BERLIN — Germany’s most beloved witch has been making mischief for more than 50 years, but now she’s caused an uproar that goes to the heart of what it means to be German in the 21st century.
When the publisher Klaus Willberg announced earlier this month that the next edition of the children’s classic “Die Kleine Hexe” (“The Little Witch”) would appear without outdated, racist terms, he was met with an unexpected storm of protest.
Hundreds of angry e-mails poured into his Stuttgart-based publishing house, Thienemann, the online peanut gallery went berserk and even the stodgy weekly Die Zeit ran on its cover alongside black characters from various children’s books a headline that could be translated as: “Kids, these aren’t Negroes!”
Although I grew up in rural Illinois, I read many German children’s books sent by my Swiss grandparents. Yet when the hullabaloo over “The Little Witch” broke out, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what was so offensive about the endearing tale of a little witch who tries to prove herself to her elders.
The two controversial passages deal with children — white European children — who dress up for carnival as Africans, Turks, Chinese and Native Americans (“Indians,” in the text). Instead of the word “African,” the author Otfried Preussler used the word “neger,” which at the time of the book’s publication in 1957 was standard German usage, akin to “negro” in segregation-era America.
The German term is now considered racist, which is precisely why Willberg wants to remove it from a special edition of the book to be published for Preussler’s 90th birthday this year. Any changes to the text will be made by one of Preussler’s daughters, who represents him. The publisher rejects the idea of adding explanatory footnotes: They would be of little use because the book is usually read aloud to children between the ages of 4 and 6.
The decision seems innocuous enough, but reading Germany’s leading newspapers recently, you’d have thought Willberg was part of an Orwellian plot to fill the nation’s classics with mushy doublespeak.
Die Zeit’s leading literary critic called the changes censorship and fretted over what the thought police might now do to Schiller. A columnist for Der Spiegel’s online edition was rewarded with more than 20,000 Facebook “likes” and hundreds of laudatory comments for skewering the revisions.
The only commentary I found that got to the real issue behind the debate was by Simone Dede Ayivi, a young theater director of both European and African descent. In an op-ed for a Berlin newspaper, she wrote that the point of view of non-white Germans was being ignored. The whole discussion was taking place, she argued, as if “German” were still a designation of ethnicity rather than citizenship.
Compared to the United States, with its history of slavery and immigration, or to Britain and France, with their maritime empires, Germany had only a brief experience with overseas colonies. As a result, mainstream German society is largely oblivious to the sensibilities of non-European minorities who have made their home here over the past half-century.
The traditional homogeneity of the German nation still feeds the convenient myth that the absence of other races means the absence of racism. The Holocaust was the starkest demonstration that racism can run rampant even if minorities aren’t outwardly different.
The controversy over The Little Witch shows that old attitudes die hard. But they do die. An informal survey taken by Die Zeit found that almost all the children in two Hamburg school classes rejected the archaic references to blacks used in the book.
