Lummerland

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Lummerland is a fictional island that is the starting and ending point of the story in the books Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver and the sequel Jim Button and the Wild 13 by Michael Ende .

The image of Lummerland is largely shaped by the TV films from the Augsburger Puppenkiste . Their title song became a hit in the charts as Lummerland song in the dance floor version of Dolls United 1995 under the title " An island with two mountains ". Since then, Lummerland has been a widely used metaphor for a small, friendly country and is often used as a fictional example.

description

In Jim Button and Lukas the Engine Driver it says:

Lummerland

“Was just very small. It was even extremely small compared to other countries such as Germany or Africa or China. It was about twice the size of our apartment and mostly consisted of a mountain with two peaks, one high and one that was a little lower. Various paths with small bridges and passageways meandered around the mountain. There was also a winding railroad track. It ran through five tunnels that criss-crossed the mountain and its two peaks. "

In relation to its size, Lummerland is densely populated. In addition to Lukas the engine driver , King Alfonso the quarter before twelfth, Mr. Sleeves and Mrs. Waas, who ran the shop , live there . The island lies in the middle of the vast, endless ocean and is connected to the outside world via a mail boat and the king's golden telephone.

Population density triggers the initial conflict of history; When the foundling Jim Knopf grows up on the island, the king decides that the country is too full and the railroad must be abolished. Lukas the train driver cannot accept this and instead emigrates with the locomotive Emma . Jim Knopf does not want to leave his friend and goes on the hero's journey with him .

The island's name is an alliteration and forms an alliteration with one of the two main characters of the book: Luke the engine driver .

Further development

At the end of the first book, the heroes catch a floating island , which is anchored as New Lummerland next to the existing island and allows the two heroes to be placed on Lummerland together with Jim Knopf's fiancé Li Si , a daughter of the Emperor of Mandala and find New Lummerland. The extension is described as

“A bit smaller than Lummerland, but almost even prettier. Three green lawn terraces with various trees on them rose in stages. […] A flat sandy beach ran around the island, which was wonderfully suitable for swimming. And on the uppermost terrace a small stream sprang up and rushed down to the sea in several waterfalls. "

In the sequel to the children's book Jim Knopf und die Wilde 13 , Lummerland finally turns out to be the mountain region of the submerged continent Jamballa , of which only the two peaks of Lummerland have towered above sea ​​level . As the pirates of the wild 13 sink their base on the land that is not allowed to be , Jamballa rises and Lummerland loses its island existence. The new continent will be called Jimballa after Jim and will be populated with the purified pirates and the families of all children who were previously kidnapped by them and freed by Jim and Lukas.

Jimballa is characterized as:

“In some places the coasts rose steeply out of the blue waves, in others they sloped gently into the water. Mountains and plains alternated in a most graceful way as far as the eye could see. […] The whole continent rose too gently towards the middle and a tiny little mountain could now be seen more and more clearly on the highest peak, a mountain that had two unequal peaks, one high and one that was a little lower. "

In his allusive adventure story, Michael Ende links the myth of the lost Atlantis with a multicultural utopia on an island of the blessed .

Implementation on television

In the film adaptation by the Augsburger Puppenkiste, Lummerland looks like a model railway , as it came into fashion at the time of writing from Ende. The implementation is also concise through the representation of the sea by means of moving foil with blue lighting.

From the title song An Island with Two Mountains , the chorus that Dolls United used in 1995 is particularly memorable:

"An island with two mountains and the deep, wide sea
With a lot of tunnels and tracks and the railroad traffic
Well, what might the island be called, there is a beautiful beach all around.
Everyone should travel to the beautiful Lummerland"

reception

Lummerland exemplarily corresponds to the literary topos of the island as closed off from the whole and limited in itself. With its location "in the vast, endless ocean", the island is isolated, manageable and self-sufficient. Lummerland is therefore classified as "a [...] model state in which man, nature and technology form a harmonious whole". This fits in with the fact that the island is described as “small, cute, idyllic and not dangerous.” A consideration of the work by Thomas Kraft classifies Lummerland as a “world design” before Jim Knopf's arrival. “Not a utopia, but a scaled-down image of a reality that is a model for our civilization. Here people rule and consume, work and lazy, everything seems to be carefully arranged and considered. ”The conflict over overpopulation is then resolved by those affected themselves, not by the government. Kraft sees this as the basis for the social criticism expressly expressed later in the work by Ende.

The comparison with a model railway is discussed in particular with regard to the freedom from purpose. Neither the shop nor the railroad have any function, an activity of the king or Mr. Sleeves beyond the role description is not described. This is the utopia of a society relieved of purposes, pure play. The function of the toy becomes an end in itself.

Lummerland is in contrast to the other islands in the two books, the Magnetic Rock and the land that must not be. Both are places of danger. The land that is not allowed to be is “evil turned into rock”, which is not allowed to exist and in the end it perishes.

Lummerland is often used as a name for model systems. A textbook for business mathematics uses it for a small island, albeit with five instead of four inhabitants; a Microsoft Excel textbook, a general database textbook, a German textbook for elementary school children and a script for local administrative law call their models "Lummerland".

In her memoir, Annegret Held compares the North Sea island of Langeoog with Lummerland, "after all, there was a locomotive on Langeoog ".

Daycare centers of various providers are often named after Lummerland . The name was also used for a German recreational facility during the German military operation in Afghanistan .

Presumably because of the association with the railroad, Deutsche Bahn advertised Lummerland: Only in Lummerland are the tariffs simpler than those of Deutsche Bahn. The railway thus also referred to the myth of small and simple things.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ a b Michael Ende: Jim button and Lukas the engine driver . Thienemann, 2015, ISBN 978-3-522-18397-0 , p. 1.
  2. ^ Heidi Aschenberg: Proper names in children's books: a text-linguistic study. (= Tübingen Contributions to Linguistics. Volume 351). Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-8233-4202-9 , p. 65.
  3. ↑ Michael Ende: Jim Button and Lukas the Engine Driver . Thienemann, 2015, ISBN 978-3-522-18397-0 , p. 215 f.
  4. ^ Michael Ende: Jim Knopf und die Wilde 13. Thienemann, 2004, ISBN 3-522-17651-0 , p. 252 f.
  5. ^ Alberto Manguel, Gianni Guadalupi: From Atlantis to Utopia. A guide to the imaginary settings of world literature. Volume 2, Ullstein, 1982, p. 79.
  6. ↑ Jochen Weber: From Robinson to Lummerland - The island as a motif in children's and youth literature . International Youth Library 1995, p. 36
  7. ↑ a b Werner Nell: Lummerland. "About twice the size of our apartment". In: Atlas of Fictional Places. Mannheim 2012, ISBN 978-3-411-08387-9 , pp. 58-62.
  8. ↑ Dolls United: An Island With Two Mountains. 1995.
  9. ↑ Horst Brunner: The poetic island . JB Metzlerische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart 1967, p. 8f.
  10. ↑ Jochen Weber: From Robinson to Lummerland - The island as a motif in children's and youth literature . International Youth Library 1995, p. 8
  11. ↑ Erik Monnen: Blank pages and little books. Small philosophy of modern German children's and youth literature. In: Roland Duhamel, Guillaume van Gemert (Ed.): Nur Narr? Poets only ?: on the relationship between literature and philosophy. Königshausen & Neumann, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3911-9 , p. 111.
  12. ↑ Roman Hocke, Thomas Kraft: Michael Ende and his fantastic world. Weitbrecht 1997, ISBN 3-522-71855-0 , p. 42 f.
  13. ↑ Fabian M. Friedrich, Meike Ebbinghaus: Jim Knopf - About Michael Ende's 'Jim Button and Lukas the Locomotive Driver' and 'Jim Button and the Wild 13'. edfc 2004, ISBN 3-932621-74-3 , pp. 70f.
  14. ↑ Fabian M. Friedrich, Meike Ebbinghaus: Jim Knopf - About Michael Ende's 'Jim Button and Lukas the Locomotive Driver' and 'Jim Button and the Wild 13'. edfc 2004, ISBN 3-932621-74-3 , pp. 63-65
  15. ↑ Horst Peters: Business Mathematics: Textbook. W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-17-020852-0 , p. 90.
  16. ↑ Horst-Dieter Radke: Excel 2007 simply professional. Ralf Seelig, 2007, ISBN 978-3-908497-55-4 , p. 15.
  17. ^ Matthias Schubert: Databases. Vieweg + Teubner, 2004, ISBN 3-519-00505-0 , p. 33.
  18. ^ Ingrid Maurer: German lessons with Pinki and Paula. Persen Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-8344-3629-1 , p. 16.
  19. ↑ Christina Meyer: General administrative law. Municipal Study Institute Kaiserslautern 2005, p. 11.
  20. ↑ Annegret Held: The chambermaid. mareverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-936384-06-1 , p. 26.
  21. ↑ Sascha Brinkmann, Joachim Hoppe: Generation Einsatz - Paratroopers report their experiences from Afghanistan. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2010, ISBN 978-3-937885-25-4 .
  22. ↑ Harald Burger, Martin Luginbüh: Media Language. An introduction to the language and forms of communication in the mass media. Walter de Gruyter, 2005, ISBN 3-11-017353-0 , p. 423.