The railroad grandma

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The railroad grandma
Book type book
Area of ​​Expertise Children's book
language German
First appearance 1981
Publisher (Country) Oetinger (Germany)
author Paul Maar
Homepage -
ISBN 3-7891-0556-2

The Railway Grandma is a children's book by Paul Maar from 1981.

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The book tells of the boy Ulli, who is in second grade and takes the train from Stuttgart to Munich alone during the autumn holidays to visit aunt and cousin.

He has to sit in the train with an old woman who is also going to Munich. At first Ulli doesn't want to know anything about her because he thinks that it can only be boring with her anyway. He would rather have sat in a different compartment. The ice only thaws when the old woman helps him find his ticket. She tells him to call her Grandma Brückner and offers him cake that he baked herself. She says that she has four grown children herself and that her youngest grandson is the same age as Ulli. Then Ms. Brückner tells of her childhood, how she and her five siblings were notorious for repeatedly playing pranks on other people. That they had coated the doorknob on the parsonage with mustard to see if the pastor would swear when he reached in. They would have tied tin cans to the bank manager's car that rattled so that he thought he had an engine failure. The baker Schleissmann would have removed the "L" from his name tag.

Ulli is most impressed by the story of how, as a young girl, she almost stole the policeman's motorcycle. He had failed to remove the ignition key and she drove the motorcycle around the block several times because she did not know how to bring the vehicle to a stop again.

Grandma plays word games with Ulli and shows him what she played as a child. She also gives him a riddle that Ulli is supposed to solve, but can only solve when they say goodbye:

What might that be:
You give it to me
and yet it stays with you!

The train journey goes by very quickly and Ulli says goodbye to Grandma Brückner in Munich. There he also finds the solution to the riddle: it is the hand.

When his cousin asked who the old woman was and whether it would be terribly boring to drive such a long distance alone in the compartment with an old woman, Ulli says no and says:

" Old people can have a great time with children. When I go back to Stuttgart, you absolutely have to put me back in the compartment with a grandma like that. "

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Paul Maar received the North Rhine-Westphalia Children's Book Prize for this book.

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