Devouring the Text: The Subversive Image in Jules Ratte

In the middle of the night a band of rats invades a town and one of them eats all but one of the books in a little girl's house, as she is to discover in the morning. With this nightmarish scenario Peter Hacks begins the story of how Jule Janke, the little girl, traps the rat who has eaten all the books and then relies on the rat to give her the answers she needs for school, until it disappears and the girl's ignorance is found out. At first sight the text of this picture book can be seen as a cautionary tale intended to instill in its young readers the virtues of self-reliance, as implied in the proverbial quality of the subtitle, Selber lernen macht schlau (learning on your own makes you smart), and reinforced in the concluding verses:

Nur eigne Weisheit macht den Weisen.Ratgeber können mal verreisen.Der kluge Freund läßt dich im Stich.Dann fragst du wen?Dann fragst du dich.

Only your own wisdom makes you wise.Counselors can go away sometime.The smart friend deserts you.Then whom do you ask?Then you ask yourself.

Even if it is not strictly a product of socialist realism, this story still serves a clearly delineated purpose in educating children to rely on their own work instead of fantastical help. Klaus Ensikat's illustrations, on the other hand, give Jules Ratte a completely different dimension as they subvert the conformity demanded by the textual message.

Peter Hacks is a known and respected, if controversial, author. Although his reputation is based mainly on his drama, since 1956 he has published a large number of works for children.¹ After his student days at Munich and his move to the German Democratic Republic in 1955, his early literary career presents an intricate mingling of ideological confrontation and involvement with children's literature.² His work has not always conformed to the political expectations of the leaders of the GDR, as the severe governmental criticism of Die Sorgen und die Macht (1959), a play for adults dealing with the contemporary situation in the GDR, makes clear; it is nonetheless evident that Hacks for the most part has embraced the tenets of literary production in a socialist society.

Party ideology reinforces the notion that children's literature is an integral part of literature in general, and it makes the same demands on children's books as on adult works: ideological soundness, a stress on community interests prevailing over individual ones, and the depiction of the development of the people within a socialist regime.³ Children's literature in the GDR had, from the beginning, to work against the fascist influences of the all-too-recent past and prepare youth for a new society. This essentially didactic function is reflected throughout Hacks's work (Di Napoli, 1987, 19), and Jules Ratte, far from being an exception, could be looked upon as paradigmatic.

The illustrator Klaus Ensikat has collaborated with Peter Hacks in the production of two books and a story.⁴ His work has been appreciated outside of the GDR: a West German edition of Jules Ratte included his illustrations rather than those of a previous illustrator,⁵ and two other books illustrated by him have been published in English.⁶ Even if Ensikat is not the most prolific of the illustrators who have worked with Hacks, there seems to be a good relationship between the two, and he is the illustrator for a forthcoming anthology of all of Hacks's work for children.⁷ Hacks sharply censured Heinz Edelman's illustrations for his Meta Morfoß, which "depict incidents which simply do not occur in the story or . . . distort those scenes that do occur .. . and in fact even compromise the text."⁸ So we may infer that Hacks was pleased with the illustrations Ensikat provided for Jules Ratte.

Yet a close comparison between the illustrations and the text they accompany demonstrates that Ensikat's illustrations do not conform to the story in important points and that they create an alternative narrative which...