The little honey thieves

Single scene from The Little Honey Thieves

The little honey thieves is a work from the early phase of the poet and draftsman Wilhelm Busch . It first appeared in 1859 as sheet no. 242 in the series of the Munich picture sheets .

The protagonists of the story are the two boys Peterl and Maxerl. They steal honey from the neighbour's beehive and are stung by the startled bees in such a way that their noses swell up into absurd balloons. The beekeeper reacts mercilessly and with malice to their cry of woe. The swollen noses even make it impossible for the children to ingest food. Only a blacksmith will help them by pulling out the beehives with the tongs. The narrative ends with the sentence:

And all children should remember that, because the bees still sting every day, and a resolute man like the blacksmith who can help with the consequences of snacking is not always at hand.

Wilhelm Busch's drawings were converted into print templates with wood engraving . Compared to later works, the individual scenes show significantly more details. They are even less reduced to lines than later stories such as Max and Moritz . The accompanying text does not yet have the density that is characteristic of the later work.

literature

• Eva Weissweiler: Wilhelm Busch. The laughing pessimist. A biography . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-462-03930-6