Max Butziwackel the Ant Emperor
Max Butziwackel the Ant Emperor A book for children and tall people is a children's book by the Italian writer and journalist Luigi Bertelli (pseudonym: Vamba ), which was published in 1893 under the original title Ciondolino .
author
Luigi Bertelli (born March 19, 1858 in Florence, † November 27, 1920 ibid) was beside his professional activity a book fanatic who was enthusiastic about everything new. In addition to political satire and poems in dialect, he also wrote books and magazines with texts in prose and poetry for children with educational intent. Ciondolino ( Eng . Appendage , little tip ; in the sense of the story about Hosenmatz ) is an example of this.
original
The first publication of Ciondolino appeared in 1893 (is often also given as 1895) by R. Bemporad & figlio , Florence . Further editions appeared around 1915 (Bemporad, with 120 black / white illustrations and 8 color plates by Carlo Chiostri (1863–1939)) and around 1935 (Bemporad: (a) A simple edition, black / white illustrations and 8 illustrations outside the Text by Carlo Chiostri; (b) a luxury edition with color illustrations). After the Second World War , Vinicio Berti made new illustrations. In 1985 Longanesi ( Milan ) published a facsimile edition of the original from 1893.
Translations
The Italian original has been translated into different languages.
German
The first edition by Max Butziwackel was published by Verlag Herder in 1920 with 43 chapters in the translation by Luise von Koch, who also translated other books by Bertelli. The 21 illustrations and the book cover were designed by the Austrian graphic artist ("With book decorations from ...") Karl Elleder . The foreword ("Zum Geleite") was written by Anton Grumann (born September 26, 1881 in Zimmer , † December 16, 1937 in Möhringen / Baden; until 1915 rector of the Catholic German-speaking community in Florence ), who also wrote the book Pinocchio in 1918 for the publisher Herder translated. From 1920 to 1965 Herder published the book in 12 editions.
Other languages
- English: The Prince and His Ants , 1910 and 1937 by Vernon L. Kellogg, Washington in the translation by Sarah F. Woodruff and 1935/1937 The Emperor of the Ants by Thomas Y. Crowell Co. in the translation by Nicola Di Pietro.
- French: Gigi parmi les insectes , 1922 by Albin Michel (Paris) in the translation of the Comtesse de Gencé with illustrations by Carlo Chiostri.
- Dutch: Keizer Witlap de Eerste - De geschiedenis van een jongen die mier werd , 1926 by Zutphen Thieme & Cie, in the translation by J. Henzel, with 8 color plates and illustrations by Carlo Chiostro.
- Spanish: Pingajillo: El muchacho que se volvió hormiga , 1943 by Hymsa (Barcelona) in the translation by Cristóbal De Castro.
Online versions
action
Max (originally Gigino ), whose parents' house is in a rural area, and his older siblings Theresa ( Giorgina ) and Moritz ( Maurizio ) have to work through their textbooks despite the summer, as all three have failed their school exams. Especially Max finds it difficult to study Latin grammar in the warm, summery surroundings. When he separates himself from his siblings and jealously watches an ant trail ("You go for a walk all day, you enjoy life ... If only I were an ant!"), A cheeky old man puts him to sleep and when Max wakes up again , he's an ant egg.
Max goes through the larval and pupa stage and after hatching, a caring worker named Fuska shows and explains everything an ant has to learn. In the ant school, Max is assigned to the soldiers in a very sporty manner and at the first opportunity saves his people from an attack by the blood-red predatory ants with a ruse , killing eleven opponents himself. This success makes Max, now a general, very ambitious and he decides - against the advice of the old ant professor - to carry out a preventive attack against the blood-red ants with the help of the black troops and a dozen bombardier beetles . A group of 50 predatory ants is destroyed and the proud Max lets his troops proclaim him emperor of the ants . On his return to the nest of the black ants, however, he finds it occupied by the predatory ants: He himself fell for the ruse of the much more experienced predatory ants and handed his own people over to them defenselessly into slavery. The predatory ants begin with the execution of the useless old people and only the attack of a predatory wasp saves Max from the same fate that Fuska and the old ant professor suffer.
On his escape, Max met a hatching gall wasp high up in an oak tree , which after a sightseeing flight gave him the direction in which his parents' house was located. On the way there, he makes the acquaintance of a mysterious dragonfly ( ant maiden ), who flatters him as an admirer of the ants and wishes her children to meet as many ants as possible. Max continues on his way and comes to a small pond, where he has an underwater experience with a back swimmer , which he initially takes to be a rowboat. A friendly water strider saves him and on the other side Max finds shelter for the night with the earth bumblebees . Max learns from a mason bee that also stays with the bumblebees that she has been driven from her own home by another of her kind. Max recognizes his parents' house in her description and helps her by driving the intruder out of the mason bee's dwelling after an interlude with a mason wasp.
With the help of a wood wasp larva , Max gets through the door into his parents' house and he saves the newly hatched wood wasp from the maid Franziska. But when he rests on the brim of his uncle's hat, who soon afterwards leaves the house with it, Max is thrown away again far away from the house - of all things, when Uncle Walter greets Max's unloved Latin teacher. Max meets honey pot ants that came to Italy from Mexico in the root ball of an oak , and soon afterwards a busy bee who hardly has time to talk to him. As she flies off in the direction of her nest, Max overhears a skull hawk talking to himself who is planning to raid the bee's nest that evening. On his way to warn the bees, Max meets Großzang and Dickkopf, the former adjutants of his brief imperial period. Dickkopf becomes the victim of an ant lion on the way to the bees and Max now understands the words of the ant maiden. Max and Großzang reach the bees' nest during the skull swarm attack and help the bees to win. Großzang receives the title of Count of All Hymenoptera , both are entertained and presented to the queen bee the next day .
After a few days they leave the beehive when a new queen is born and the previous one swarms out with part of the people. When Max and Großzang see a beekeeper catching the swarm, they climb up on him and let him carry them closer to Max's parents' house. Frightened by a louse in the beekeeper's hair, they dismount and soon afterwards meet the wood wasp that Max had saved from the maid's attacks. She helps them find shelter by drawing their attention to the wooden bees' den in an oak tree. Max and Großzang set up their home in the cave with the five chambers. They find enough food and the ant emperor without a people calls his new refuge St. Helena . Near the new shelter meets Max Erdbienen , wool bees and upholsterer bees and learn from their way of life.
When he and his friends - the wood wasp he has meanwhile advanced to the Duchess of St. Helena - passes the time doing nothing and building castles in the air for a new empire of all hymenoptera, a storm sweeps him from the oak and he ends up unconscious in the moss . The same kautzige old man - Uncle Christian, who entomologist , as it turns out later - wakes him up again and Max is a boy again. He runs home and tells his parents, siblings and Uncle Walter about his adventures.
At the very end of the story, Bertelli once again tickles the reader's imagination with a winking twist : He tells in seven sentences what happened to Großzang when Max didn't come back. Was the story just a dream - or did it really happen?
Pedagogical aspects
Similar to the children's book Maya the Bee and Her Adventures by Waldemar Bonsels (first published in 1912), Max Butziwackel (first published in 1893) is a combination of a child's adventure story, knowledge transfer ( insects in general, ants in particular) and educational behavioral management. Here, too, insects are humanized in terms of their properties - they speak, show human emotions and facial expressions, have individual names, or already know their scientific Latin names at birth. Despite acting as an ant, Max shows all the behaviors of a 6 to 12 year old.
Entomology
Entomological facts and the Latin names for insects are rich in images and very cleverly incorporated into the plot of the story. The protagonist Max learns the life cycle of the ants as well as the functions and tasks of females, males, workers and soldiers, but also details such as compound eyes , mouthparts , symbiosis with aphids . The connection between the gray-black slave ant and the blood-red predatory ant as well as the parasitic wasp laying eggs and many other insect behaviors are discussed. Because of the level of detail, which should be outstanding for an entertaining children's book at this point in time, the book - in contrast to Maya the Bee - was also recommended for teaching children about science. The Italian original edition makes this claim even clearer with the very realistic illustrations by Chiostri, which have been replaced in the German edition by the more cartoon-like illustrations by Elleder.
Behavioral leadership
In his existence as an ant, Max goes through various situations from which he gradually draws his lessons.
- Cleanliness : When Max does not clean and clean himself after a group work (tunnel construction) before eating, Fuska teaches him very humanely and in keeping with the times: " Cleanliness is the first and most noble evidence of an educated creature who has self-respect ".
- Tolerance : Max learns with horror during ant school that he himself, as an ant, has this appendage ( Ciondolino ), this shirt tail, which earned him the nickname Butziwackel among his siblings. When the other young ants want to attack him because of it (“ This white thing is suspicious!” “It's a stranger!” “Let's kill her!” ), Fuska defends him and teaches them a lesson by making them aware of their prejudices .
- Pacifism : Despite the first victory against the predatory ants, the old ant professor warns: " Your deed was good because you defended our homeland. The war, however, is a crime in itself. Even if it has to be waged for just causes, it can be done only to be called a sad, deplorable necessity. ", and when he is later captured by the predatory ants, he complains before his execution:" ... how long should the unreasonable enmity reign between peoples that nature made brothers? "
- Willingness to help : In many situations on his trip, Max experiences unexpected willingness to help, which he often replies, or he is ready to help himself and he is then also given help.
- Humor : Although violent deaths occur in the story (Fuska, the old professor, Dickkopf), the story runs through a thread of humor that is fed again and again by Max's childish-naive behavior, his verbal exaggerations in commenting on situations and his often pathetically exaggerated vanity , despite the loss of his people, still insistingon wanting to be perceivedas The Ant Emperor . Towards the end of the story, Adjutant and Sidekick Großzang also contribute to the humor, whose main interest (besides the admiration of his emperor Max) lies in the most frequent food intake possible (" When I'm hungry, my reason ceases. At the moment it is so big that I fear losing respect for you. ").
- The joy of learning : At the end of the story, the bright Maximpresseshis family with his new knowledge and his awakened interest in the smallest things and beings in nature. Even the Latin -Learn is now no longer a problem (Max passes the test with one and a star!) And Uncle Walter says that he (Max) " ... the makings of a famous naturalist has. "
literature
- Maria Nikolajeva (Ed.) Aspects and Issues in the History of Children's Literature (Contributions to the Study of World Literature) Praeger Frederick (1995) ISBN 978-0-313-29614-7
- Andreas Weigel : Oh, how bad that nobody knows. The painter and illustrator Karl Elleder. In: Stars in Gars. Create and enjoy. Richly illustrated history of the summer resort Gars-Thunau from its beginnings to the present. Published by the Gars Museum Association, Zeitbrücke-Museum Gars ( Gars am Kamp 2017) pp. 9–174, here: pp. 78–82. ISBN 978-3-9504427-0-0 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Robin Healey Twentieth-Century Italian Literature in English Translation - An annotated bibliography 1929–1997 University of Toronto Press Inc. 1998, Toronto, Buffalo, London, page 23 ISBN 0-8020-0800-3
- ↑ Author profile Luigi Bertelli (Vamba) (in ital.)
- ^ According to the edition available in the Berlin State Library
- ↑ Herder & Co GmbH publishing bookstore in Freiburg im Breisgau, Berlin, Karlsruhe, Cologne, Munich, Vienna, London, Saint Loius (MO)
- ↑ Brief information
- ↑ German title: The story of the wooden kid - funny and educational for children of all ages
- ↑ first edition 1920; 1922 (2nd ed., 6th – 12th thousand); 1925 (3rd ed. 13th-17th TSD); 1927 (4th ed. 18th - 23rd TSD); 1933 (5th ed. 24th - 26th TSD); 1949 (6th ed., 27th-32nd TSD); 1951 (7th edition, 33rd – 37th TSD, from this edition illustrations by Elsa Quast); 1954 (9th ed., 42nd-44th TSD); 1955 (10th ed., 45th-50th TSD); 1960 (11th edition); 1965 (12th ed.)
- ^ Thee Booklist ans subscription books bulletin, Vol. 7 American Library Association (1911)
- ^ English summary of the story
- ^ Henri Buchet L'individualisation de l'enseignement (1933)
- ^ Instituto Panamericano de Bibliografia y Documentacion Boletín bibliografico mexicano (1946) Porrúa
- ↑ BG Teuber Journal for Mathematical and Scientific Education Volume 52 , 1921
- ↑ Here you can find some original illustrations by Chiostri ( Memento of the original from May 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. can be viewed (click on the thumbnails).
