Janosch (pseudonym of Horst Eckert, 1931– ), extremely prolific and internationally renowned German author/illustrator of books for young children. Janosch has written and/or illustrated close to 200 books. His works have appeared in 47 languages and an estimated 5 million copies have been sold world‐wide. Most of these are playful and grotesquely funny tales for young children, but Janosch has written several novels for adults as well. In his autobiographical novel Janosch: Von dem Glück, als Herr Janosch überlebt zu haben (About the Luck to Have Survived as Mr Janosch, 1994), Janosch talks about his life and his dream of becoming a painter. Born into a working‐class family, he was apprenticed as a blacksmith and later worked for several years in a textile factory. His attempt to study at the Art Academy in Munich in 1953 failed, but he remained in Munich, designing wallpaper and writing and illustrating stories for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit, and the satirical journal Pardon.
Janosch has stated that he merely stumbled into writing children's books. He still sees himself as illustrator first and author second, yet he is extraordinarily talented as both. Social satire and parody have always been his preferred means of expression, but much warmth and gentle fun can also be found in his tales for the young. The menagerie of whimsical, endearing, sly, and clever anthropomorphized animal characters who come to life in his faux‐naïve drawings are lifted right out of fable and folk‐tale tradition. Many of his stories are in fact playful, demythifying, and anarchist recreations of German folk tales and fairy tales. Janosch erzählt Grimms Märchen (Not Quite as Grimm, 1972) belonged to the most controversial and successful children's books in Germany in 1972. The fairy tales in Janosch's collection are imaginative, creative, original, and turn morals upside down and inside out, and they invite readers familiar with the classic tales to productive comparisons.
One of Janosch's best‐known books is perhaps Oh, wie schön ist Panama (The Trip to Panama, 1978) which won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Prize for Children's and Youth Literature) in 1979. It is an account of an unsuccessful quest undertaken by the two friends, Little Bear and Little Tiger, that ultimately proves to be fully satisfying and rewarding for both. Friendship is also the theme of Die Fiedelgrille und der Maulwurf (The Cricket and the Mole, 1982), a ‘de‐moralized’ fable in which the cricket carelessly fiddles the summer away only to be taken in for a jolly winter by her good friend the Mole. This tale and its illustrations have the perfect blend of naïve sweetness and humorous grotesque that characterizes all of Janosch's production.
Bibliography
- Children's Literature Review, 26 (1992).
- Something about the Author, 72 (1993).
— Eva‐Marie Metcalf
