A biography of Jella Lepman for younger readers | EUROtoday

Jella Lepman could also be very distant to most of us right now because of generational causes, however her biggest achievement might be seen shut by: in Munich. There, the International Youth Library gives a globally distinctive vary of just about 700,000 books for younger audiences, written in a complete of 250 languages. This required a transfer, as a result of the home in Maxvorstadt, which Jella Lepman was capable of transfer into in 1949 when she based the corporate due to her dedication, was not enough three many years later to accommodate the stock, which had initially grown to eight thousand titles. In 1983, the library moved to the previous electoral searching lodge Blutenburg, which had lengthy since been surrounded by the town, however whose moat and wall ring give the impression of a world of its personal in the midst of Munich. A magical fort like one thing out of a kid’s desires – that’s becoming. Like the neighbors from the Erich Kästner Society in the identical constructing.

The founder didn’t stay to see the transfer to Blutenburg; Jella Lepman died in 1970 in Zurich, the place she had lived since she gave up administration of the International Youth Library in 1957. One would possibly now assume that her departure needed to do with the truth that she distrusted the Germans after the Jew, born in 1891, had to surrender her job as a journalist in Stuttgart in 1934 with a view to carry herself and her two youngsters (her husband had died early) to security from the Nazis. Lepman got here to England by way of Italy, the place she labored for the BBC. After the give up, she was requested to go to the American occupation zone (by which her hometown of Stuttgart was positioned) to work on a ladies’s journal that was purported to convey democratic values ​​to the Germans. But Jella Lepman positioned far more hope in youngsters than in adults.

That’s why she begged for donations of books from different international locations for a devastated Germany, and even in international locations as soon as occupied by Hitler’s troops, this request discovered fertile floor. This is how Lepman received collectively the founding assortment of the International Youth Library, and from then on she herself was optimistic about the way forward for the Federal Republic, as a result of the extra time that handed, the less folks compromised by National Socialism would direct Germany’s fortunes. Her transfer to Zurich was not because of ideological issues, however as a result of she was uninterested in the bureaucratic squabbles surrounding her unifying thought.

The well-known American youngsters’s e-book creator Katherine Paterson is now retelling this life story with fixed ups and downs for a younger viewers – supported by the International Youth Library, whose director Christiane Raabe additionally contributed an afterword. And Paterson’s compatriot Sally Deng has created illustrations for the e-book that draw appreciable attraction from the truth that historic pictures are collaged with the drawings for which they served as fashions: into illustrations that go away behind the customs of younger grownup e-book illustration, simply as Jelle Lepman succeeded in doing so with the customs of coping with the defeated. The drawings alone would have given the impression of the Fifties, additionally due to the pastel colours that Deng used; In mixture with the largely older pictures, the result’s, surprisingly, a timeless impression, which can also be contributed to by the unfastened distribution of the illustrations on the pages.

The solely factor that’s considerably disappointing is that the (too) quite a few photos that present Lepman’s imaginative and prescient of her accumulating idea that transcends all language boundaries monotonously use the identical depiction: a flyby of well-known characters and scenes from worldwide youngsters’s literature. And there actually would have been extra to search out than simply “Pooh the Bear”, “Nils Holgersson”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “Bambi”, “Pinocchio” or “Heidi”. Not to say that one might have left the Western tradition as soon as. Finally, Jella Lepman additionally based the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People) board of trustees and the Youth UN, the place youngsters from everywhere in the world gathered to lift their voices for peace efforts.

Paterson’s narrative model is totally standard. That does not essentially do any hurt, given the extremely uncommon biographical material, and it’s definitely touching to learn that Paterson grew to become buddies with Jella Lepman’s granddaughter, however ultimately this clearly gave rise to a private obligation to permit the good friend to seem notably prominently. This is disproportionate to different members of the family. A girl with the audacity of Jella Lepman would even have deserved an unconventional biographer.

Katherine Paterson, Sally Deng: “Jella Lepman and her library of dreams”. Translated from English by Alexandra Rak. NordSüd Verlag, Zurich 2025. 110 pages, hardcover, €30. From 10 years