Struwwelpeter - Influence and References

Influence and References

The Struwwelpeter characters make another appearance in Heinrich Hoffmann's 1851 illustrated children's book König Nussknacker und der arme Reinhold. The characters are portrayed as living inhabitants of a fantasy world visited by the protagonist, Reinhold, and the Struwwelpeter book itself is depicted as one of the Christmas presents that appear beneath Reinhold's Christmas tree. A link to the German language book can be found here.

Writing for the journal Neurotica in 1951, Dr. Rudolph Friedmann studied the stories so intensely for analytic psychosexual imagery that Dwight Macdonald was moved to include the essay in his 1960 anthology of parodies as a sincere but inadvertent example of the form.

M.J. Trow in "The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade" (ISBN 978-0895263438) recreates each of the cautionary tales as the work of a serial killer.

The comic book writer Grant Morrison drew inspiration from Struwwelpeter during his tenure on the DC comic Doom Patrol when inventing several enemy monsters. The Tailor from The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb provided inspiration for the Scissormen in issues #19 to #22, where Struwwelpeter is quoted directly, and apparitions named The Inky Boys and Flying Robert appear in #25, along with a special cameo appearance by a Scissorman.

W. H. Auden refers to the Scissor-Man in his 1930's poem "The Witnesses" (also known as "The Two"):

And now with sudden swift emergence
Come the women in dark glasses, the humpbacked surgeons
And the Scissor Man.

Adolf Hitler was parodied as a Struwwelpeter caricature in 1941 in a book called Struwwelhitler, published in Britain under the pseudonym Dr. Schrecklichkeit (Dr. Horrors).

The Story of Soup-Kaspar is parodied in Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking (1945), with a tall story about a Chinese boy named Peter who refuses to eat a swallow's nest served to him by his father, and dies of starvation five months later.

American composer Michael Schelle composed a song cycle based on the Struwwelpeter stories for tenor singer and piano in 1991. He revised the piece for tenor and chamber ensemble in 2006.

The character Dwight Schrute reads Struwwelpeter to a group of children on a 2006 episode of The Office.

In the Family Guy episode, Business Guy, a cutaway gag retells the story of the thumb sucker, however instead of the tailor, it is the boy's mother who cuts off the boy's thumbs.

Jasper Fforde's novel The Fourth Bear features a town heavily influenced by "cautionary tales" based on stories from Struwwelpeter.

In 2005, the German band Rammstein released "Hilf mir" on the album "Rosenrot", a song inspired by "Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug".

In 2009 Tokyopop released a manga-style comic book by David Füleki called Struwwelpeter: Die Rückkehr which is a mix between adaption and sequel of the original children's book. The story contains all the original characters with their individual bad habits, but in contrast to Hoffmann's version those habits are special powers helping the rascals in a fight against a dictatorial regime.

'Snip Snap' by 1980s Yugoslavian band Videosex uses as its lyrics an English version of 'Little Suck a Thumb'

Paulinchen, the young girl burned to death, was featured in campaign posters of the Christian Democratic Union Party in German elections in the 1990s. Playing up on her green dress and red bows and shoes, voters were warned "keine rot-grünen Experimente!" ("no red-green experiments!"), the implication being that a coalition of the SPD (Social Democrats, who traditionally use red in their campaign material) and Greens would entail a disastrous outcome for Germany.

In the comic-book Hellblazer, a character summons a demonic version of Struwwelpeter in order to fight her own inner demons. After slaying countless hellspawns with his nails, he says "Wenn die kinder artig sing, kommit zu ihnen das christ-kind" which is the very beginning of the book itself.