There’s a lot of talk about book-banning, amongst the chattering classes these days. But are books really being banned? And who’s doing it? Well, for a start, Germany’s banning books again — and they’re banning ones that even the Nazis didn’t dare.
There’s more than one way to ban a book, of course. The Nazis, with the brutal directness that was their hallmark, simply burned them. The modern totalitarians are a touch more subtle. Their ultimate tactic, when they can get away with it, is bullying publishers into never publishing the books in the first place.
This has been the fate of several of Dr. Seuss’ books in recent years: not just withdrawn from libraries and from sale, but ceased to be published at all. Not because of poor sales — although the books were among Seuss’ lesser-known works — but because of political pressure.
Now a popular children’s author — what is it these censorious creeps have with children’s books? — is being unpersoned in Germany.
A German publisher has announced it is withdrawing two new books paying tribute to a highly popular character in children’s fiction after facing accusations of racism and cultural appropriation.
But of course.
Ravensburger Verlag, a leading publisher of children’s books in the German-speaking world, said its latest books on Winnetou, a fictional Native American hero who made his debut in 1875, would be pulled from its schedule and that it would also be considering whether to continue publishing other Winnetou titles in future.
Bookshops have reportedly been stopped from ordering the books from Ravensburger and they also appeared to have been pulled from Amazon on Tuesday. Editions by other publishers were still available.
Gosh, what sort of unbridled racism must this stuff be about?
The stories focus on the friendship between the character Old Shatterhand, a German immigrant to the United States who is the first-person narrator of them, and Winnetou, an Apache leader and his blood brother.
So… an immigrant who forms an intensely close relationship with a heroic indigenous leader?
The decision has split social and cultural commentators. Supporters of the move have described May’s literary attempts to conjure an idyll in the country of origin of the Indigenous people of North America as a “lie, which completely edits out the genocide of the Indigenous people, the unjust settlement of their land by white settlers and the destruction of their natural habitat,” according to Die Zeit, summarising the angry response.
Because, of course, all literature for European children should be nothing but endless Jeremiads lecturing them on how horrible they are, simply for being white. Just force them to endure the racist gibberings of loons like Ibrahim X. Kendi until they hate everything about themselves, instead.
The tabloid Bild meanwhile has led the calls for the books to be reinstated, insisting that “woke hysteria” was responsible for “burning the hero of our childhood at the stake”.
The head of Ravensburger Verlag, Clemens Meier, said the books had to be viewed through the perspective of historical reality, against which they displayed a “romanticised picture with many cliches”.
I mean, children’s books with romanticised pictures and cliches? Who ever heard of such a thing?
The novels were so popular the Nazis refrained from banning them, despite misgivings over the way they were seen to contradict their racial ideals by celebrating people of colour.
The Guardian
The Wokeists, on the other hand, are happy to go where even the Nazis feared to tread.