ABSTRACT
Children’s books keep alive a sense of nationality; but they also keep alive a sense of humanity. Semiotic models of literary history would seem to have little in common with Hazard’s Romantic notion of universal childhood. Paul Hazard’s concept of literature as an agent of communication between the children of the whole world was enthusiastically adopted, especially in post-war Western Germany and America. International understanding through children’s books was one of the most discussed topics among German-language children’s literature professionals in the 1950s and 1960s. On the pragmatic level, many people motivated by the concept of internationalism made important and lasting contributions towards a practical international understanding through children’s literature, as the case of Jella Lepman shows. The vision of the universal child, the same the world over, refuses to acknowledge difficulties and contradictions in relation to childhood, offering in their place a glorification of the child.
