Sometimes a century ends with the death of one person. This applies to Klaus Doderer, the last representative of a generation of “gold diggers in the field of children’s and youth literature”, as he once described himself. After 1945, this generation of founders, in a gold-rush mood, set themselves the task of helping the little-noticed children’s and young people’s literature to gain more weight and greater public respect and to emphasize its literary quality. Among them were the founder of the International Youth Library, Jella Lepman and her successor Walter Scherf, the young children’s book publishers Heidi Oetinger and Christa Spangenberg and later the publisher’s founder Hans-Joachim Gelberg. Klaus Doderer campaigned for the establishment of children’s and youth literature as a scientific subject and founded the world’s first institute for youth book research at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main in 1963. This made him a pioneer of modern young adult literature.
On the Death of Klaus Doderer – Culture
