“Power opposes a lack of power”: On Mirjam Pressler’s Nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Award

An avid approver of children’s curiosity and spontaneity, Mirjam Pressler is one of those authors who are not known only to an audience that is interested in fiction for young people. Her works are concerned with topics that grab a reader’s attention beyond one’s own backyard and show a concern about history, social problems, and politics. Pressler is one of the most prolific German writers of children’s fiction, her best known fictional work possibly Bitterschokolade [Bitter Chocolate] which caused her to be widely known throughout Germany and won the 1980 Oldenburger Kinder- und Jugendbuchpreis [Oldenburg Children and Youth Book Award]. Her debut novel is concerned with the schoolgirl, Eva, who does not accept her obese and lonely self and has to learn to overcome her self-doubt and be happy with her body and within her circle of family and friends. The enthralling, down-to-earth and honest account seems more than relevant in today’s supermodel culture. Eva’s psychological complexity is presented in a comprehensible manner and already indicates Pressler’s precise, yet tentative style that provokes reflection.

Mirjam Pressler studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste [Academy of Fine Arts] in Frankfurt and in Munich. She has been based near the Bavarian capital for the last several decades. Born in Darmstadt near Frankfurt in Germany in 1940 during the first years of the Second World War and growing up with foster parents, Mirjam Pressler is also a well-received translator of texts from Hebrew, Yiddish, English and Dutch into German, among them novels by Zeruya Shalev and Amos Oz. As translator Pressler is most famous for her annotated edition of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, a work that remains the most vivid and haunting personal account of Jewish life during the persecution in twentieth century Nazi Germany.

When Pressler was young, she spent a year in a kibbutz in Israel and a major part of her writing centres on questions of Jewish faith, not the least of which is her interest in Anne Frank. Having acquainted herself with Frank’s diary in a critical edition, Pressler worked extensively on the famous National Socialist victim and her circumstances. She wrote a biography on the young girl that suffered in Nazi Germany and the occupied Netherlands, Anne Frank: A Hidden Life, and another biography on Frank’s family, a typical German-Jewish successful family until the Holocaust: Grüße und Küsse an alle. Die Geschichte der Familie von Anne Frank, published in English as Treasures from the Attic: The Extraordinary Story of Anne Frank’s Family. The volume provides a highly informational account of the family over three centuries on the basis of various letters and other documents. It describes Frank’s ancestors as European intellectuals and artists, spread throughout the Netherlands, Switzerland and England, recording the life and fate of the family and their daughter whose life was cut short by the horrors of fascist, anti-Semitic politics.

The German societies for Christian-Jewish collaboration awarded Pressler the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal in 2013 for her focus on aspects of Jewish life during times of National Socialism. The award granted by the German Koordinierungsrat honours her excellent translation and literary engagement with regard to aspects of a multilayered and complex society. It highlights her honest and relentless transmitting of aspects of “damaged childhoods” to the next generations, also underlining aspects of her books that support demands for an open and tolerant society which she brings closer to her young audience in an accessible narrative way (“Mirjam Pressler erhält”). The committee also reflected on her function as a translator from Hebrew and Yiddish to emphasize her success in overcoming prejudices against foreign cultures to erect a differentiated and complex picture of Jewish and Israeli society after the Holocaust.

Her engaging output on Anne Frank is only one of many concerned with the Jewish faith in times of crisis: Malka Mai, published in 2001, winner of the German Bücherpreis [Book Prize] in...