ABSTRACT
The action system we are discussing here has suffered a considerable decline in importance in Germany in recent decades-indeed, it can be found, if at all, only in an atrophied form. Nevertheless, from the historical perspective, it has been of great importance: In Germany it molded the whole children’s literary action fi eld for a broad span of time. For this reason I will devote myself in this chapter not to the present, but to the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the period when this action system was at its most fl ourishing. The most important actors in this action system-which was purely an evaluation system-were the teachers, not tied to any particular religious denomination, who had always felt themselves to be responsible not just for teaching privately or in schools, but also for the children’s development outside school. In other words, they regarded themselves not just as teachers in school, but as educators, as pedagogues in the broadest sense. One aspect of this was that they saw themselves as responsible for children’s and young people’s leisure reading, which they thought they ought to guide and monitor. From the middle of the 19th century onwards it was mainly teachers in the lower schools, and particularly primary schools, who were active in this evaluation system.1
