Wilhelm Busch confessed later on in life, that some things in his book really did happen. His friendship with the miller’s son Erich Bachmann and their childhood antics together likely inspired the figures of Max and Moritz. A pencil portrait that Bush drew at age 14 shows Bachmann as a young man with thick, round cheeks like those of Max.
Tag: <span>Wilhelm Busch</span>
Max und Moritz was initially rejected for publication, it was never meant to be a children’s book. It was Busch’s publisher Kaspar Braun who suggested offering it through the children’s book division of his publishing house rather than in the pages of the satirical weekly, Fliegende Blätter, as Busch had suggested. Braun paid Busch 1000 guilders, the equivalent of about 2 years’ pay for a craftsman, for the rights to his manuscript.
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.
My husband had just finished mowing the yard and when he came back into the house a sweaty mess, I looked at him and smiled, “You look like Moritz,” I said and his face went blank.