Overinterpreting Das Urmel: linguistic, scientific and gender trouble ... but in a good way!

Speaking animals are obviously the bread and butter of children's literature. One aspect of Max Kruse's special genius in the Urmel stories lay in giving his animals comical speech "defects." Once my son became aware of these, he wanted to listen to the animal dialogues over and over and soon began to imitate the patterns. 

The most pronounced speech peculiarity belongs to Ping the penguin, who can't pronounce sch and says pf instead: 

Muschel > Mupfel
schrecklich > pfrecklich
schöne Sterne > pföne Pfterne
Schweinefleisch > Pfweinefleipf

In the wake of J's first encounter with Ping, he started asking and then telling me in the course of normal conversation how Ping would say this or that word or phrase. He still does this quite often, a year later. At first he had trouble distinguishing sch from ch, which Ping doesn't have trouble pronouncing. J has gotten a lot of practice on these sounds (sch, ch, pf), none of which are found in English. 

The other speech peculiarities are more subtle: the Urmel says d- and t- at the beginning of words instead of g- and k- ("danz toll"; "der Trankheit"); Wawa says tsch instead of z ("gantsch plötschlich"); Schusch says ä instead of i ("Mär äst was eingefallen"); the Seelefant ö instead of i and e ("Ös öst söhr traurög"). This is all quite challenging to read. Up to now, J has only really glommed on to Schusch's manner of speaking, though he has not begun to imitate it yet.

All in all, beyond the pronunciation practice, the Urmel stories are great for fostering attention to the nuances of speech and general linguistic awareness on multiple levels. 

One interesting question they subtly raise has to do with linguistic normativity: To what extent do we want to say that the animals speak "incorrectly," and to what extent do they simply have their own ways of speaking—their own idiolects? The stories empower the latter perspective in no small measure.

The way that science is handled is also quite nuanced. Evolution plays a major role in the Urmel world, and the stories are a great way of introducing and/or exploring that science with a child. The sophistication has to do with the way that science and what one might call practical philosophy are put in tension. 

Professor Tibatong, in addition to considering the Urmel as a means to an end (rescuing his reputation as a scientist), sees it in scientific terms, i.e., as the evolutionary "missing link" between reptiles and mammals. Accordingly, he doesn't quite grant the Urmel full legitimacy of being. For him, it represents a "bridge" between one category or class of animal and another; nor does it, as a relic from the past, fully participate in the present. The professor is not nearly the worst example of "means-thinking" in the stories, but he is not immune to it.

The Urmel, for its part, insists on absolute real-presence, stubbornly resisting the idea that it is a "link" or a "bridge" between anything, or anything other than precisely who it is right now and an end in itself. 

So these stories are underwritten by a real love and respect for evolutionary science, but there is also a very gentle critique of tendencies within that discourse toward teleological thinking and toward the ontological reification of abstract categories at the expense of lived creaturely life. This kind of thinking is often found in explanations of evolution for a young audience. For example, on p. 40 of this book,

A young person can read the following description of the Blind Snake (emphases mine):

A throwback to prehistoric reptiles, the primitive BLIND SNAKE (Typhlops sp.) has adapted to a life underground: smooth, even scales, a blunt head, and eyes so reduced that they are little more than points under the skin. Found worldwide, this snake is considered by some experts to be little more than a degenerate blind lizard.

Nice. If they're so primitive and degenerate, how have they managed to spread all over the world?

The question about the Urmel's identity also extend into gender: We never learn if it is male or female. There are debates in the internet over this. The Urmel, again, though a juvenile, expresses sovereign disregard for this kind of classification. Here, too, in an age where popular commercial culture anxiously demands you begin shaping your child's identity according to reductive and psycho-socially impoverishing gender categories even before their birth, the Urmel offers a salutary little moment of resistance.