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Movable Struwwelpeters worldwide Theo Geilen The Netherlands
Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the publication of first English translation of the famous children's classic Struwwelpeter. The German book was written by Heinrich Hoffmann in 1844 as a Christmas first present for his three year old son Carl. It was that Since 1845. for Christmas Germany in published
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VOLUME 5 NUMBER 3
SEPTEMBER 1997
(Dutch) Struwwelpeter, I thought it interesting, on the occasion of the coming jubilee year, to explore the point of contact of these two fields of my research. In researching the history of the movable Struwwelpeter, with an amazing success, J found no less than twenty-five movable editions worldwide.
time the German edition always remained in print and the book has been translated in over thirty languages. Along with Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, it appears to be the most successful children's book ever, celebrated with not less than two special museums in its hometown Frankfurt.
Though the book has not been as popular in the English-speaking world as it has been in the German, it nevertheless has been translated over seventeen times in English and printed in -hundreds of editions both in England and the United States with titles as Struwwelpeter, Shock-Headed Peter, or Slovenly Peter. And with considerable success as well are the adaptations of the ten stories of the original edition reprinted in countless booklets known as Struwwelpetriades, some of them by people like Mark Twain, Hilaire Belloc and Roald Dahl. The illustrations have been redrawn bv wellknown artists such as Louis Wain, Emest Shepard and Janet Graham-Johnstone. In 1974 the fame of Struwweipeter was used in a parody of the Watergate scandal of the U.S. president in a political version: Tricky Dick and his pals, as it was used before by the allies of the First World War in Shock-Headed William, a parody of the German Emperor William, and of the Second World War in Struwwel-Hitler.
A copy of the English 1848 edition recently sold
at Christie's in London for over £4200 (ca.$6500 U.S.).
Good collections of English language editions and adaptations are now on exhibit at the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota, the Allisson-Shelley Collection of the Pennsvivania State University and the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.
Since I am not only studying the history of movable books but also researching the printing history of the
The earliest edition of a movable Struwwelpeter know to me, is the Strruwwelpeterbuch mit mechanik. Kleine
Gedichten
fiir Kinder. (Struwweipeter
book with
mechanics. Little poems for children), published in 1863 a in Berlin by Carl Kahn and Sons. Since the first German movable, Eduart Tlle's Hanswurst's lustige Streiche, was only published in 1862, and F.C. Hésch called himself the inventor of these kinds of books in his book Kinder Lust in Lebendigen Bildern (Children's pleasure in living pictures) also published in 1863, it is surprising to find our protagonist already amongst the incunables of the movable books. In the book we see already in those early days an unusual mixture of technics: pull-tabs to put the 1
figures in motion, pull-tabs showing different pictures one after another, and a ift-the-flap used for an exercise book showing the scraw] of the gitted child once the flap 4
Js lifted.
The next example is dated about 1870, Neves Lustiges und Lebendiges Bilderbuch fur Artige Kinder (New amusing and living picture book for nice children), a pullcontinued on page 2