Hello. Today I'm going to share with you something that I happened to stumble
across while looking into the bonkers Victorian Valentine's cards that we covered
in an earlier episode. Today I'm sharing the story of 'Struwwelpeter'. Which is, frankly,
the most bizarre and horrifying children's book i've ever come across. Where naughty
children are starved, disfigured and sometimes even killed. Because nothing does disturbing
like the combination of Victorian morality, children's education, and German fairy tale.
Now the book itself comes from the pen of Frankfurt psychiatrist, Dr Heinrich Hoffman
in 1844, and i can only assume he was looking to increase the number of traumatized patients
booking in for a consultation. The book forms 16 pages of illustrated stories
designed to highlight that children who misbehave have to face the consequences of their actions.
So far so good, and most of the lessons are quite understandable and have consequences
that you and i can easily understand. Such as the titular character of Struwwelpeter himself.
Now Struwwelpeter means 'Shock haired Peter' and Peter is a boy who will not take care of his
personal hygiene. He won't brush his hair, have his nails cut he definitely wouldn't bathe
and as a result he lives his days out being unloved, which is a harsh but truly understandable
consequence of his lack of hygiene. Then they take a turn for the really bizarre and the dark.
Let's take a few of these educational tales. First up is 'Bosen Friedrich' or 'Cruel Frederick'
who is just plain nasty to animals. So you know the sort. Pulling the wings off of flies,
killing birds, being nasty to kittens etc. But one day he beats his dog mercilessly
and as a dog lover i'm right behind this because the dog turns on him and chews his foot off.
and the next page shows shows us Frederick laid up in bed nursing his chewed foot and
his wounds, and meanwhile the dog, totally unpunished, and even gets Frederick's dinner.
So let that be a lesson to you all as to where dogs sit in the appropriate pecking order.
Then we can move on to Kasper or the boy who would not have soup. Now Kasper refuses
food with the sort of foot stomping tantrum that will be all too familiar to those of
you with children of a certain age or those of you who were children of a certain age.
But unlike many children Kasper stubbornly holds out for five days of refusing his soup, and that's
the five days it takes to waste away and starve to death. Yeah starved to death. I look at this and I
can still hear my grandmother saying "There's nowt else so you'll starve". Perhaps she read the book.
So far we are looking at logical, if extreme, consequences of your own actions. But that's
clearly not harsh enough for our learned friend Hoffman who, incidentally, also writes under
a pseudonym of Heinrich Kinderlieb. That surname translates to 'child friendly' or 'nice to children'.
I disagree. But I digress. If we take a look at the story of "little suck-a-thumb" this is a small
child, Konrad, who sucks his thumb. Nothing unusual about that and he's warned that he should, by now,
have grown out of sucking his thumb. But, you know, he just can't resist...
so lo and behold the terrifying scissor man appears and hacks off his thumbs. What the hell!
and this is not the only gratuitous injury that's inflicted on curious and demanding children.
Harriet is completely incinerated by playing with matches, and poor "flying Robert" merely wanted to
play out in the rain. He was even sensible enough to take an umbrella out with him, but
he was blown away to his death by the storm. Yeah. Now most of the stories and lessons within could
easily form the sort of childhood parables that we could see today. Although the story about the three
racist boys who are turned black by a wizard's magic inkwell is uncomfortable reading. The lesson
might be that they should accept difference lest they find out what it's like to be a victim of
such abuse. But even that lesson still displays the unacceptable racist tropes of its time.
But what looks horrifying today was not exactly out of place in children's teaching in the mid
19th century. There were very much two schools of thought. On one side there were the romantics
who tended to view the child was best served by freedom, experimentation, and exploration.
On the other side of the argument, the more science-y side, which very much felt that morality
had to be instilled in children as quickly and brutally as possible, because it was not something
that they would discover themselves, and in this Struwwelpeter is not alone. You only have to look
at Grimm's Fairy Tales to see that they're filled with abuse, assault and murder and even Hans Christian
Andersen writes of a girl getting her feet sliced off as a punishment. So given that background you
can see why the book was a whirlwind success in its day, and over the years it has been
reworked with improvements in illustrations and also translated into over 35 languages.
The English reworking has been put in the public domain by the Gutenberg project so we'll put
a link in that into the description. Do enjoy disturbing the hell out of your kids won't you.
Now some of those reworkings have formed the basis of political and social satire starting as
early as 1899 with the "Political Struwwelpeter and then the story of Swollen Headed William to
parody Kaiser Wilhelm in 1914, and of course the Nazis are going to
get the Struwwelpeter treatment in three editions in 1933, 1941, and 1943.
The example we're showing you here is the 1941 book Struwwelhitler by Robert and Phillip Spence.
They write under the pseudonym of Dr Schreklichheit or Doctor Horror. In
this book we see several leading Nazis featuring in the traditional German morality stories. Cruel
Frederick has been changed over to Cruel Adolf who abuses his dog Fritz as described here.
"When patient Fritz in abject mood complained that he was short of food, "be off cried Adolf!
Greedy scamp. To Dachau concentration camp" Yeah. In similarity to the original story of Cruel
Frederick we can see Adolf getting his foot chewed off and lying in the recovery bed while his dog
gets all the food but note the subtle difference. Here the Doctor is feeding him rat poison just
for good measure. The caption reads "so Adolf had to go to bed. The doctor came and shook his head.
Remarked that he would soon be dead. And gave him nasty physic too. Precisely with that end in view."
The previously horrifying story of little suck-a- thumb, that we discussed earlier, is transformed
to bring us the story of little Joseph Goebbels and his poison pen as Nazi propaganda minister
Goebbels is portrayed as a small weasley Nazi man who scribbles lies.
Much like his real counterpart, and as such the scissorman comes to take his thumbs so
he can't hold the pen. This is genius stuff. And I find it not only bizarre and fascinating that
this exists. But that a work that had been a centrepiece of German folklore,
culture and morality, for over a century, is used so breathtakingly to stab directly at the architects
of the Third Reich culture of morality. I find that beautifully poetic
While it is mostly unheard of outside Germany these days the influence of Struwwelpeter has stayed with
us throughout the 20th century. Here is an American adaptation that satirises Nixon, and if you combine
the scruffy character of Struwwelpeter himself and combine him with the scissor man you get the 1990
Tim Burton classic Edward Scissorhands which gave Johnny Depp his first leading movie role.
and all of this from a 16 page children's story by a German psychiatrist.
If you want to dive further into this world then you can visit the Struwwelpeter museum
in Frankfurt and, as I mentioned before we'll put links to the online versions of this
in the descriptions and the comments. Read it please, and don't have nightmares
goodbye