Otfried Preußler's time capsule of the "Little Ghost"

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When I was a kid, I grew up with the children books by German author Otfried Preußler, particularily "The Little Witch", the "Highwayman Hotzenplotz" saga, "Krabat" and "The Little Ghost". These works were written and published mostly in the 1950s to 1970s, so it's safe to assume that my parents grew up with them as well. "The Little Witch" fell out of favor since, but the stories of the highwayman Hotzenplotz and the Little Ghost enjoy a remarkable longevity, spawning reboots even to this day, although they're firmly consigned to kindergarten and lower elementary school kids.


What's fascinating to me and why I think you might get something out of this is how these books present time capsules to us, because when Preußler - a veteran of World War II and not a fan - wrote his books, Germany was in a weird place when it came to placing stories in the past. Given how much abuse there had been with reinterpreting the German past for the ideologies of the Kaiser as well of National Socialism under Hitler, there was little appetite to return to THAT specific well.

However, you could hardly set a story about a ghost, a highwayman or a witch in 1950s Germany, either, so Preußler essentially placed them in a nondescript era of his own youth, avoiding any specifics of time and place as much as possible. This timelessness certainly contributes to the continued popularity of these works as well as to their rather inexplicable rebootability (which is a word I just made up). But of course, Preußler was a man of his time and couldn't avoid SOME allusions to where he was coming from. It's like reading the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings; you simply see the fantasy version of rural England that was shattered by World War I all around the edges even if you aren't looking. So, what fantasy version of Germany do Preußler's works present?

The first observation is that Preußler's characters are townspeople. Cities are practically absent from these stories; the protagonists either live in smaller communities like small towns (The Little Ghost), villages (Highwayman Hotzenplotz) or even isolated huts (The Little Witch) or even mills (Krabat). Cars, radios, cinema, all these shiny inventions of the 1920s play little to no role. Time has been frozen at this weird spot that's essentially set in the world of the stories Preußler himself grew up with; let's non-descriptively put them in the late German Empire.

The most obvious allusion to this is that Hotzenplotz' antagonist, the policeman Alois Dimpfelmoser, is wearing a Pickelhaube, the traditional Prussian military garb. The heroes of the story, Kasperl and Seppel, abhor all forms of violence and try to trick their adversary into submission. The most intimidating weapon in the story is Hotzenplotz' gun, which shoots pepper which burns when you get hit. Everyone else is unarmed. Kids stories, as I said. The object of Hotzenplotz' desire, by the way, is the coffee mill of Kasperl and Seppel's grandmother, which may have been a valuable object around 1890 but surely isn't today. The whole story gets an absurdist tone, even for a kid's story, but the remoteness of the time might just make it into a fantasy realm for them.

The same is true of "Krabat" and "The Little Witch", which are going even further back in a fantasy version of the Middle Ages. In both cases, there's some dark magic involved (usually very frightening to the little kids these stories were read to), and in Krabat's case, Evangelical groups up until this day campaign for Krabat not to be read in school because there's dark magic involved, which somehow might damage the twelve-year-olds, who usually read this in sixth grade, profoundly.

But the most interesting case for me is "The Little Ghost", in which a boy explores the town museum in the castle above the town, where he meets the titular ghost and befriends him. The ghost brings all kinds of mischief, one prominent target being the pompous, incompetent mayor (mayors in German kids stories are always pompous and incompetent, another holdover from the Empire, I suspect).

The main plot, though, revolves around the festivities for the anniversary of the miraculous defeat of a Swedish General besieging the town in the Thirty-Years-War, for which of course the (immortal) ghost was responsible. The pompous mayor insists on playing the role of said general, and the ghost mistakes him for the original. Hilarity ensues as the ghost repeats his feat from 400 years earlier.

The interesting thing about it, though, is that the Thirty-Years-War is an event that's practically fallen into obscurity in Germany. My students, if they heard of it at all, remember it for its duration and do not know any details. This was different in Preußler's age.

The Thirty-Years-War had been the defining event of German history for centuries. It was fought mainly on the territory of modern-day Germany, and its (lose) predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire of Germanic Nation, lost a third of its inhabitants during the war. Some regions were practically depopulated. It was carnage on a scale, level and duration never seen after and, likely, before.

No wonder this event left scars in the memory and was later propped up in stories and recontextualized. It was the defining trauma of the Germans, their primal culprit as to why the nation had come together so belatedly compared to France and Britain and why it wasn't as strong as its proponents claimed it had the right to be.

As with every such momentous event, of course, it was also recontextualized in all kinds of ways, including toys (let's play Wallenstein vs. Gustav Adolf, kids, it's fun!), fairs of all sorts (what passed as clothing and uniform in these days is astounding) and as a playground for stories. While the French comic scene produced such classics as Asterix, recontextualizing their own history, some of the few existing comic artists in Germany wrote stories set in the Thirty-Years-War. It's a bit weird to have stories written in the mould of Ivanhoe or The Last Mohican in that setting, I grant you.

However, we since have a brand-new national trauma of a German country in ashes and ruins, this time of our own making. World War II has since supplanted the Thirty-Years-War entirely as a reference point for "great catastrophe", and knowledge of it went dormant as the generation who had been born before the early 1930s died out.

But of course, if you had to look for some war games in the 1950s or 1960s, that's exactly the period you would hark back to. Which makes it into a fascinating time capsule, especially when these plotlines are taken over. As a little post scriptum before we close this, the last reboot was a movie from 2013, which my son liked when he was three or four years old. They opted for giving everything a strong 1950s vibe, but keeping the setting very nondescript otherwise. It's a bit weird, but charming in its own way. Watch the trailer here.