Happy 215th Birthday, Dr. Heinrich Hoffman!

I thought that name was familiar, when I saw it on a notification elsewhere, earlier today.

Here’s why:

Heinrich Hoffman was born in Frankfurt on June 13, 1809.  His mother died when he was an infant, and his father subsequently married her sister for what was–by all accounts–a happy marriage for all involved.

After qualifying as a physician and working for some years at a pauper’s clinic, Hoffman further qualified as a psychiatrist due to a great deal of “boots on the ground” training at a local lunatic asylum, and he had a reputation as a responsible and empathetic doctor who did his best for his unfortunate patients, often achieving a quality of life for them that other doctors of the time could not.

At some point he began to augment his medical career with that of a writer of tales for children.  Which is how I caught up with him, somewhere around 1960, at the age of about five.

Hoffman’s best known work for children is Der Struwwelpeter, a mid-19th century German book of cautionary tales.  Translated into English not long after it was published, it was one of my childhood favorites.  Some of its stories have a pretty acceptable message–and one that speaks well of Heinrich Hoffman–in modern terms, at least: The hare steals the gun from the nasty hunter while he’s napping, and then hunts him down herself; the little boys who pull the wings off flies suffer an alarming fate; the racist children who tease the “harmless blackamoor” are dipped in a vat of ink and themselves become the target of mockery and scorn.

Still, it’s hard to imagine an elementary school class of today being allowed to enjoy–and I did enjoy–such horrifying stories.

Ugh.

And yet.

Struwwelpeter–and a few other such stories–served a useful purpose in my formative years.  They served as examples of how not to behave, as exemplars for accountability, and as examples–before it was a ‘thing’–of the “Don’t be that guy” meme.  (Because every generation thinks they’ve invented, all by themselves, such ideas.  LOL.)

In short, absorbing such horrifying stories, early in my life, taught me the following: “Don’t lie.”  “Don’t boast.”  “Don’t cheat.”  “Don’t hate.”  “Don’t be a jerk.  And, above all, “Be kind.”  Lessons for a lifetime.  Which I absorbed and took forward.

I’ve known a few (very few) IRL “Struwwelpeters” during the course of my seven full decades on this earth, and almost none of them was–at least in actual age-related terms, more than a decade old.

As for the (vanishingly few) rest of them, the chickens–as they say–quickly “came home to roost.”  They (metaphorically at least) hanged themselves, set themselves on fire, starved themselves, succumbed to those whom they’d tormented in ways that were shockingly appropriate, or they simply couldn’t stop fidgeting long enough to let life take its course without themselves as the center of attention.

Negative, and the worst, examples all. I guess such things are useful markers too, although I sometimes wish the lessons life must teach us need not be quite so unpleasant or so difficult. Still, I suppose, we get there in the end, as I think I have.