Customer Reviews

Die Geschichte Von Peterchen Hase: Ein Buntes Marchenbuch/Von Beatrix Potter (Dover Little Activity Books)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
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Beautiful pictures helped my two year old really get into the story. When Peterchen sneezed, he sneezed. When Peterchen cried, he cried. The story may be a bit scary for very small children, but there's a happy ending, and it's a good opportunity to explain safety.

This is a German version of the classic Peter Rabbit. It's a good length for a bedtime story, reading in the car, or a distraction on a first airplane ride -- about 10 to 20 minutes to complete the story. The vocabulary is fairly simple and covers many day-to-day items - foods, clothes, gardening.

For those who don't know the story, mom rabbit goes to the bakery to buy brotchen. Peterchen, Floppsy, Mopsy, and Kuschelschwanzchen (Cottontail) are trusted to watch themselves. Peterchen goes where he shouldn't, into Herr MacGregor's garden. After a little snack, he loses his new jacket (second one this week) and shoes. Then he hides in a full watering can, meets some other animals, and finally escapes. When he gets home, he immediately falls to sleep, missing the wonderful dinner that mom got for the other rabbits.

It would be very nice if Amazon carried more foreign language versions of children's books, such as can be found on amazon.de.

I found that this was a good exercise for me to practice my translation skills while at the same time telling my five year old a story that she can understand. We are looking forward to a transfer to Germany and have started teaching the kids German.

This story of a struggle between small brown rabbits and a brutal white landowner is rich in symbolism. The landowner has eaten Peterchen's father. Peterchen sets out to eat what is his. The females hold back (the gender of Flopsy, Mopsy and Kuscheschwanzen is ambiguous - it is hinted that Benjamin Hasche is a fellow revolutionary). The white landowner's structures (Gerateschuppe and Stachelbeernetz) devour the environment to provide him with things to eat. As in so many folk tales of the clever trickster Peterchen is helped by birds and outwits the gigantic MacGregor. He finally escapes into the Geholz - the remaining pristine environment - discarding the emblematic uniform with which his mother has encumbered him. Was she innocent in his father's death? She persuades him to take tranqillizing drugs "Einen Essloffel vor dem Schlafengehen einnehmen" and in the final scene, with Peterchen in drugged sleep, capitalist values triumph as the siblings become completely anthropomorphic and feast on manufactured store-bought food.