolers and demand the attention of scholars of children’s literature. Its content matter and the pedagogical practice it represents are outdated at the close of the twentieth century, giving rise to occasional debates among child pedagogues about the advisability of presenting such a text to children. Its uniqueness and importance, however, do not lie in the message but in the manner in which this message is relayed—in other words, in its formal and stylistic elements which I will concentrate on in this article.

Struwwelpeter marks the beginning of modern picture book design through its interplay of picture and text, and it displays a blend of the popular and pedagogical, typical of the modern children’s book. Nothing like it had existed before it appeared on the German market in 1845, at least not in this format and for this audience, and its immediate popularity and commercial success speaks to its extraordinariness and the timeliness of its appearance. By positioning Struwwelpeter within the framework of the time, place, and the specific circumstances of its creation and reception I will trace the innovative traits that have made it both famous and infamous.

Tradition, Influences, Innovation

In the mid-nineteenth century, educational messages of civility and obedience were the rule in a children’s book, and in this regard Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter makes no exception. What sets Struwwelpeter apart, is the fact that the author took into consideration the mindset and desires of the young viewers and listeners as he created the book, and this fact contributed to its immense popularity. The education of his three-year-old son was the driving force behind Hoffmann’s enterprise, but Hoffmann was no professional educator. He did, however, know the psyche of children well, and since he was artistically gifted and gregarious rather than pedantic by nature, he blithely disregarded traditional discursive practices in educational children’s literature of his day and, as a result, radically changed the tone and format of the picture book.

Hoffmann did borrow the paradigm of the cautionary tale popular in children’s literature at the time, but altered its presentation. He relied heavily on oral lore and popular culture, and he let himself be guided as much by what would fascinate the young as by what benefited them. Scholars have been able to trace most of the characters and situations portrayed in Struwwelpeter to images and stories already in circulation in the 1840s which Hoffmann may have—wittingly or unwittingly—used as his source of inspiration, such as the boy whose hair grows uncontrollably when he gets his hands on a certain hair pomade (1840 (1843), the girl in flames (1820 (1839), Nikolaus stuffing naughty children in his sack (1805 (1823), or the silly hunter (1820, 1835, 1840) (Der Struwwelpeter, 1983).

Hoffmann knew children were spellbound by fairy and fantasy tales like those collected by the Brothers Grimm, and fascinated by “Bilderbögen” (a sequence of simple colored pictures) and he was surely aware of the popularity of Punch and Judy shows for young and old. By using popular culture as a source of inspiration and by applying some of its tools and means of expression to children’s literature, Hoffmann created a truly popular book and brought a breath of fresh air into the somewhat stuffy environment of mid-nineteenth-century children’s literature. Like Pippi Longstocking exactly 100 years later, Struwwelpeter was immediately embraced by its intended audience. Children appreciated the drama and child-orientation of the stories as well as their anarchic spirit and grotesque exaggeration; and in the case of Struwwelpeter parents presumably appreciated the ease with which children swallowed the nicely wrapped educational message. In any case, both books became commercial success stories. Struwwelpeter could boast 500 editions by 1921 and was widely translated. Both books...