U52 years after its publication, everything has been said about Otfried Preußler’s “Krabat”: a modern classic of young adult books, translated into more than thirty languages, sold millions of copies. But not everything has been shown yet, despite animated and live-action films, theater and opera adaptations. And despite the illustrations by Herbert Holzing, which have been an integral part of “Krabat” from the first edition: With their colorful, paper theater-like appearance, which owes as much to the baroque era of the book as it does to the animation aesthetic of the 1960s, they have supported three generations of readers the fairytale atmosphere of Preußler’s material and gently toned down the horror material it offers. These images are so closely linked to the reading experience in a way that only Walter Trier’s drawings for Erich Kästner’s “Emil and the Detectives” or Franz Josef Tripp’s for Preußler’s “Robbers Hotzenplotz” were able to achieve in Germany through the books of another author Enrich illustrations.
But now, on the occasion of Preußler’s hundredth birthday, there is a newly illustrated edition of Krabat: large format, no longer colorful, no longer graphically oriented towards the time of action and creation. And especially now with an emphasis on the dark side of the book. Mehrdad Zaeri, born in Iran in 1970, shortly before “Krabat” was first published, and fled to Germany with his family in 1984, where he became one of the most creative book illustrators (only last year “An Angel in the Night” was published together with Cornelia Funke “), has chosen a style for his charcoal drawings that is inspired by expressionist silent films and at the same time also cites the illustration art of Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward – the greats of the interwar period, who each represented the principle of books without words.
“Krabat,” however, is an eloquent book, the masterful updating of an originally Sorbian legend that Preußler set in Lusatia at the end of the seventeenth century – i.e. in a region that had only been given to Electoral Saxony a few decades earlier as a reward for loyalty to the emperor in times of war. which then horribly devastated the region. This geographical-historical setting with the corresponding traumas plays into the story of the adolescent Krabat, who goes into the service of a miller as an apprentice, whose true nature of a sorcerer provides the fundamental conflict of the plot. The good-evil schema comes from fairy tales, and Zaeri consequently uses it as a model for his impressive black and white drawings.
Eighty of them are spread across the large volume, which covers more than three hundred pages, from vignettes to double-page illustrations like the one reproduced above. You can see the meticulousness with which Zaeri has translated Preußler’s descriptions and moods into images. As readers, we always follow Krabat’s perspective, even though the novel has an authorial narrator: “Krabat becomes one with the candlelight that the Kantorka carries before him. Now he is close to her – closer than he has ever been to a girl before. He looks into a young face that is very beautiful within the strict confines of the headband and bonnet. The eyes are large and gentle; They look down on him and don’t see him – or do they?” And we look at Zaeri’s picture and see exactly that – don’t we?
But the illustrator did not slavishly serve the text. Successful illustration is always a story that goes beyond the text, and so Zaeri also shows us Krabat himself, through whose eyes we see everything when we read. Zaeri also counteracts Preußler’s general proximity to the action, his avoidance of large panoramas – for example on Krabat’s path to the remote mill in the forest, which is completed in less than ten lines before a page-long “close-up” of the inside of the mill takes place through individual motifs. And he also takes a distance of a completely different kind, for example right at the beginning of the story, when Krabat goes through the winter with two other begging boys as star singers and Zaeri only sketches the trio, slightly blurred in the white landscape and thus discreetly avoiding one of Preußler’s terms to put into the picture that could meet with reading resistance today: “Mohrenkönig”. The publisher has included a short note in the imprint that refers to the intertextual and historical context of the story; Any text changes have been omitted.
It’s a completely different “Krabat” thanks to the new pictures. Not one for which one would have to sacrifice Holzing’s familiar drawings, and that wasn’t even Zaeri’s ambition. Rather, his diametrically opposed aesthetics express respect for Holzing, because the results are incomparable. And respect for Preußler’s story anyway.
Otfried Preussler: “Krabat”. Novel. With pictures by Mehrdad Zaeri. Thienemann Verlag, Stuttgart 2023. 320 pages, hardcover, €28. From 12 years old.
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