Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

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Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by pete9012S »

Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

On Friday 17th of January a photojournalist from Germany came into St. Christopher's The Hall School. She spent the day researching facts about Enid Blyton for a series about women in history who are an inspiration. She interviewed and photographed, spent time with the Headmaster and ate lunch with the children. Her article (in German) is to be found here..happy reading!
http://www.stchristophersthehall.org.uk ... om-germany" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The pdf mentioned is in German.Can the pdf be translated?
Or perhaps our German members could give us the gist of the article?

The pdf article:

http://www.stchristophersthehall.org.uk ... n_Pham.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Regards

Pete
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by The 6th Find Outer »

The article seems to be part of a series about famous women. It is written for children. The author obviously is a fan of Hanni und Nanni (St. Clare’s).

Here is a translation of the article:

It also works without adults

Millions of children loved "Hanni and Nanni"-books. Now we visited Enid Blyton´s school: The model for her boarding school stories.

The most embarrassing moment of my life happened to me in a library. I stood at the counter where books could be borrowed, when I saw a familiar face: Thomas, our new class mate in the 8th grade. A cool boy with wild locks and torn jeans. Also playing the guitar.
Without saying a word he looked at my books. I freezed and got red ears. I had a pile of about 30 books - my reading ration for a month, amongst them some volumes of Hanni and Nanni. What would Thomas think about me? Certainly that I was uncool reading that kind of girl-books.
Exactly that scene could be described in a Hanni and Nanni-book. The famous twins getting constantly in trouble. Their parents want to sent the 12-year-olds to a boarding school, what they don´t like much. Their new class-mates are bullying them. They get bad marks from their french teacher. But in the end all the problems are solved - and that without help from an adult.

Anyway adults are not important in these books. That´s why I loved Hanni and Nanni that much as a child. The woman who thought of all the twins´ adventures has passed away 45 years ago. Her name was Enid Blyton and she lived in England. She not only created Hanni and Nanni but also the Famous Five (whose latest adventure being released in the cinema this week), Dolly, the Adventure- and the Mystery-series and many more stories, not all of them being translated to German. She sold more than 600 million books worldwide and got immensely wealthy with that.
There were other childrens´ authors before her, but no one has published so many bestsellers as Enid Blyton did. Blyton may have written 700 books, she herself didn´t know exactly in the end. Meanwhile in Germany many books have been published under the name of Enid Blyton, but were written by other authors. (The original English-series of Hanni and Nanni only hat 6 volumes, in Germany there exist 33).

For me Enid Blyton is the most important female writer in history. Children all over the world loved her books and later gave them to their own children. You can feel how many people have been deeply moved by Enid Blyton when visiting her hometown. It is called Beckenham and located in the south of London.
The houses Enid Blyton spend her childhood in are still there: Walls of red bricks, oriels with large windows, enclosed gardens. But on the streets there were no cars in these days but horse-carriages. On the rails opposite to her first house a steam engine stopped.
Enid Blyton was born in 1897, so almost 120 years ago. Already as a child she told her two younger brothers stories. When she was 10 she started writing them down. She was inspired by real persons: her teachers and schoolmates. And she also wrote about her pets. Her biographer Barbara Stoney tells, that Enid could read a page fast and after that retell it from the memory. She read a lot, because her father had lots of books. Grimms tales she thought to be scary, Alice in Wonderland funny and Black Beauty sad.

"Looking back these days were the happiest" Enid Blyton later said about her childhood. "The days always seemed to be warm and sunny and the sky was always blue."
Maybe she wanted to keep this ideal world in her books, because suddenly this idyll broke apart: When Enid Blyton was 12 her father left the family for a new woman. That was a catastrophe for Enid. She had learned much from her beloved father about nature, music and poetry. On an old school-picture you can see her sitting amongst her schoolmates and teachers with a stern look and long and wavy hair.
Although I never visited England as a child, neither an English boarding school, I could imagine school-life vividly. I wished to take part in a midnight-party with Hanni and Nanni. Enid Blyton described this world so lively and attractive, but today I keep asking myself if this description was true. All along my childhood did I dream of places, that didn´t exist?
The model of the boarding schools in Hanni and Nanni and Dolly was Enid´s girl-grammar-school. It has been merged with another school later and is now called St. Christopher´s The Hall. The school is very different from a German school. It seems to be a cosy old hotel: green carpets, spiral stairs, stucco ceilings, labyrinthine corridors. Enid Blyton´s hockey bat and her old desk are standing right next to the entrance. So proud are people of the famous authoress. The table top is almost square and has a large hole for the inkpot.
300 boys and girls are being educated at this school. In the classroom of the 5th grade 9- and 10-year-olds are sitting at single desks that look somewhat like Enid Blyton´s - just without the inkhole.
They wear blue shirts and green cardigans and striped ties. They look like small adults. When I told them that you don´t have to wear a school-uniform in Germany they whisper. When I asked them who has read a book by Enid Blyton all the hands go up.

Although today there is Harry Potter, the internet and a lot of school stress, pupils still love Blyton´s adventure-stories as I did then. "The children in the books could easily be in our class", says a girl called Iyun, who is wearing glasses. "The books are not up to date, but you can put yourself into it", Joshua adds.
To my disappointment I realise, that today many things are different from what Blyton described: The school is no longer a boarding school, girls and boys are learning together and they are not playing Lacrosse but Cricket. The children don´t play in the forest any more, because their parents are worried - and because they don´t have the time. Even during the holidays they have to learn. So they have to read stories to experience adventures.
On the other hand the companionship still lives on, as Enid Blyton always summoned it. The pupils are divided in four so called houses, one of them called Blyton (a relict from the boarding school time, when different blocks of buildings existed).
If somebody gets a good mark or holds open a door for somebody else, he can get advantage points for his house. If he forgets to do his homework or is mean to somebody, he loses points. That makes pupils exert themselves.

Enid Blyton is said to have been a very good student, in her last two terms she even was head-girl. She particularly liked music and sports. Only at home she had to struggle: She didn´t get along well with her mother and when she left home at the age of 19 she stopped having contact with her mother and told everybody, that she was dead. She became a teacher. And she always tested the effect of her stories with her pupils by reading them to them.
When she got two daughters she had difficulties in interacting with them. Imogen, the younger one, later complained about having to sit in her room the whole day long, because her mother didn´t want to be bothered while writing the children´s books. Imogen remembers: "In fact Enid was arrogant, insecure and very quick to forget unpleasant things. She didn´t have any mother´s instinct." Can this be true? A woman, that can understand children that well, is unable to understand their own?
Today when I look at the happy family photos showing Enid Blyton and her smiling daughters I realise how simulated they are. For Enid Blyton the most important thing was how she was perceived by the outside world. She wanted to pretend the perfect family. She having married twice was bad enough in these days. It was uncommon then for a woman to work that hard and think of her career. Even while the Second World War, when the publishers ran low on paper, she published several books a year. Amongst them the Hanni and Nanni books.

Many people wondered, how one person could fill so many pages: Did she have others writing for her? And many people didn´t like her spelling style: The stories are all alike, people said, and the grammar is poor. She was also blamed for her stories being full of prejudices: The baddies are for example always foreigners and the leaders of a group are always boys and never girls. The English BBC refused to read Enid Blyton´s books or audioplay them for decades. Libraries took them away from the shelves and schools banned them from the curriculum. 20 years ago the publishers deleted all mean words from the books, for example the word "Neger [blackamoor]". But by this time Enid Blyton has died long before.
Is Enid Blyton a bad author, just because she was a bad mother? Can she be a bad storyteller, if so many children and me myself love her books? In her hometown every pupil, every neighbour, every teacher, every taxi driver told me with shining eyes about his favourite Enid Blyton book. For many people she offered a way out of an unpleasent everyday life, as well during the war-time as today.
When I was young I was embarrassed of Hanni and Nanni - today I´d say, that I feel a pity for everyone not having read them.
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by Fiona1986 »

Thanks for the translation, it's a really interesting article.
"It's the ash! It's falling!" yelled Julian, almost startling Dick out of his wits...
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by pete9012S »

The 6th Find Outer wrote: Here is a translation of the article:
Thank you so much for taking the trouble to give us the English translation.I was dying to find out what the article said.

Cheers

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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by Courtenay »

That is a very interesting article, although I would object to the assertion that the baddies are "always foreigners"! :evil: (Strangely enough - unless I read too fast and missed something - the author failed to mention golliwogs as well. :roll: )
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by The 6th Find Outer »

Courtenay wrote:That is a very interesting article, although I would object to the assertion that the baddies are "always foreigners"!
This is not the opinion of the author, but what some people say about EB´s stories - people who don´t like the stories.
(Strangely enough - unless I read too fast and missed something - the author failed to mention golliwogs as well. :roll: )
Noddy and golliwog-books are not well known in Germany. Maybe that is the reason. The author only mentions the elimination of the offensive word "Neger" in modern editions in general.
I don´t know what golliwogs are called in German books, if they appear at all. In a dictionary "golliwog" is translated as "Negerpuppe", which means "puppet looking like a blackamoor". So eliminating the word "Neger" probably implies eliminating the equivalent of "golliwog" as well.
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by Wolfgang »

I have some older Noddy books in German, and Gollywogs are called "Mohr(en)", a word which has become offensive in German.
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Re: Enid Blyton Interest from Germany

Post by sixret »

I've just read the article. Thank you Pete and The 6th Five Find Outers. :D
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