When the world of children's books was preparing to become more colourful, beautiful and international in the 1950s and 1960s, publishers, critics and authors met every year for readings and discussions on the island of Mainau.

It was the time when the International Youth Library was founded in Munich, today the most extensive of its kind, and when the German youth literature prize was launched, which then, as now, also looks abroad.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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A frequent guest at Mainau was the journalist Sybil Countess Schönfeldt, born in Bochum in 1927.

She spent the night with other participants in a group dormitory, where stretched towels provided some privacy, she held talks with the authors and publishing house employees who had traveled from the GDR and wrote such clever and groundbreaking articles that she soon became the most prominent and influential critic of children's and youth literature in Germany and has remained so for a long time.

A blessing for the children's book

But she drew limits to her commitment: When a moderator was spontaneously sought for a podium, she refused to take on the job.

Because among the discussants, Hans Baumann, once the most prominent author of HJ songs, was now striving to make a name for himself with children's books like "I Moved with Hannibal".

"She doesn't sit next to an old Nazi like Baumann," she replied to the organizer, whereupon other participants joined her protest.

The author of a wide variety of books, who could write about behavior and cooking as well as about her forced labor under National Socialism, spoke vividly and stimulatingly of those years, just as she always found what interested her in every topic of conversation.

She was a blessing for the children's book scene, and at the same time, with her joy in speaking openly, she was also an attractive target for those who saw Schönfeldt's sense of style and tradition as an indication of a socially backward-looking attitude and who denounced her texts, which was unconvincing even then.

The Joke in the Bible

Sybil Countess Schönfeldt, married Schlepegrell, translated numerous children's books into German, most effectively perhaps the work of left-wing English author Edith Nesbit and books by Roald Dahl, she wrote about her friend Astrid Lindgren and retold the Bible, with a great sense for the Template slumbering joke.

Until the end she lived in her Hamburg apartment, received guests and cooked for them.

There were flower pots on the balcony, in which whatever the wind, birds or squirrels had carried could grow.

Sybil Gräfin Schönfeldt died on Wednesday at the age of 95.