Morality Lesson Gone Wrong
Struwwelpeter has one entry with a surprisingly modern message, but presented in a questionable way. In “The Inky Boys,“ three white boys tease a black boy. This angers a local man, Agrippa, (depicted as a sort of wizard), who yells at the white boys to stop their teasing, how it isn’t fair or nice. Agrippa grabs the boys and dips them into an ink pot.
The message is to show how teasing people of different ethnicities is terrible and wrong. By itself, the message of racism being wrong is rather progressive for the times. But there’s still the implication that being ‘dark’ is a bad thing, when the boys are dipped in ink and forced to be ‘dark’ to experience how it feels. While it reflects the sentiments of the time, it is a rather blatantly racist viewpoint when observed by modern readers using today’s standards.
