Wolfgang wrote: ↑28 Jan 2021, 17:44
There are quite some changes though, many names have been changed, I remember two missing chapters throughout the books.
In Fifth Form the tricks are missing - both the one played by June with the balloons and the one Mamzelle plays to everyone.
In the last book they left the whole story around Jo out .
I agree that the German continuations sure don't have much in common with the originals. I read them as a child and liked them. Of course I didn't know that they had been written by someone else. I now see the differences between the original books and the ones written in German in the series of Malory Towers and also St. Clares. The German books are nice (for me as a German at least) but not Blytonian. In my opinion they shouldn't have published them under her name.
That Darrell becomes headmistress always seemed unlikely to me. Usually you have to be teacher for that. But Darrel just stayed a few semesters at university and it seems that she didn't do final examinations.
No, she went "Studieren" after the two years at the "Möwennest". Sometimes the girls of the Möwennest are referred to as "Studentinnen" but Dolly must have been somewhere else between books number 9 and 10:
She leaves the Möwennest when Felicity finishes the fifth form. In "Wiedersehen auf der Burg" it's said that Felicity finished her time at Möwenfels two years ago and is now at the Möwennest. So there are three years that aren't covered by the books.
Two girls are asking Dolly "are you a teacher now" and she says "not yet, I'm doing practical training to become 'Erzieherin' " (I couldn't find a suitable translation for "Erzieherin", because all words I found are related to kindergarten/nursery but "Erzieher" can work with teens and adults too. Maybe someone knows the correct term?)
This sounds strange though because at least when the books were written you didn't go to university to become "Erzieher" (and no one would have called the pupils at a school for Erzieher "Studentinnen") and it sure wasn't a step on the way to become a teacher but Dolly says "not yet" ("noch nicht").
She also says to Ellen in "Die jüngste Burgmöwe" at the beginning of the book "Dann habe ich ein paar Semester studiert..." when telling what she did after leaving the Möwennest.
Oh okay thank you. As you can tell, I'm not that familiar with them because i never considered them really Blyton, partly because they were written much later so I never read them as a child. For "Hanni and Nanni", I read the "fake ones" as a child too and only found out later which ones are really Blyton ones, if you can call them that after all the changes they made to them. I prefer reading the original ones for both now.
Last edited by Catbury on 27 Jun 2021, 16:46, edited 1 time in total.
Being only 35 I've read all Dolly books and the first 19 books of "Hanni und Nanni" as a child/teen and before knowing that they weren't written by Blyton. The same goes for "Tina and Tini" where just the first two books were written by Blyton (though not as a series) and the third is base loosely on an existing book while the other 11 books are completely new.
I still like the German books but I don't really consider them as "Blyton books" anymore.
Ah yes, the Tina and Tini books, read them, though even the first one are so Germanized that they are barely recognizable. They slammed the name Enid Blyton on about everything because she is so popular. Also the "Rätsel" series which they extended with "The mystery that never was" and a new story that has nothing to do with Blyton. How that was even legally handled I don't know.
As it is some Byton books are put together in English versions that were stand-alone books (Riddle series) - maybe they thought the German idea was appealing .
About "The Rumlington Mystery" (Rätsel um die Falschmünzer), "Fünf Freunde auf der verbotenen Insel", "Fünf Freunde und der blaue Diamant" and "Die verwegenen Vier retten das große Pferderennen", I think I read in an Wikipedia article that the publisher had allowed Bertelsmann to publish new books while the owner of the rights hadn't. That's why these never made it past two or three editions.
About Hanni und Nanni, at one time they changed the running order of the books to fit in the continuation books, but of course there was a major error in the new running order, too. To make things more absurd they kept the original running order in the three books omnibusses edition.
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