We don't give a damn about the pickle king

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We don't care about the cucumber king is a fantastic children's novel from 1972. The author Christine Nöstlinger won the German Youth Literature Prize for this book .

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The twelve-year-old Wolfgang tells how the cucumber-shaped king of the Kumi-Ori appears in his family on Easter Sunday, whom the subjects drove from his kingdom in the cellar. While the father decides to grant the "Gurkinger" asylum and to accommodate him in his room and the youngest son Niki also befriends him, the rest of the family quickly finds out that the arrogant king is lying and stealing in order to manipulate his surroundings . When Wolfgang gets to know the other Kumi-Ori and learns of the king's plans for revenge, in which the father is supposed to play a decisive role, the children have to stand up against their father.

Interpretation, background and criticism

The book is only superficially a story in which the cucumber king is the trigger for a lot of turbulence. Rather, the Hogelmann family is in a crisis, which in view of the dispute over the Kumi-Ori only comes to light. The father is overwhelmed by the financial responsibility and is therefore prone to the king's false promises. He has little time for his family and has to find that they are developing their own view of life, to which he can no longer access. That is why he interprets the behavior of the children, but also the political differences of opinion with his father and the attempts at mediation by his wife as disloyalty and disrespect.

The literary scholar and author Lothar Quinkenstein pointed out that the name of the cucumber king was borrowed from Jewish tradition: the words "kumi ori" (two imperatives of Hebrew) come from the book of Isaiah; they mean “arise!” - “shine!” and refer - as a promise of future glory - to Jerusalem (Isa. 60: 1). The words “Hitoreri hitoreri kewa orech kumi ori ...” also appear in a stanza of the Sabbath hymn Lecha Dodi . This hymn, written in the 16th century by Shlomo Alkabez , is part of the Sabbath liturgy; it is sung every week on Friday evening for the symbolic reception of the "Queen Sabbath ". Thus, according to Quinkenstein, the book speaks on the one hand in the name of the Enlightenment (the monarch is driven out), but at the same time transports anti-Jewish clichés with the negative character of the Kumi-Ori. The focus of a re-reading of the novel must be the ambivalence of the concept of using a central content of Judaism as a name for a deeply unsympathetic figure who is ultimately "dumped".

Christine Nöstlinger comments on the allegations as follows: "Christine Nöstlinger [...] explained that she discovered the name in Paul Celan's poem 'You are like you', which ends with the words 'kumi / ori'." Jewish children's author Mira Lobe, who died in 1995, asked for a translation. "It was black humor, very private for me, to call this terribly conservative person, against whom there is a revolt, 'Rise up'", said Nöstlinger. "I didn't even know that the Jerusalem that was supposed to rise up there was." When asked whether a Hebrew name made the title figure a Jew, she said: "It's a cucumber, please!"

Film adaptations, radio plays and scenic versions

literature

  • Christine Nöstlinger: We don't give a damn about the pickle king . 44th edition. Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-499-20153-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lothar Quinkenstein: A vegetable dictator named Jerusalem ; tagesspiegel.de, January 25, 2013
  2. ↑ Lothar Quinkenstein: Jerusalem as a scheming cucumber? A rereading of “We don't give a damn about the pickle king”. In: interjuli. Internationale Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung, 02/2013, pp. 77–91.
  3. ↑ Nöstlinger finds accusation against "Kumi-Ori" absurd . Retrieved January 25, 2013.