The excitement on Twitter was immediately great. Many were outraged – about Teresa Bücker, not about the frog who kissed without a declaration of consent. I read her tweet again and wasn’t so sure what to make of it. Was the frog intrusive or romantic? And what if the tiger duck had no problem being kissed without being asked? I was unsure, had no opinion, which in turn unsettled me because you don’t have to be unsure on Twitter, please.
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A few days later I read one blog entry the writer Berit Glanz, who dealt critically with Pippi Longstocking. Since the 1970s, Pippi has been a symbol of resistance and rebellion. “Be like Pippi, not like Annika,” was a saying that circulated on stickers in left circles. This interpretation was wrong, argued gloss. With her anti-authoritarian demeanor, the children’s book heroine rather consolidated the existing power structures.
Pippi had fallen into disrepute for some time because of racist language. In the United States, a popular children’s book series by Dr. Seuss hired because of apparently racist representations. Everywhere you looked, everything seemed complicated, dangers lurked everywhere, even on children’s bookshelves.
While I was still pondering what I thought of everything, what my position as an enlightened modern mother was, my six-year-old son was sitting on the sofa listening to a new audio book, the Iliad, the story of the Greeks’ battle for Troy.
Troy statt Ninjago
He has developed a keen interest in Greek mythology for some time. It all started with a book a colleague had given me for him. “Ariadne’s thread” was the name of the Polish author Jan Bajtlik, an illustrated children’s book with many labyrinths. It became the six-year-old’s favorite book. Suddenly he was no longer interested in Zane, Cole and Samukai, the comic fighters from the cartoon series “Ninjago”, but in Zeus, Achilles and Odysseus. He wanted to know more and I discovered the Iliad, told for children by Dimiter Inkiow. I thought that was good at first, as a child I also liked the Greek legends.
But when I think about it, I notice that the Greeks are much more violent and bloody than Janosch. There is Kronos eating his children Zeus, Hades, Poseidon and Demeter. There is Hera, who throws her baby out of Olympus because it is too ugly for her. That was all worse than kissing frogs. Did I traumatize my children? Especially the question of women. Women are reduced to the household or are spoils of war. At most in the case of the goddess Pallas Athene one could speak of modern female empowerment. It is astonishing that the books have not long since had trigger warnings. On the other hand, the stories are better than in “Ninjago”.
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