Max und Moritz - Germany’s juvenile Bonnie and Clyde?

August 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

One of the things that first grabbed my attention when I first visited Germany was the high profile of two characters that were unknown to me called Max and Moritz. There appearance is quite disturbing, punkish hair-do’s and rather evil little faces. On further investigation I found out that these two characters are are embedded into the German psyche and culture and seem to be some kind of dark symbol of the naughty potential of children and a moral tale of what happens to them (getting ground to bits and fed to ducks. Wilhelm Busch who wrote/illustrated the tales must have had a black humour indeed, the seven tricks that the boys play on unsuspecting victims are both entertaining and morbid. My favourite almost Kafkaesque one is the story where the evil duo plant a sack load of May beetles onto their uncles bed whilst he is sleeping. Recently I saw (with one of my daughters) a recreation of this story in real life at Ludwigsburg castle (photo above) - it scared the living daylights out of us. It made me think of how times change and what was deemed appropriate for a young audience in the mid 1800’s is certainly not now, I think my daughter and I will stick to Bob the builder…