German Folktales

This is the topic on which I am going to write my blog... when I feel better and can actually sit here to write it.


=(


All right, (Why isn't "alright" grammatically correct? I hate the way "all right" looks, but I hate improper grammar even more than I hate "all right," so I suppose I must deal with it. *sigh*) this is my perspective on the effects of German folktales on young children. When I went to Germany in December of last year, my dad and I spent a lot of time on sidewalks, in restaurants, in markets, etc. I got to observe the differences between American public behavior and German public behavior. Now in America, imagine you're walking through a mall and you see a mother and a small child pass by an ice cream store. The kid wants ice cream. The mother says no. What do you think happens? Of course, the kid throws a fit. How do many parents of young children in America threaten their children into good behavior, especially in December during holiday season? Of course, they tell the child that Santa will be bringing them coal instead of presents. Now during one of my walks through a little "Christmas market" in Berlin, I observed something very interesting. I saw a mother and a little girl walk past a stand that was selling chocolate fudge. The little girl asked her mother for some fudge, and her mother said no. Now this is the part that amazed me: the child simply walked away and didn't say a word about it. No temper tantrum, no crying, no violence, no nothing. This continued all week. I passed by many little kids, and not ONE of them was misbehaving. After recently studying German folktales, I've come to a conclusion as to why this is.


One of the legends in the German culture is of a character named Schwarze Peter ("Black Peter"). In America, we have Santa Claus, who comes for both the good children and the bad children, except he brings coal to the bad ones as punishment instead of presents. Well in Germany, kids are not just threatened into being good with the idea that they'll get coal for Christmas. Instead, Schwarze Peter will come to their house, put a sack over their head (yes, he carries one just like Santa), suffocate them, and cut their hands off. Now this is only one version of the story... I'm sure other people have heard ones that aren't nearly as graphic as that one, but when I have kids, that's the one they're going to hear.

American kids get away with a lot of bad behaviors because the only real threat they face is not getting presents for Christmas (which, of course their parents never stick to anyway). It's the same punishment for any transgression, such as not eating one's dinner, thumb sucking, playing with matches when told not to, not playing mean pranks on adults, etc. In Germany, these things come with far worse consequences, and children are taught these consequences at a very young age... as soon as they are able to understand fairy tales. I am a senior in high school (one who doesn't mind the sight of blood or guts or brains falling out of the skull or decapitations or anything of that nature), and some of the German fairy tales I've read are gruesome enough to make me a little uneasy. There's one that I read about a little boy who refused to eat his soup. He started to become skinny, and after about five days he weighed less than two ounces (yes, specifically in the story, less than two ounces), and the story in this picture book ends with the boy dying of starvation accompanied by a picture of a gravestone with a soup bowl on top of it. And the little girl who played with matches while her parents weren't home? She caught on fire and ended up as a pile of ashes with shoes (pictures of the entire burning process are included in the story). The kid who wouldn't stop sucking his thumbs? A tailor came to his house and cut them off and made blood get all over the floor. The two boys who put a bag full of junebugs in their Uncle Fritz's bed and cut holes in the bags of grain at the flour mill? They got poured into the grinder at the mill, got ground up into little pieces, and the pieces got eaten by ducks.


When I have children, they will be the most perfectly well behaved children in the world. I'm going to teach them every one of these fairy tales.


I have a theory about "Hansel and Gretel" and its effect on world events, but that's a story for another day.

O'Brien Response

Although his experience in the Vietnam War certainly changed his life and will always remain unforgettable, Tim O’Brien is right in saying that the essence of a person remains the same no matter what they go through in life. Ultimately, the only thing that changes is a person’s own perception, not the person themselves. Even if a person has an experience that truly changes nearly everything about them, such as O’Brien and his experience in Vietnam, that change only applies from that point forward. Since one cannot change his or her past, they essentially remain the same person forever, with their life events and perceptions being the things that do change.
Despite the fact that I have never gone through something nearly as extreme as O’Brien did in fighting the Vietnam War, even I can say that I have always been the same person, despite how different my perspectives have become over the past several years. Before I entered high school, my outlook on the world as well as my personality were completely different from what they are today. I believed that there was nothing I could ever do that could be considered wrong, and nothing in life was to be taken too seriously. I knew this was not just something that young teenagers feel as a result of being that age, because the people I looked up to for this reason were well into adulthood, and they too had the same attitude as I did. I believed at that point that all consequences were short-lived, and nothing would ever present me with a difficulty as far as moving on from it. However, around the time I began high school, I made some decisions that I still think about to this day, and I still question why I made them and even whether or not I regret them now. The events of the previous three years could not have been more different from what I had expected prior to that, but even today I do not feel I am any different as a person. Knowledge gained from experience does not equal permanent change from one person to another new person.
Because one will always remember how they used to be, they will, in essence, never change completely. Even though their feelings about a vital situation may have been even the opposite of how they feel about it looking back on it, this is simply a change in perspective, not a change in person. For example, before O’Brien left to go to war, he saw himself as a coward “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to war” (61). But even decades later as he tells the story, he still remembers that this is exactly how he felt at that point in his life. After all that had happened between the time he left and went to war and the time he wrote The Things They Carried, he obviously does not feel the exact same way about life as he does now, but the important thing is that he does realize that these are the things that made up his life, and he still, forty-three years later, feels they are important enough to tell now. A person is not simply made up of what they are now, but rather they are made up collectively of everything they have ever been, no matter how different the past is from the present.

Angela's Ashes

During my childhood I never had the opportunity to write as I spent most of my younger years acting as the man of the household since my father went to England when I was a boy or even just trying to survive day to day. I write now for the opportunity to express what I never got to tell anyone for fear of either being thumped so hard on the head I flew into the wall or having the door of the church slammed in my face once again and this time for good. I write not for the sake of earning money for I have lived so long so deeply in poverty that I am used to how it feels to have nothing. I have written many threatening letters before as a way to earn enough to make ends meet for my family in the absence of my father and I no longer wish to use my writing for that same purpose. The only thing I ask for now is for the story of my family but most especially my mother and I to be heard. My mother must have gone through the hardest time of us all while we were growing up and God bless her even though I know about how she sinned those nights at Laman Griffin's loft and never confessed them to the priest. By my writing maybe I can take that burden of sin from her so it does not remain inside her for the rest of her life going untold. I also write for her to express the years of pain and suffering she faced with her family disappearing before her very eyes with my father drinking the dole money and then leaving us for England never to send a shilling home. Her only daughter's life taken from her before her baptism, her twin boys succumbing to the pneumonia, her husband and her son off to the army, and her oldest boy out of school and off to work before leaving to America. I write for her to tell her all these things that I kept in my head for so long as a boy and to let her know that I understand her suffering. I never showed her this before as a boy because it was at that time in my life when I needed to be the strongest and scrape together a living for myself and for her and for my younger brothers. I write because I never had the heart to complain then. Yes my life was miserable in Limerick and yes I was faced with eye disease and sin and poverty for many years. But I had more than some of my siblings got to have. I was alive and had more potential to move up in the world than anyone else including my mother and father. I write now because I am grateful for where I ended up after leaving behind what I lived with in Ireland. I write now because for the first time in my life, I can.

Angela's Ashes

"You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it." -Bill Cosby

While reading Angela's Ashes, I found myself constantly having to remind myself that it was in fact a true story with real events. Because of the incredibly depressing, miserable setting and events of the book, it was difficult to keep in mind that this was not a story that the author created in his mind as a fictional work, but that it was actually the story of his childhood. It seems almost unreal that a child could be brought up this way and yet still grow up to be able to write a 300+ page famous memoir about it. Young Frank loses three of his younger siblings before he is even ten years old. So far, the only one of his siblings that has been with him through all the miserable experiences of poverty (the death of [so far] three of his siblings, his own case of typhoid fever, the family's years of having hardly anything to eat or wear, his alcoholic father who is responsible for keeping his family poor and hungry for the sake of satisfying his addiction, etc.) is his year-younger brother, Malachy. Malachy is portrayed to be a rather "favorite" child of many in the community, and it is he that brings the book a great portion of its reality and childlike innocence and humor. The quote by Bill Cosby definitely can describe the McCourt family. Most of Frank and his younger brother's childhood experiences indeed involve painful memories that no child should have to suffer, but not once does either child mention that they are ready to just give up on life. Frank almost always narrates the novel with the most positive tone possible relative to the events he is telling the audience about, and never are his internal thoughts and feelings as depressing as what is actually happening to him and his family. His mother, on the other hand, is very often shown crying or hiding herself from some of the daily miseries of her life. She is always found in a hopeless state of depression, constantly worried about losing what children she has left, worried that her husband's desire to drink is ruining her family's chance at ever having anything, and also often shown smoking unhealthy cigarettes because "they are the only comfort she has." One of the aspects of the story that adds some very significant, childlike humor and innocence is Malachy's frequent ability to make everyone laugh. At times, he says things that even the adults find funny and laugh about. He also entertains Frank even in the serious, negative atmospheres where they often find themselves, such as when the family first arrives back to Ireland from America. Malachy begins making fun of their grandmother for saying "ye" and even though she acts harsh and angry toward the boys a good majority of the time, everyone cracks up at this. "Malachy says, Ye, ye, and starts to giggle and I say, Ye, ye, and the twins say, Ye, ye, and we're laughing so hard we can hardly eat our bread" (58). Another example of childlike humor comes from Frank himself with many of his rather blunt descriptions of things, as well as his descriptions of people. One of the most recognizable relatives in the book as far as the way Frank portrays him is "Uncle Pat Sheehan who was dropped on his head." The way Frank refers to him every time he has something to say about him makes it seem like his full name is "Uncle Pat Sheehan who was dropped on his head." This repeated phrase reminds me of something that Oskar from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close would say.
Both the quote by Bill Cosby and the events told by Frank in Angela's Ashes show that children, even though they sadly physically suffer more than adults do in lives of poverty, hunger, and illness, often in fact are better off from day-to-day than adults. While adults are more concerned with how much of a disaster everything is and how they will ever live a good life and provide one for their children, the younger ones are almost always in higher spirits, finding humor and enjoyment in any situation, no matter how bad it may be. Obviously, Frank McCourt eventually grew up and out of an impoverished life, and went on to write this memoir about his life as a poor boy growing up in Ireland. It shows that he was able to persevere as a young boy to overcome the hardships of his early life and was able to accomplish something for himself that brought him out of poverty and into a more comfortable, rewarding life in his later years.

Discussion Question #10- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living” (113). This quote by Oskar’s grandfather is an excellent example of the theme of interconnectedness among the characters in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Oskar has important connections with people he has never met, including his own grandfather. In a way, the lives of Oskar and his grandfather are similar. Both of them experience a loss of something very important to them (Oskar loses his father, and Oskar’s grandfather loses Anna, his son, and his speech). Oskar’s journey throughout the novel when he is searching for the key has several parallels to his grandfather’s own search for something meaningful in life. Both characters are seeking to gain something positive out of a negative experience. The author also draws parallels between Oskar’s tragic experiences and those of his grandfather by mentioning not only the events of 9/11, but also the Dresden bombings that his grandfather witnessed, which are very similar in tragic nature. Neither Oskar nor his grandfather are alone in experiencing these sorts of terrible events.
The quote also demonstrates, on a larger scale than just Oskar and his grandfather, how all of the people mentioned in the book have at least one thing in common with one another, and this is that every one of them has experienced some sort of loss or tragedy. Oskar’s grandfather mentions in the quote how he feels as if he is carrying the weight of several other people’s lives, not just his own. Oskar feels the same way about even people he has never met. He calls his collection of photos of tragedies and accidents that happened to other people “Stuff that Happened to Me” (42). Although he obviously did not experience these things such as decapitations and shark attacks, this is Oskar’s way of coping with the loss of his father by showing himself that bad things also happen to other people, and he is not alone. He presents a report in school on the bombing of Hiroshima and the great amount of human suffering that came as a result. This too is one of Oskar’s ways of dealing with loss, knowing that other people have experienced things that are just as horrific as the victims of 9/11 and their families have experienced.
Overall, Oskar’s search for the key and his grandfather’s letters are both ways that the two characters connect with each other as well as with those around them. Oskar interacts with many people he has never met and still feels as if something important exists between them in some way or another. For example, Mr. Black and Oskar develop a fairly strong relationship in just a short amount of time that all started simply because of his last name. Even though Oskar and his grandfather have never [knowingly] met, they are still living their lives in a very similar way through one another’s experiences. In a way, Oskar is picking up his grandfather’s lifelong search where he left off, and because of this, both of them are feeling the strain of lives other than their own.