Der Struwwelpeter - ungekürzte Fassung: Der Kinderbuch Klassiker zum Lesen und Vorlesen

This book was terrific and I can see why Victorian children were so well behaved ! Fancy a story about having your thumbs cut off by a crazy tailor for being a thumb sucker ??!!!!!

Another one deals with a girl told not to touch the matches who burns herself up !!!! Hard to believe this was classified as children's lit 150 years ago.

As awful as the stories are, I found them a refreshing change from the junk I had in 1st grade ( Dick and Jane ) and Carolyn Hayward.

I am much more in the Alice in Wonderland and Roald Dahl camp for kid's lit.

Der Struwwelpeter might seem a bit alien and off-putting to the modern English-speaking reader. I'm not familiar with the abridged English version, so I don't know how much was snipped (SNIP! THE THUMBS!) but grew up with the original and a healthy suspicion of tailors, even though I can't say I knew any. This peculiarly German alienness should not detract from the quality of the book as such. Some of the stories ought to be looked at in the context of the times. Der Struwwelpeter predates modern medicine, hygiene, and emergency services. Cleanliness may not necessarily have been next to godliness but improved your children's chance of seeing their next birthday. Playing with candles was potentially more deadly by a factor of a bazillion when the horse-drawn tank took half an hour to get to the blaze.The rest of the stories are definitely more gratuitous in their cruelty. Granted, no one starved to death without soup in five days but entertainment was more gory in general, as is evident in the collections of the Brothers Grim(m). At least the German middle classes, who were the target audience of the book, were mostly cured of the scatological excesses of mediaeval and Renaissance humour by the 1840s. This book was billed as funny and indeed it was a tool that consciously intended to mock nonconformity and lack of discipline. As another reviewer pointed out, these were turbulent times for the European bourgeoisie. Keeping children in line was of utmost importance lest they find themselves broke and embarrassing their parents by writing radical manifesta by candlelight.Despite its dated and unfamiliar imagery, der Struwwelpeter is quite capable of frightening the bejeezus out of your four-year-old and I would not feed it to mine. As an article of wordcraft it is powerful in its pictorial display and effective in its message. Today the book is paedagogically suspect, to put it mildly, but still makes a top-notch cultural curiosum.

One of my favorite childhood books, but then again, I was not a thumb sucker. I'll never forget the day my mother visited my kindergarten class and I brought my favorite book, struwwelpeter, for her to read to the class. One little girl ran crying out of the room as my mother read the little tommy suck a thumb story-it turns out this little girl was a thumb sucker, and was very frightened at the thoughts of a man with big scissors coming to cut off her thumbs. Clearly this book is not for the timid child. But for those who are tough enough to handle it, these stories are imaginative and frightful and engaging.

It's hard not to burst into xenophobic raptures when contemplating this bizarre little book. I mean, where else could a children's book of such an austere and humourless moral tone have originated than nineteenth century Germany? Have you heard the story of Harriet who played with matches? She BURNS TO DEATH! What should happen to naughty Conrad who sucks his thumbs when his mother isn't looking? The Long Legged Scissor Man leaps out of a door and CUTS HIS THUMBS OFF WITH A HUGE PAIR OF SHEARS, OF COURSE! And what of Augustus, who wouldn't eat his soup? HE STARVES TO DEATH! Naturally! The only thing more ghastly than reading this to your lovely child as she or he is tucked up in bed is reading it in the original German: fear not if you don't understand German; in fact it's even better that way: far more scary! And all illustrated in the most grotesque fashion, sure to surprise, delight and permanently derange even the most pleasantly disposed child. Well, it never did me any harm...