The image of the child in the German short story after 1945 (2): Vulnerable childhood

Abstract

The article analyses and interprets through three clusters of problems (The War in the Shade, The Sensitive Child and Between Dream and Reality - a Phantastic Metamorphosis) the im age of the child in twelve short stories from the 1945 -1988 period. The thematic interests (child the "outcast", the oversensitive/retarded child, the waned friendship among children, animals as friends of children, the flight from reality into imagination ) are more variegated than the short stories them selves in which the war and its immediate consequences (death, hunger) posed the main dangers to normal childhood. The literary child of the second half of the 20th century is endangered by modern technology which blocks its communication with the world of his/her elders and, w ithin the triangle of the family-school community engenders the problematic situation which the child transcends as a prosecutor of the grown-up world. Within the stories the children characters are represented as powerless and sorrowful; they are overwhelmed by the feeling of fear and frequently seek unsuccessfully to establish a partnership with their immediate and broader community. After 1945 the short story thematically concerned with childhood, in addition to fostering the myth of the good child , incorporates the popular procedures of the European folk tales (the child orphan or half-orphan, the benevolent help of an older stranger, the animal helper). It generalises the image of the child which as such has little in common with the real children of the second half of the 20th century but is valuable as a symbolic message to humankind that it is neglecting its future. The most representative short story is the one about initiation but it is often portrayed as a tale of denied initiation because the young protagonist experiences grown-up reality as opposite to the system which ought to have been founded on reason and positive values.