Gerda Laufenberg: insights into the colorful world of rubble flowers

Gerda Laufenberg: insights into the colorful world of rubble flowers

In the Nippes district of Cologne, the normal life of an eight -year -old girl named Gerda takes place. Like many children and age, Gerda is curious and likes to explore the world around him. She meets with other children in the Veedel and experiences adventure. But her imagination often goes beyond reality, because her father, a commercial employee in a factory, has a less exciting job. In order to compensate for the monotony of his everyday life, Gerda invents stories about a father who drives through Europe with a truck. So she unfolds her creativity and creates a colorful fantasy world from the few siblings she has.

in an environment where her mother - a hardworking secretary - strives for a better life, sometimes feels uncomfortable. The family lives in a workers' district, which of her mother's plans to move into a better residential area. For Gerda, this means that she has to deal with even more changes. Their eleven aunts are a colorful element in family life, but often Gerda has difficulty understanding the serious and sometimes shocking terms that her mother uses, even if she tries bravely to understand the language of adults.

a childhood between imagination and reality

Gerda recently completed her first day of school. This new experience could help her find access to the complex world of language. In the four -story house in which the family lives, she not only gets to know different families, including a landlord with an unmarried man and the Eschbach family, who has a strikingly often police visit. There is even a neighbor from Alsace who speaks a strange language, and a Miss who gives violin lessons. All of these encounters provide Gerda stories that she incorporates into her own stories.

With her adventures and insights, she hits the nerve of the times and reflects the views of child and youth literature in the post-war period. This era, which extends around the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, is considered to be the flowering period of the latest children's literature, which said goodbye to traditional forms and gave a space to the child's experiences. The literature of this time was looking for new perspectives and opportunities to live out childish wishes and dreams-a development accompanied by many contemporary works, which [Kinderundjugendmedien.de] (https://www.kinderundjugendmedien.de/kriffe-und-termini/570-kinder-und-djugend-der- after-year-and-and-oesterreich) revolutionary is described.

"The bizarre beauty of the rubble flowers"

Gerda Laufenberg's book "The bizarre beauty of the rubble flowers", which was published by Dittrich Verlag and comprises 156 pages, reflects this dynamic. The price of 18 euros is certainly well invested for everyone who is interested in the Cologne characters of the post -war period. The work not only offers humorous, but also loving insights into the child's soul of an eight -year -old who wants to conquer her place in the world. It addresses the inaccessible kind of adults and the questions that the child has to answer. The distance between the worlds of Gerda and her parents is impressively illuminated and represents the challenges with which children of this generation were faced with.

In a time when children's literature changed her face so much, Laufenberg's history has the potential to captivate readers as well as the works of large masters of literature that left a new generation a picture of the world. Ultimately, it shows how tight childhood and imagination are connected and what great potential in the literature is slumbering when she dares to tell - a thought that is always present when looking back at the history and when looking at the current trends.