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Writer Funke: “Told too rarely about heroes who speak a different language, look different, believe different things than we do?”

Photo: Helmut Fricke/dpa

The writer Cornelia Funke practices self-criticism. For too long she believed that Germany would be immune to fascist promises for a very long time after the Second World War: "It has to be a powerful vaccine that kills every right-wing virus immediately," she writes in an article for the weekly newspaper "Die Time".

Now the author of the “Ink World” books asks herself the questions: “Have our stories told too little about the fact that everything, simply everything, is so much easier with each other instead of against each other? Have we talked too rarely about heroes who speak a different language, look different, believe different things than we do?”

One consequence that Funke has drawn from this is that she is working with a young Syrian woman on her report about her family's escape from Aleppo. “The people the AfD wants to deport have so much to tell us,” writes the writer, who now lives in Italy after almost 20 years in the USA. She is convinced that stories could be told together with them "that convince our children that strange and different always holds a promise: that you can understand the world a little better through encounters."

The “Grüffelo” illustrator Axel Scheffler, who has lived in Great Britain for more than 30 years, did not believe that the rise of right-wing extremists in Germany was possible. “But in order to make children’s books, you have to maintain a little hope,” writes Scheffler in “Zeit”. Most children's book creators tried to make the world a little better: "It's best to start with the little ones!"

The Hamburg children's book author Kirsten Boie ("The Little Knight Trenk") warns in view of the increasing right-wing extremism: "History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. But we should be very, very careful." After the AfD entered parliament, she already tried to warn with the young adult novels "Dark Night" and "Don't cry, you're still alive."

Paul Maar, the inventor of "Sam" who was born in 1937, believes that he "shaked off the unacknowledged fear of the return of the ghosts of my childhood by not ceasing to write books for children." He hopes, he writes in his “Zeit” article, that his books “offer children an inner island where they can retreat and feel protected.”

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