Wie viele Seelen passen in den Himmel? Der Umgang mit Tod, Trauer und Trost in der modernen Kinder- und Jugendliteratur am Beispiel von Amelie Frieds und Jacky Gleichs Hat Opa einen Anzug an?
How Many Souls Fit in Heaven? Dealing with Death, Grief and Consolation in Modern Children's and Young Adult Literature, Using the Example of Amelie Fried and Jacky Gleich's Is Grandpa Wearing a Suit?

Author(s): Nico Elste
Subject(s): Sociolinguistics, Behaviorism, Theory of Literature, Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Društvo germanista u Bosni i Hercegovini (DGuBiH) / Germanistenverband in Bosnien-Herzegowina (GViBH)
Keywords: death; grief; dying; loss; picture book;
Summary/Abstract: In our modern society, the subject of dying and death – contrary to how it was previously taken for granted – is often only addressed in the media, but rarely on an individual level. Particularly with regard to children, their vulnerability and sensitivity, death and dying are often tabooed and removed from individual experience or banished to hospitals, nursing homes, and cemeteries. Although death and mortality are omnipresent in our media-driven society, death has become culturally and socially invisible and is no longer part of family experience. In contrast, since the paradigm shift of the 1970s and the turn of children's and young adult literature toward the actual social conditions of children and childhood, topics such as death and dying have also found their way into children's and young adult literature. The picture book genre in particular has been productive in this regard and has addressed the topos of death and dying in a variety of ways. Aesthetically, however, to quote Jens Thiele, the genre should be understood more as “pedagogically and psychologically based [...] functional art.” This makes modern picture books such as Amelie Fried and Jacky Gleich's “Hat Opa einen Anzug an” (1997) all the more exciting, as they address the themes of death and dying, grief and loss in an educational and critical manner, while at the same time exploiting the aesthetic potential of the picture book medium to the full. In addition to an analysis of images and text, this article will therefore also discuss the question of educational added value in view of the paradox of death, which to this day remains difficult for humans to articulate linguistically.

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