Zohar Shavit

זהר שביט

Based on a study of hundreds of children's books on the Third Reich and the Holocaust, published in West Germany in 1945-89, and especially on 74 of them, which were awarded literary prizes. The books differentiate between "Germans" and "Nazis, " and focus on the suffering of the German people, who are presented as the main or only victims of Nazism. The suffering of other peoples or countries is hardly ever mentioned. The "story" of the Germans as victims of the First and Second World Wars was invented in the 1960s, possibly to avoid moral dilemmas, and was adopted by authors of children's books. In many of the books, analogies are even made between Nazis and Jews: both are described or illustrated as dark-skinned, small, cunning, crazed, suicidal, and ruling or taking advantage of the Germans. Discusses strategies used by historians and authors in their "story" of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, e.g. differentiation between the Wehrmacht and the SS, identification with the heroism of the Wehrmacht, emphasis on Soviet war crimes, and relativization of the Holocaust.

בניית תמונת העבר ב״סיפור״ הגרמני לילדים

עבר בלא צל

הספר עוסק בשאלות יסוד הנוגעות לספרות הילדים, התפתחותה ודרכי התנהגותה. ספרות הילדים נידונה בספר כז'אנר, ולא מזווית הראיה של הפדגוגיה. תפיסה זו מהו החידוש בתפיסת ספרות הילדים. הספר עוסק בספרי ילדים שהפכו לנובלה למבוגרים, ובספרי מבוגרים שנדדו אל ספרות הילדים. בין הספרים הנידונים: עליסה בארץ הפלאות, סדרת חסמבה, מסעי גוליבר, כיפה אדומה.הספר משובץ בציטוטים טקסטואליים ובאיורים רבים.

מבוא לפואטיקה של ספרות ילדים

מעשה ילדות

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century as a distinctive cultural system, children's literature has had a culturally inferior status resulting from its existence in a netherworld between the literary system and the educational system. In addition to its official readership—children—it has to be approved of by adults. Writers for children, explains Zohar Shavit, are constrained to respond to these multiple systems of often mutually contradictory demands. Most writers do not try to bypass these constraints, but accept them as a framework for their work. In the most extreme cases an author may ignore one segment of the readership. If the adult reader is ignored, the writer risks rejection, as is the case of popular literature. If the writer utilizes the child as a pseudo addressee in order to appeal to an adult audience, the result can be what Shavit terms an ambivalent work. Shavit analyzes the conventions and the moral aims that have structured children's literature, from the fairy tales collected and reworked by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—in particular, “Little Red Riding Hood”—through the complex manipulations of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, to the subversion of the genre's canonical requirements in the chapbooks of the eighteenth century, and in the formulaic Nancy Drew books of the twentieth century. Throughout her study Shavit, explores not only how society has shaped children's literature, but also how society has been reflected in the literary works it produces for its children.

Poetics of Children's Literature

Hans-Heino Ewers

Annegret Völpel

Ran HaCohen

Die auf 2 Bände angelegte Bibliografie hebräischer und deutsch-jüdischer Kinder- und Jugendtexte ist ein einzigartiges Monument jüdischen Lebens in Deutschland. Die über 2.400 aufgenommenen Titel sind um zahlreiche textgeschichtliche Informationen ergänzt. Dazu zählen insbesondere Informationen über Gebrauchssituation des Textes, Intention, Inhalt, Struktur, Gattungszuordnung und Rezeptionsgeschichte. Aus dem Blickwinkel der deutsch-jüdischen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur erscheinen 3 Jahrhunderte jüdische Kultur im deutschsprachigen Raum in völlig neuem Licht.

Die deutsch- und hebräischsprachigen Schriften des deutschsprachigen Raums. Ein bibliographisches Handbuch in zwei Bänden.

Deutsch-jüdische Kinder- und Jugendliteratur von der Haskala bis 1945

Malte Dahrendorf

Historisches und politisches Bewußtsein in Kinder- und Jugendbüchern über die Zeit des Nationalsozialismus bzw. zum Thema Faschismus und Holocaust.

Die Darstellung des Dritten Reiches im Kinder- und Jugendbuch

A Past Without Shadow examines 50 years of German children's books in which the darkest horrors of the Third Reich have routinely remained hidden. The horrors of the Third Reich are systematically screened and filtered, allowing the darker, bleaker parts of history to escape illumination. Here Zohar Shavit explores 345 German books for children describing the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and finds a shocking distortion of the past: a recurrent narrative which suggests that the Germans themselves had no hand in the suffering inflicted on the Jews. These books, Shavit argues, have created the false historical lesson that the real victims of Hitler's crimes were the German people themselves. First published to great acclaim in Hebrew and now available in English, this book is a wake-up call for anyone concerned about German children's literature and its responsibility to past and future.

Zohar Shavit

Books

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