Tangential Recollections: Non-Comic Related

This isn't really comic related, but it popped into my head while talking with my friend today, so I decided to post about it.

When I was in high-school I took three years of German language classes. Well, four technically, but we didn't learn much the first year on account of that teacher's nervous breakdown...it wasn't her fault, she was a very young German school-teacher really really not used to the atmosphere of an American school. And we were terrors.

Anyway, it was a pretty standard class up until my third or fourth year, standard study materials, text books, the like. The last year though, my teacher (a strict older woman with a doctorate in German literature and no patience for nonsense) decided to try something different. She'd had this children's book, retelling these rhyming folktales about two mischievous kids, complete with cute illustrations. She decided we'd read those primarily through the semester, learning context and vocabulary from them and supplimental materials rather than a text book.

The folktales/stories were about these kids named Max and Moritz, and they'd focus on their crazy mischievous schemes that would sometimes backfire but usually create triumphant chaos throughout their village. We liked the stories. Or at least, thought they were lame but cute. Considering we were teenagers, that was probably as close to a ringing endorsement as anyone's likely to get. They were silly and predictable, always ending the same way, with a singsong cadence and final happy illustration of the two kids skipping away, hand in hand

We got the stories in class on Monday, read them together, and studied the vocabulary and context and other fun things for the rest of the week. We never had the chance to read ahead and honestly, they were so predictable that none of us really thought about it.

Then we got to the last story of the semester. Yet more of the same old thing, Max and Moritz pulled a prank, people got mad, chaos ensued.

Except that Max and Moritz ended up hiding in a couple of flour sacks. (This was charmingly illustrated so we could see Moritz's hair sticking out cutely). Whereupon the miller, a frequent victim in the pranks, threw the sacks in the wheat thresher.

The end came with the same cute singsong ending and an illustration in which large grains formed the outline of both boys, including Moritz's cute tufts of hair...hand in hand.

The reaction of our class was impossible to relate. Our minds were blown, completely and utterly. This was not what was supposed to happen! I think we spent the rest of that week in an utter uncomprehending daze.

It was amazing really, an entire class of cynical and too-cool 16 and 17 year olds, grown up on Michael Myers, Jason, Freddy, Chucky and the like were all traumatized by a children's story. Frau Marlow, who may have been evil, was beside herself with glee. Like the miller in the story, she'd gotten her revenge on all the crap we'd put her through. She got us good.

I've actually thought about reading the stories again, but it's been six or seven years now. My German has descended to all but nil. And it really wouldn't be the same in English. Besides, I may not remember the stories themselves, but I will probably never forget that carefully drawn grain-outline as long as I live.

Sometimes I wonder if this hasn't some how influenced my comic reading sensibilities. (It's not traumatizing enough child murder/mutilation without a wheat thresher?)

All I know for sure is this: Germans are fucked up, man. :-)