“Max and Moritz” by Willhelm Busch -Part Two

Children’s books first appeared in the later 18th century and were strongly moralizing and educational. The books were meant to teach and instruct, not to entertain, and the child figures in those books behaved like miniature adults. 

In the first half of the 19^thcentury, literature started describing the child in what was believed to be his natural state – innocent and perfect. With their colorfully illustrated and entertaining rhymes, their wild and rebellious children, and their gruesome content. Wilhelm Busch (1865) broke with both of these traditions with his story about the mischievous boys.

Max and Moritz 

First Trick

To most people who have leisure
Raising poultry gives great pleasure:
First, because the eggs they lay us
For the care we take repay us;
Secondly, that now and then
We can dine on roasted hen;
Thirdly, of the hen’s and goose’s
Feathers men make various uses.
Some folks like to rest their heads
In the night on feather beds.

One of these was Widow Tibbets,
Whom the cut you see exhibits.

Hens were hers in number three,
And a cock of majesty.
Max and Moritz took a view;
Fell to thinking what to do.
One, two, three! as soon as said,
They have sliced a loaf of bread,

Cut each piece again in four,
Each a finger thick, no more.
These to two cross-threads they tie,
Like a letter X they lie
In the widow’s yard, with care
Stretched by those two rascals there.
Scarce the cock had seen the sight,
When he up and crew with might:

Cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo;–
Tack, tack, tack, the trio flew.

Cock and hens, like fowls unfed,
Gobbled each a piece of bread;

But they found, on taking thought,
Each of them was badly caught.

Every way they pull and twitch,
This strange cat’s-cradle to unhitch;

Up into the air they fly,
Jiminee, O Jimini!

On a tree behold them dangling,
In the agony of strangling!
And their necks grow long and longer,
And their groans grow strong and stronger.

Each lays quickly one egg more,
Then they cross to th’ other shore.

Widow Tibbets in her chamber,
By these death-cries waked from slumber,

Rushes out with bodeful thought:
Heavens! what sight her vision caught!

From her eyes the tears are streaming:
“Oh, my cares, my toil, my dreaming !
Ah, life’s fairest hope,” says she,
“Hangs upon that apple-tree.”

Heart-sick (you may well suppose).
For the carving-knife she goes;
Cuts the bodies from the bough,
Hanging cold and lifeless now;

And in silence, bathed in tears,
Through her house-door disappears.

This was the bad boys’ first trick,
But the second follows quick.

To be continued tomorrow…