Characteristics
Erlbruch tackles many adult topics in children's books, though he is not always fond of being characterized as an author for children. Some of his books have autobiographical notes, such as his Leonard (a "delightfully eccentric tale"), a book partly inspired by his then-six year old son Leonard (now an illustrator himself), about a boy who overcomes his fear of dogs by becoming a dog himself. Many of the characters in his books, such as the mole of The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit (also known in English as The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business), have little round black glasses, such as Erlbruch has himself. He is praised for the original and surreal quality of his work. According to Silke Schnettler, writing in the German newspaper Die Welt, the "Erlbruch-style," whose main characters are skewed and sometimes disproportianate but nonetheless real recognizable, has become widely imitated inside and outside Germany.
Death is a recurring topic in Erlbruch's books. Duck, Death and the Tulip (2008) features a duck who becomes friends with Death, and in Ein Himmel für den kleinen Bären ("A heaven for the little bear") a bear cub tries to find his recently deceased grandfather in bear heaven.
The moral of his own stories, Erlbruch suggested in 2003, the year he received a special version of the Deutschen Jugendliteraturpreises for his entire oeuvre and the Gutenberg Award of the city of Leipzig, is that people should regard themselves from a distance and accept even what is not so beautiful about themselves, what is special.
Read more about this topic: Wolf Erlbruch