The graphic artist Sonja Danowski has created the sleep book of the year with "Nachts im Traum".
What at first glance could be taken as an insult - a book so boring that every reader is inevitably transported to the realm of Morpheus - is in the everyday world of really electrified and sleep-deprived children a not to be scoffed at: You look at the poems and pictures together, in an extensive description, brings together the overabundance of details to be discovered in Danowski's pictorial world - and boom, parents and children are dozing off.
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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A double page of dreaming children is followed by another with a kind of haiku in children's mouths on the left-hand side and the graphic artist's pictorial fantasies about these very sentences on the opposite page.
Danowski is rightly regarded as a painter-poet of memory.
Her translucent colored drawings always wear pastel muted colors;
timeless or slightly antiquated dresses give the whole thing a delicate fifties look.
At times a kind of milky veil even seems to lie over little faces and objects.
In order to create the protected atmosphere of a dream zone, Danowski deliberately dims the light in her pictorial spaces.
From dream tableaux to dream tableaux, one can follow in slow motion that the eyes of the children turning the pages are falling more and more shut.
Admittedly, Danowski does not exaggerate the surrealisms in "Night in a Dream" as much as in her parallel world "Gon Gon", an enchanted planet on which the eponymous "Smon Smon" lives.
But the children in their current book also move through the most carefully "invented" dream worlds, when, for example, Lucia with a dark struwwelpeter mane rides through a still body of water on a lamb-like giant dog plush toy and instead of leaves red, yellow, blue beads wind around the trees - the however, are in turn connected to the girl by a leash.
It is not unworldly escapes that Danowski presents to the little people.
Parents cannot protect them completely from the fact that they often have to see disturbing images on their way to kindergarten or school during the day, and probably shouldn't either.
In the book, little Kai, for example, steers his children's vehicle, which is by no means commercially available, a wonderful mixture of bobby car and Lohengrin swan carriage, "to a place with flowers and birdsong in the forest".
The forest to be headed for has already found a place in Kai's two-seater in the form of a fully grown tree, including a spacious nest with a bird family in the crown.
So that the birdsong can start, you have to get out of the city.
The journey passes a dreary factory setting with fourteen smoking chimneys.
Or the girl Ume, who lets the koi carps circle and the small sails of lotus blossoms fly, while at the same time patiently waiting in her anchor kit boat for the wind to come, almost like a Buddhist.
In fact, a whirling circle of motion is formed on the corresponding book page when the koi circle around a central ceremonial lotus, nudge the boat-shaped petals with their fish mouths and hand them to the girl at the railing, who in turn rigs them up as the little pink miniature sails of her ship.
And although the lotus is the divine symbol plant par excellence in Buddhism, because it is based in the muddy morass of pools and ponds, but its blossoms stretch towards the sky like a sun, the full depth of this whirlpool of images can still be intuitively understood by children.
The seasonal changes and cycles anyway: A river meanders happily across the floor through the door gap of Little Anne's room.
The child reverently populates the resulting glacial landscape with herds of animals and crafted trees with cloudy crowns and giant white blossoms that also resemble windmills (by the way: brilliant crafting idea for dense fantasy forests that are not scary!).
And all of a sudden, offspring and parental bookkeepers are "night in a dream".
Sonja Danowski: "Night in a dream"
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Bohem Verlag, Münster 2022. 64 p., hardcover, €20.
From 4 years