Loved this book. Had been trying to get it for years and now I finally have! There's lots of reviews of people saying it's horrifying and cruel and with zero psychological value, and I couldn't disagree more! First of all, the stories ain't all that terrible and shouldn't be taken so literally. The author wasn't killing real kids, was he? And there's a lesson behind almost every story. For example, take the one about the girl playing with matches and getting burn. Isn't that a true thing? Doesn't that still happen nowadays? Maybe if parents told their kids the real consequences about their actions there might be less 'accidents'.Secondly, I think this book is of great cultural and psychological value, a small window to what people taught to their kids back in the 1800s. I immediately started thinking about the Grimm brother's fairy tales, which was published around thirty years before Struwwelpeter. And Daniel Paul Schreber's mental illness case came to mind too! His father (Moritz Schreber) was a physician, university teacher and children's health eminence; his methods were so radical and cruel that they're classified now as part of something called 'Poisonous Pedagogy'. This 'physician' was alive around the time Struwwelpeter was published (actually, his son was born two years before that, so I take it Papa Schreber read it to him quite gladly). It's amazing how it all comes together!
I'm not saying you should tell your kids they're gonna get their fingers cut off if they won't stop sucking them (which reminds me of Little Hans, a 5 year old that developed a serious phobia of horses after his mother told him he would get his penis cut off if he kept touching it. Oh, sweet Germany! Thank heavens Freud came into the picture...). Yet, I do think kids should be treated as beings capable of dialogging and understanding the dangers that come with some actions, even if the consequences are not very Disney-like.
Stop being so outraged, people. Maybe 150 years ahead in the future parents will be freaked out by Dr. Seuss books, who knows?
