|
|  | |
In the year of his eightieth birthday, the Frankfurt author and cartoonist Hans Traxler has written an amiable book about an angry child and thereby given his readers a very special present.
The picture book Franz, der Junge, der ein Murmeltier sein wollte (‘Franz, the boy who wanted to be a marmot’) tells the story of the unusual friendship between Franz, the village teacher’s son, and Albert, a marmot. In the course of a summer the two slowly get to know each other and end up firm friends. But the first fall of snow puts an abrupt end to their fun and games on the marmot’s meadow — and for Franz this is a real catastrophe. The meadow is suddenly buried beneath a thick layer of snow, and his friend has disappeared.
His father having explained to him the hibernation habits of marmots, Franz decides that he, too, will hide away and hibernate, and only reappear in the spring. But when his plan is foiled by hunger and a shortage of air, he begins to doubt his father’s words. What if Albert is suffering exactly the same problems? Driven by his anxiety about his friend, Franz heads off in the middle of the night to the snow-covered meadow. He is found there, half frozen to death, and has to spend the rest of the winter in bed with severe pneumonia. But when spring returns to their valley at long last, Franz and Albert meet up once again in their familiar meadow.
Traxler tells the story of their friendship in language that is clear and unaffected, yet full of gentle poetry: ‘Franz always had a couple of carrots in his pocket. They shared them like brothers, chewing them for so long that they turned all sweet in their mouths. Franz wanted things to stay like this for ever and ever.’ There is not a single superfluous word here; Franz’s yearning for everlasting happiness is conveyed without pathos or sentimentality.
But the book is by no means limited to such calm cadences. When Franz can’t find his friend in the snowy meadow he vents his rage and disappointment with noisy vigour: ‘“I didn’t want this to happen!”, he cried, smashing the icicles from the roof. “Winter has to stop — now!” he yelled, knocking the head off the beautiful snowman.’
What a good thing if there are parents in the offing who keep their calm in such situations. Traxler gives young Franz the benefit of having two such remarkable people by his side. No matter what tantrums or maverick ideas their son may have, their love for him remains ever undiminished, their facial expressions in the illustrations are unfailingly kind.
Like the text, the illustrations, too, demonstrate the principle that less is more. Traxler depicts meadows, snow-covered mountains and sky with monochrome tracts of colour in the kinds of gentle hues so characteristic of him, but interspersed with splashes of coloured detail — and instantly conjures up an alpine scene close to the tree line.
A similar pattern is evident in the depiction of his characters, who clearly show themselves to be the work of someone thoroughly familiar with both human and animal physiognomy. With their clear black outlines they appear drawn rather than painted, whilst being at the same time extraordinarily vivid. Just a few strokes are enough for Traxler to be able to convey their emotional state. A happier marmot has never been espied than Albert on the book’s first page, nor a lonelier boy than Franz following his vain attempt to slow his breathing in the manner of a hibernating marmot: with his green face, his turned down mouth and his shoulders hunched up to his ears, he looks on the point of melting away not only into his baggy pyjamas but also into the enormous cushion in the midst of which he is nestling.
In his amiable, sometimes tongue-in-cheek sort of way, Traxler is always in close communion with his young readers. This is particularly telling when the narrator offers comments on the story at important junctures, as for instance when Franz has been dug out of the snow only just in time and the narratorial voice asks: ‘So was everything okay again?’ And with his answer ‘Sadly not’, the narrator is plainly sharing in his listeners’ sorrow that things are going to to get worse before they get better — for in children’s eyes the news of Franz’s ensuing illness can only be sad. The fact that his protracted stay in bed parallels the marmot’s hibernation becomes apparent to them only gradually. Thus for instance two pictures show Franz in his bed, with next to him a tiny marmot peeking out from beneath his enormous duvet; at another point his mother refers to him as he lies there in bed as ‘My poor little marmot’.
We are offered an additional perspective on this tale of an unusual friendship through Traxler’s illustrations. Before we have even opened the book, the cover depicts Franz and Albert sitting side by side on a meadow with their backs to the beholder and their gaze fixed on the distant mountains; then within the book this same motif is elaborated in four panoramic strips that are arranged one below the other, and vividly demonstrate the pair’s growing friendship. In the first picture, labelled ‘June’, the two of them are sitting at opposite ends of the meadow; in the ‘July’ and ‘August’ pictures they are shown moving closer and closer together, until finally in ‘September’ they are sitting there next to each other, gazing into the distance. This image is reprised in variant form on the final page of the book: we now also see Franz’s sister Fanny sitting to one side of the two friends, and Franz has brought carrots for three: ‘And then they looked at the mountains and chewed until the carrots turned sweet in their mouths. A whole lovely long summer lay ahead of them.’
Eva Jaeschke
August 2010
[Translated by John Reddick]
|
to title overview
