ABSTRACT
The children’s literary sphere of action that has prevailed in Germany for a number of decades includes a multiplicity of distribution, evaluation, and recommendation systems, of which we can only discuss a selection in this work. A further striking characteristic of the situation in Germany is that the most important distribution, evaluation, and recommendation systems have for some time been secular in character and therefore not committed to any religious denomination or any other kind of ideological movement. Historically this sector of literary life has by no means always had such a variety of systems available, just as the religious, political, or ideological neutrality of the main mediation systems-after a brief initial fl ourish in the late 18th century, the age of the Enlightenment-only gained permanent acceptance in the second half of the 19th century.
