The Storyteller (18 page)

—

Translated by Esther Leslie
.

Written 1935; unpublished in Benjamin's lifetime. Manuscript bears the pseudonym Detlef Holz.
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 771–7.

Ugly Angel (Hässlicher Engel)
, 1939.

Alois Jalkotzy
, The Fairy Tale and the Present: The German
Folk Tale and Our Time,
Vienna, Jungbrunnen, 1930

T
here is something peculiar about this book: the fact is the cover gives it away right from the start. It is a photomontage: winding towers, skyscrapers, factory chimneys in the
background, a powerful locomotive in the middle distance and, at the front of this landscape of concrete, asphalt and steel, a dozen children gathered around their nursery teacher, who is telling a fairy tale. It is incontestable that whoever engages with the measures which the author recommends in the text will convey just as much of the fairy tale as the person who relates it at the foot of a steam hammer or inside a boilermaker. And the children will have just as much in their hearts of the reformed fairy tales that are earmarked for them here as their lungs have of the cement desert into which this admirable spokesman ‘of our present' relocates them. It is not easy to find a book which demands the relinquishment of that which is most genuine and original with the same taken-for-grantedness that unreservedly dismisses a child's delicate and hermetic fantasy as an emotional demand, having understood it from the perspective of a commodity-producing society, in which education is regarded with such dismal impartiality as an opportunity for colonial sales of cultural wares. The type of child psychology in which the author is well versed is the exact counterpart to that famous ‘psychology of primitive peoples' as heaven-sent consumers of European junk wares. It exposes itself from all sides:
‘The fairy tale allows the child to equate itself with the hero
. This need for identification corresponds to the infantile weakness, which it experiences in relation to the adult world.' To appeal to Freud's fantastic interpretation of infantile superiority (in his study on narcissism), or even to experience itself, which confirms just the opposite, would be to take too much trouble with a text in which superficiality is proclaimed so fanatically, unleashing, under the banner of the contemporary moment, a holy war against everything that does not correspond to the ‘present sensibility' and which places children (like certain African tribes) in the first line of battle.

‘The elements from which the fairy tale draws are frequently unusable, antiquated and alien to our contemporary sensibilities. A special role is played by the evil stepmother. Child murderers and cannibals are typical figures of the German folk and fairy tale. The thirst for blood is striking, the portrayal of murder and killing is favoured. Even the supernatural world of the fairy tale is, above all, frightening. Grimms' collection teems with the lust for beatings. The German folk and fairy tale is frequently pro-alcohol, or at least never opposed to alcohol.' And so the times move on. While, to conclude along the lines of the author, the cannibal must have been a rather common feature of German everyday life until quite recently, he is now somewhat alienated from ‘contemporary sensibilities'. That may be so. But what if children, given the choice, would rather run into his throat than into that of the new pedagogy? And thereby for their part prove themselves likewise to be alienated from the ‘contemporary sensibility'? Then it will be hard to captivate them again with the radio, ‘this miracle of technology', from which the author expects a new blossoming of the fairy tale. For ‘the fairy tale necessitates … narration as the most important expression of life'. This is what the language of a man who approaches the work of the Grimm Brothers in order to adapt it to particular ‘needs' looks like. Because he shies away from nothing, he even provides samples of such adaptation in a procedure that substitutes the spinning wheel by the sewing machine, and royal castles by stately homes. For ‘the monarchical polish of our Central European world is happily overcome, and the less we place this spook and nightmare of German history in front of our children, the better will it be for our children and for the development of the German nation and its democracy'. No! The night of our republic is not so dark that all the cats in it are grey and Wilhelm II and King
Thrushbeard can no longer be distinguished from each other. It will still find the energy to block the path of this fun-loving reformism, for which psychology, folklore and pedagogy are only flags under which the fairy tale as an export commodity is freighted to a dark corner of the globe, where the children in the plantations yearn for its pious mode of thinking.

—

Translated by Esther Leslie
.

First published in
Frankfurter Zeitung
, 21 December 1930;
Gesammelte Schriften III
, 272–4.

Hoffmanesque Scene (Hoffmanneske Szene)
, 1921.

Tom Seidmann-Freud
, Spielfibel 2
and
Hurra, wir rechnen!
Spielfibel 3,
Berlin: Herbert Stuffer Verlag, 1931

O
ne year ago (13 December 1930) the
Frankfurter Zeitung
introduced its readers to the first play primer by Tom Seidmann-Freud. The idea back then was to loosen up the
primer in a playful way, represent its historical development and, at the same time, give some indication of the circumstances which act as preconditions for this most recent and most radical solution. In the meantime, the enterprise has advanced further: the second part of the reading primer and the first part of the arithmetic primer are now available. Yet again, the two methodological guiding themes have been retained most brilliantly: the complete activation of the drive to play through the most intimate association of writing and drawing, and the affirmation of infantile self-confidence by the expansion of the primer into an encyclopaedia. This provides us with an opportunity to recall one of the crucial sentences from the introduction to the first play primer: ‘It is not oriented towards “appropriation” and “mastery” of a particular task – this style of learning only suits grown-ups – rather it takes account of the child, for whom learning, as with everything else, naturally signifies a great adventure.' If, at the beginning of this adventurous journey, flowers and colours, children's names and names of countries were the little islands in the sea of fantasy, then it is now segmented continents, the world of leaves on trees and fish, shops and butterflies, which rise up from the water. Resting places and little huts to lodge in have been provided everywhere: this means that it is not necessary for the child to write on and on to the point of exhaustion. Rather,
there
an image awaits his signature,
here
a story awaits the missing words;
there
again a cage waits for a bird to be sketched in, or – elsewhere – a dog, a donkey and a cock await their woof, bray and cook-a-doodle-do. Groupings and classifications join in, now and again they are even of a lexical type, whereby painted things are written out according to initials, or, just as in a real encyclopaedia, in topics organised by concepts. Small boxes are as good for ABCs as for things made of leather, wood, metal
and glass, or for furniture, fruits and objects of everyday use. With all of this, the child is never placed in front of, but rather above the object of instruction: as if, for example, in a zoological class, he or she were not led in front of the horse, but rather placed upon it as a rider. Here every letter, every word and drawing is such a horse, which accompanies all the stages of this learning process. With its curves, just as with its bridle and collar, it is able to bring all that is recalcitrant under the control of the little rider. It is quite extraordinary how, from the beginning, the author also accentuates the power of command, so crucial for childish play, in relation to numbers. The point-system is retired after only a few pages; there follow red or black battalions of fish or insects, butterflies or squirrels – and, if at the end of each sequence, the child sets down a number, then he does not draw the digit any differently than when he plants a sergeant in front of his squad.

At every point the author made sure to guarantee the sovereignty of the player, allowing him never to relinquish any power to the object of learning and banishing the horror with which the first numbers and letters so readily configure themselves as idols before the child. This is surely the way that the older generation recalls the impression – so hard to describe – made on them by the first ‘applied tasks' in their arithmetic textbooks. What coldness was spread by the phoney moral uprightness of these lines, into which – like a trap door – numerals were embedded every now and again. It was nothing less than a betrayal by the most trusted and beloved thing that the child had received from his mother: the story. And, therefore, it is a whole world of reconciliation which rings forth from the simple imperative of this maths primer: ‘8 – 6 = 2. Invent a story to go along with this and write it here.' Part of the charm of these textbooks – and simultaneously their
highly pedagogical achievement – is the manner in which they capture the easing of tension that corresponds to their confident attitude, an attitude which the child may, at first, seek outside of these pages. For if, in turn, the child is prepared to natter away about what he has just learnt, to get up to mischief and silliness with it, then this book is, once again, his best friend. After all, it contains enough white spots to be painted and scribbled on, broad fertile territories on which all its owner's monsters and favourites can be settled comfortably. Of course none of this occurs without some clearance work:

But, oh, the parties to which one gets invited after the work is done! Garlands, which had already cropped up in the first primer as traces of the ‘writing tower', wind their way through the land of reading and the letters assume carnivalesque disguises. ‘Onca ipon e tuma thara wes a luttla gurl, who hed e meguc cet. Thus cet coild spaak': so it begins in a dialect between old high German and thieves' slang. In addition, however, there is sufficient room for an unmasking: ‘Copy down the story, but replace every
a
with an
e
and vice versa; for every
i
put a
u
and vice versa.' Quite underhandedly an old pedagogical bone of contention is thus resolved: whether, when it comes to children, one may model error as a warning. The answer: yes, as long as one exaggerates. Hence it is exaggeration, the experienced confidante of the littlest ones, which protectively places its hand over so many pages of this primer.
Or is it a case of not exaggerating a lie when a story begins as follows? ‘A boy with the name Eve got up one morning from the closet and sat down to eat his evening meal.' Is it any surprise if such a person concludes his day by plucking chocolate biscuits, which grow in the grass, until he gets hungry? It is certain that the child feasts itself on such stories. Another story begins: Adolf lived at the house of a bumpkin together with little Cecily – is that not an exaggeration of the world order, to allow all the nouns up to ‘witchcraft' and ‘Yucatan' to appear in the story in the correct alphabetic sequence? In the end, does it not mean exaggerating even the regard for the preschool pupil? To place questionnaires in front of him as before a professor: what are you doing on Monday? Tuesday? Wednesday? etc., or to cover a table for him with lined plates on which he may write his favourite meals? – Yes. But Shock-Headed Peter, too, is exaggerated, Max and Moritz are exaggerated, as is Gulliver. Robinson's loneliness is exaggerated and so is what Alice saw in Wonderland – why should not letters and numbers also have to authenticate themselves in front of children through their exaggerated exuberance? Certainly their challenges will still be strict enough.

Perhaps some person or another (such as the writer of these lines) has held onto the primer from which his mother learnt to read. ‘Egg', ‘whee', ‘mouse' – its first pages may have begun this way. I won't say a word against this primer. How could anything negative be said by he who learnt from it how to rebel against it? Of all the things that he encountered later in life, what could rival the rigour and certainty with which he approached these strokes; what subsequent submission filled him with such a strong sense of immeasurable import as the surrender to the letter? Nothing against this old primer then. But it was ‘the seriousness of life' which spoke therefrom, and
the finger that followed along its lines had crossed the threshold of a realm from which no wanderer returns: he was under the spell of the black-upon-white, of law and right, the irrevocable, the being set for all eternity. We know today what we should think of such things. Perhaps the misery, lawlessness and insecurity of our days is the price for which we alone can pursue the enchanting-debunking game with type, from which these primers by Seidmann-Freud acquire such deep reason.

—

Translated by Esther Leslie
.

Written 1931; published in
Frankfurter Zeitung
, 20 December 1931;
Gesammelte Schriften III
, 311–14.