Paul Maar
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Paul Maar became known to a wide audience with his stories about Sams. His other major successes include Lippel's Dream and Herr Bello und das blaue Wunder. He has received numerous awards for his books for children and young people, including the German Youth Literature Prize (1996). In his books, there are frequent allusions to works of the literary canon, including fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. Maar is also active as an illustrator, screenwriter and playwright.
Image: Bodow (Wikimedia Commons; CC-BY-SA-4.0)This year, the Kassel Grimm Poetics Professorship will be integrated more strongly than before into the research and teaching activities of the University's Institute for German Studies. Thus, more than twenty courses in literary studies, but also in linguistics and subject didactics, will deal with the topic of "Children Literature Language" in the coming summer semester.
Prof. Dr. Nikola Roßbach from the Institute of German Studies explained Maar's choice: "Children's and young people's literature is often only considered from a pedagogical point of view: What is the child supposed to learn from it? Paul Maar shows how multi-layered, sophisticated and genuinely literary children's books can be," she said. "He is the most important living German children's book author; it honors us and our university that he has accepted the Grimm Poetics Professorship." Her colleague Dr. Andreas Wicke, who researches and teaches in the field of children's and young adult literature, among other areas, emphasized the many references in Maar's texts, saying, "They tie in with the narrative literature of German Romanticism as well as international literature. Again and again, there are also allusions to or adaptations of motifs from the Grimmʼs fairy tales."
