COVER TO COVER

MAX UND MORITZ: A CHILDREN’S TALE OF CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

HANS DÖPPE

June 26, 2025

First published in 1865, Wilhelm Busch’s “Max und Moritz” is a dark, rhymed picture story about two mischievous boys who wreak havoc on their village—until they are caught, ground into crumbs, and fed to ducks. Ostensibly written for children, it reads more like a fable of punishment, control, and the cost of stepping out of line. On its 160th anniversary, the book feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. What begins as slapstick ends in silence—and the logic behind it hasn’t gone away..

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My grandmother read me the first story that stuck in my mind. It didn’t end in a hug or a lesson. It ended in erasure. Two boys, seven pranks, and then silence. No tears, no warning, just gone. It was called Max und Moritz, and it was, in theory, a book for children. In practice, it was a morality tale so severe, it read like something etched into the wall of a Prussian schoolroom.

She read it in German, of course, her voice soft and clipped, like the edge of a knife that had just been wiped clean. I remember the illustrations more than the words: the boys’ mean little faces, the chickens dangling, the tailor falling into the stream, and, finally, the mill where the boys are ground into bits and fed to ducks.

There is no warm parental gaze in Max und Moritz, no redemption arc. Just punishment. Violent, impersonal, irrevocable.

Flattern auf und in die Höh’ / Ach herje, herjemineh!

Flutter up and to the sky, / Oh dear me! Oh my, oh my!

I remember laughing at the pranks, at first—the thread through the widow’s chickens, the teacher’s exploding pipe. But my laughter ended where the story did: abruptly. The book closed. The boys were gone.

Decades passed. The copy of the book I owned was lost. My grandmother died. I forgot the names, but not the sensation. That early awareness that the world was not built to explain itself. That actions had consequences, and not always proportional ones. That mischief might be fun, but the adult world did not have a sense of humor.

I bought Max und Moritz again last week because my daughter—four now—was asking for “something funny.” I remembered the cover. I remembered the boys. I had not remembered how brutal it all was.

Sitting beside her, I tried to read it the way my grandmother had. As if it were just another children’s story. As if the final grinding and feeding to ducks was not so outlandishly severe that it bordered on the absurd.

Schnupdiwup! da wird nach oben

Schon ein Huhn heraufgehoben;

Schnupdiwup! Jetzt Numro zwei;

Schnupdiwup! Jetzt Numro drei;

Und jetzt kommt noch Numro vier:

Schnupdiwup! Dich haben wir!

Snip-snap! Up into the air—

Goes a chicken unaware!

Snip-snap! Number two is caught!

Snip-snap! Number three is sought!

And now here comes number four:

Snip-snap! Got you—shut the door!

But something stopped me before I got to the ending. My daughter looked up at me and asked, “Why are they mean?” And I didn’t know if she meant the boys or the adults.

Max und Moritz was written by Wilhelm Busch exactly 160 years ago, in 1865, just six years before the founding of the German Empire. A period of simmering tensions, political unifications, and industrial transformation, marked by iron rails, conscript armies, and the tightening grip of state power. The unification of Germany was not only a political project but a cultural one, requiring order, discipline, and a shared moral framework. Children were seen less as innocents and more as unfinished citizens, raw material for the Prussian school system and future roles in bureaucracy or battle. Education was not about self-expression; it was about shaping obedience and national character.

Und schon ist er auf der Brücke, / Kracks! Die Brücke bricht in Stücke.

And now he’s on the bridge—oh no! / Crack! The bridge breaks down below.

In this atmosphere, morality tales didn’t sugarcoat. They struck hard and fast, like lightning meant to illuminate the path through discipline. Stories were not meant to entertain, but to instruct. Mischief was not endearing—it was dangerous. And so books like Max und Moritz delivered their lessons with blunt force. The humor was sharp, the consequences immediate, the worldview clear: Stray from the rules, and you will be dealt with swiftly and without appeal.

This attitude of punishment as moral correction, of order as virtue, of individuality as threat, laid the cultural groundwork for a society increasingly receptive to authoritarianism. Otto von Bismarck’s empire was forged through military might and sustained by obedience, bureaucracy, and hierarchy. The child trained to accept harsh discipline without question became the adult who accepted state power as a necessity. Decades later, that logic metastasized into the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler, who promised not just strength and unity but also the cleansing of disorder. A culture taught to equate mischief with danger, and punishment with justice, was disturbingly well prepared to look away—or even applaud—when cruelty was institutionalized.

Rums! Da geht die Pfeife los

Mit Getöse, schrecklich groß.

Kaffeetopf und Wasserglas,

Tabaksdose, Tintenfaß,

Ofen, Tisch und Sorgensitz

Alles fliegt im Pulverblitz.

Boom! The pipe explodes with might—

A truly terrifying sight.

Coffee pot and water glass,

Tobacco tin and inkwell pass,

Stove and table, worry-seat—

All go flying in the heat!

Busch himself was a satirist and illustrator, sharp-witted and suspicious of authority. He didn’t idealize childhood. If anything, he exposed its anarchic core. Max und Moritz was a reaction to the cloyingly moralistic children’s literature of its time—stories where virtue triumphed with a smile and mischief was gently corrected, often with a hymn or a moral verse. Books like Friedrich Wilhelm Güll’s Kinderheimat (1851) offered sanitized depictions of childhood, full of obedient boys, dutiful girls, and lessons wrapped in syrupy rhymes. Busch replaced sentimentality with satire, and happy endings with ducks. Max and Moritz aren’t naughty in a cute way—they are agents of destruction. And the world they live in responds with mechanized cruelty.

The pranks are memorable not just for their mischief, but for how they expose the hypocrisies of the adult world. In the first, they kill the widow Bolte’s chickens by luring them with breadcrumbs and stringing them up. In the second, they steal the cooked chickens from her kitchen, prompting her dog to be unjustly punished. Then they fill their teacher’s pipe with gunpowder, leading to an explosion. They saw halfway through a narrow crossing, and the tailor Böck, punctual as ever, unwittingly does the rest. They slip bugs into their uncle’s bed. They cut holes in a baker’s sacks so the grain spills out. Each prank escalates until, finally, they are caught, stuffed into a sack, and ground to death.

The mill is the endpoint. The image of the boys being pulverized and fed to ducks is grotesque, unforgettable. It’s not just punishment. It’s obliteration.

In die Tüte von Papiere / Sperren sie die Krabbeltiere.

Into a paper bag they drop / The creepy-crawlies—sealed on top.

And maybe, in hindsight, it was a premonition. The beginning of a cultural logic that would, just years later, feed young men into far more literal machines. First in the wars of Prussia, then in the trenches of the Somme, and again in the total annihilation of World War II. The idea that mischief—or deviation—must be crushed, ground down, made to disappear, did not stop at literature. It marched forward in uniforms, with flags and efficiency. What started as metaphor in a children’s book would become machinery, bureaucracy, conscription, grinding boys into history, and then into dust.

My grandmother grew up in a world where things were lost all the time: most of the family during World War II, houses to invasion, money to a regime that changed the rules overnight, and finally her home. For her, a story like Max und Moritz wasn’t disturbing. It was clarifying. She wasn’t telling me a tale to soothe me. She was inducting me into a worldview. That the world was not fair. That people are cruel. That actions matter. That mischief ends badly.

It occurs to me now that her choice to read me that book was not casual. She wasn’t trying to scare me. She was trying to warn me.

We live now in a society that loves to flirt with punishment. We hunt in public, sentence in private, and call it justice. We punish not only wrongdoing, but tone, taste, timing. We punish not just with laws, but with public opinion, and with algorithmic exile.

And often, as with Max und Moritz, the punishment is disproportionate. Two boys saw a bridge in half, and they are fed to ducks. Today, someone posts a joke that doesn’t land, and they’re digitally obliterated. Sometimes we cheer. Sometimes we don’t notice.

Knusper, Knasper! — wie zwei Mäuse / Fressen sie durch das Gehäuse.

Crunch and munch! Like little mice, / They gnaw through walls—not once but twice!

But what frightens me more now is what Max und Moritz also got right: Cruelty doesn’t only come from above. Children, too, are capable of it. Not because they are inherently bad, but because they are still learning how to carry power. And they experiment with it—on one another. The playground is full of little trials: who gets excluded, who gets laughed at, who is left out at lunch or mocked behind a hand. It is easy to say they don’t mean it. But often they do. Or at least, they mean to test the hierarchy.

Today, that testing happens not only in classrooms but in group chats, Instagram DMs, and anonymous message boards. Screenshots become weapons. Secrets are currency. And somewhere in the middle of this, someone always gets fed to the ducks.

We raise our children in a world that encourages surveillance and spectacle, and then we’re surprised when they turn it on one another. If cruelty is the air we breathe—relational, political, algorithmic—why should children behave differently? They are simply following the cues. This isn’t a question of blame, but of atmosphere. What kind of wind are we sending them out into? And how much of that old mill, the one Busch drew so gleefully, is still turning in our own backyards?

»Her damit!« Und in den Trichter / Schüttelt er die Bösewichter.

“Hand them here!”—and down the spout, / He shakes the little rascals out.

What frightened me as a child—those final, grinding consequences—feels eerily familiar now. The machine of social judgment is just as mechanical, just as irreversible, and just as indifferent to nuance. The mill still turns. And yet, despite everything, I wonder now whether my grandmother also found the story a little funny. Not because she was cruel, but because she knew the difference between moral instruction and survival strategy. She didn’t raise me to be Max or Moritz. She read me the book to show me the system. To teach me not just how to behave, but how to watch.

Now, I sit beside my daughter. I tell her about the boys, but I do not read the ending. I leave them in the middle of a prank. I let them escape. I buy us both a little more time.

But I keep the book on the shelf. Because she’ll need it one day. Because the world’s mills continue to turn.

Hans Döppe (b. 1986 in Kassel) is one of Germany’s most renowned child psychologists and fairy tale analysts—think Sigmund Freud with a bedtime story. He has cracked more of Grimm’s hidden codes than a locksmith at a gingerbread house. If your kid dreams of wolves, witches, or wicked stepmothers, he’s already written a paper about it.

Cover image: A portrait of disobedience