Door flew open, in he ran/The great long-legged Scissor-Man! The Struwwelpeter Thread

Cafe Society
1

Am I the only Doper fascinated with this completely psychotic 'children’s book? In the 1840s, Heinrich Hoffman, a German psychologist apparently decided that the best way to teach children moral lessons was to psychologically scar them.

He wrote a book of poem called “Struwwelpeter Stories” (aka “Slovenly Peter Stories”) all of which involve children being naughty. Unlike modern books like Mary Poppins or Mrs Piggle-Wiggle where children survive their naughtiness to learn to be better people, Heinrich mutilated or outright killed his naughty characters. As the Struwwelpeter stories are in the public domain, I’ll reproduce one, below (you can see the original illustrations in all their bloody glory here. Click on the “Little Suck-a-Thumb” link)

The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb
*One day, Mamma said, “Conrad dear,
I must go out and leave you here.
But mind now, Conrad, what I say,
Don’t suck your thumb while I’m away.
The great tall tailor always comes
To little boys that suck their thumbs.
And ere they dream what he’s about
He takes his great sharp scissors
And cuts their thumbs clean off, - and then
You know, they never grow again.”

Mamma had scarcely turn’d her back,
The thumb was in, alack! alack!

The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissorman.
Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come
And caught our little Suck-a-Thumb.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;
And Conrad cries out - Oh! Oh! Oh!
Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast;
That both his thumbs are off at last.
Mamma comes home; there Conrad stands,
And looks quite sad, and shows his hands;-
“Ah!” said Mamma “I knew he’d come
To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb.”
*
And that’s NOTHING compared to some of the others (including the girl burned alive). This guy was a warped genius. Apparently even Mark Twain was fascinated with Hoffman’s stuff as Twain did a translation (not a very good one, IMO)

I mean, Hoffman’s goals were ok, but his methods were just over-the top. Cruel Frederick tortures animals. I think we can all agree that this behavior is in need of changing. But he has the dog bite Fredrick (to death??) and that may not send entirely the correct message.

Anyway, anyone else into this weirdo’s work? Also, I’ve always wondered if Dahl was inspired by Hoffman when he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The fates of the kids in Charlie is weirdly reminiscent of Hoffman (tho’ the kids all survived in Charlie)

Fenris

2

Omigod, that thing scared the bejeebus out of me when I was a kid! My sick, demented Grandmother (it skips a generation, you know), got me a reproduction of a very early version of that, with the scary 1840s woodcut illustrations (I can still see them in my head).

Crminey, that link brought back some childhood nightmares . . .

3

Ruined. My. Childhood.

Remember the Inky Boys? Talk about “but for the grace of God we’d be black ourselves”.

[shudder]

4

Got mine from my Grandma, too.

Here it is.

Gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

::Runs away and hides face under pillow, sobbing::

5

By the way, did you know the book was made into an award-winning musical in the UK?

6

Hee hee . . . I always got a kick out of those stories.

In Frankfurt, in the shopping district just off of the Hauptwache, there is a fountain dedicated to Hoffman’s characters. I took a few pictures when I was there, so I stuck them online for your enjoyment here. THe bottom photo has my favorite, the girl who played with matched and burned herself up.

They’re a little blurry – I’ll see if I can’t Photoshop them up a little and make them clearer.

7

A BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD award-winning musical. It’s sung entirely in a bad falsetto and accompanied by a bad accordian.
It may be wonderfully staged or acted, but I’ve got the CD and it’s utterly unlistenable.

Fenris

8

when I was a kid, complete with horrifying illustrations. Struwwelpeter had a huge mop of spiky hair & a huge pair of scissors, like that scene in The Exorcist III, when the nurse is crossing the hall & the robed figure comes behind her with that silver medical instrument to cut off her head. I’ll never forget the picture of Conrad standing there, crying, with blood dripping from the stumps of his thumbs.
Of course, these days, kids grow up watching slasher movies, so maybe Struwwelpeter wasn’t so bad.

9

The troupe came to a theater in Minneapolis (I have season tickets, lucky me). It was absolutely terrific-- I laughed so hard my cheeks hurt afterwards. Really excellent stuff, but I agree-- a CD alone just wouldn’t work.

Man, those stories freaked me out as a kid. My German grandparents got it for me when I was about 4. There’s one illustration that haunts me to this day: that of two naughty boys being ground up into sausage.

After we saw the play (above), my husband bought me a copy of the original stories, and there was that horrid illustration looking at me.

10

Well, as I understand it – and this is mentioned on a few of the pages linked in the thread – the stories are a satire of the moralizing children’s literature prevalent in the nineteenth century. Of course, satire is a concept lost on kids, as a general rule, so the point remains.

Incidentally, Frederick does seem to survive his ordeal.

I actually don’t have any memories of Struwwelpeter-induced childhood trauma, although as a kid I was inclined towards that sort of thing. Since the stories seem vaguely familiar, I might have repressed it… :wink:

11

Yikes! My Scary Austrian Grandmother™ used to read this to me in the original German when I was a kid. To this day, anyone reciting poetry in German gives me a little shiver. I still have this tattered, drawn-on circa-1930 copy, with the original woodcut illustrations. I was afraid of the Red-legged Scissors Man and Tall Agrippa, so much so that I imagined them lurking in the shadows of my room at night, and I refused to have the book in my bedroom. I used to hide it under the sofa cushions before I went to bed.

I was in a Barnes & Noble the other day and came across a ‘revised edition’ of Der Struwwelpeter, with brand-new and even more grotesque and gory illustrations. In this version, Friedrich is eaten alive by rats. Charming, no?

12

Heh, I also had this book when I was young. It was still printed in old German typeface so it was hard for me to read it. Also it had the gory illustrations.

However I don’t remember exactly which influence it had on me. I guess it didn’t really scare me because I thought those were just stories. At least I don’t have a trauma from them. :slight_smile: