There was a little witch who wanted to be a good witch. Not a perfect witch — a good one. The difference matters. She practiced hard, got into trouble, broke the rules occasionally, and kept trying. There was a robber named Hotzenplotz with a seven-feathered hat and a pepper grinder. There was a small, friendly ghost who only wanted to see the sun, just once, before vanishing back into the cold. And there was Krabat — an orphaned boy, a raven in the winter dark, a mill that turned in the night, and a love fierce enough to break what no counter-spell could touch.
These were the gifts Otfried Preußler gave to children. To thirty million children, in fifty-five languages, across half a century.
If you grew up with these stories you already know what they did to you. They went somewhere deeper than entertainment. The little witch isn’t a villain — she’s the best kind of rebel, warm and mischievous and genuinely trying. It is entirely possible to fall a little in love with her, as I did. Krabat is something else entirely — it is initiation in the oldest sense. A young person drawn into a place of real power and real darkness, who finds the thread back not through cleverness or force, but through being truly known by someone who loves him. That story existed long before Preußler. He just remembered it more clearly than most.
He could remember because he came from Reichenberg — not Liberec, Reichenberg — in Bohemia, a borderland where Germanic and Slavic traditions had braided together for seven hundred years. His grandmother spoke Czech better than German. She was the transmission line — telling the old stories by firelight to a boy who received them the way children receive real things: not as lessons, but as substance. They shaped his imagination at the root.
The Boy Who Wrote About the Harvest
In 1940, at seventeen, he wrote Erntelager Geyer — a short novel about the youth harvest camps, in the spirit of the times as a teenager understood it.
Here is something almost nobody says: a boy writing about community labor, about young people helping bring in the harvest, about belonging to something larger than yourself — that impulse, stripped of context, is not monstrous. It is recognizably human. The longing to belong, to contribute, to matter in a world that has spent years telling your community it doesn’t quite fit — that is not a disease. That is youth. The political architecture around it was something he could not fully see from inside it. What seventeen-year-old in any era can?
In 1942 he went to the Eastern Front. In 1944 the Soviets captured him. He spent five years in prison camps while everything he had known was dismantled behind him. Three million German-speaking Bohemians — Sudetenlanders whose families had lived in that land since the twelfth century — were expelled by decree, ratified at Potsdam. Organized. Systematic. Their language, their traditions, their churchyards: reclassified. His Reichenberg became Liberec. The graves stayed. The people did not. That story, too, is rarely told with the gravity it deserves.
He returned in 1949, settled in Rosenheim with the other expelled Sudetenlanders, became a schoolteacher, and started writing.
He never spoke much about any of it. The stories said what needed saying.
The Decades When Nobody Needed a Tribunal
For fifty years, nobody felt the need to put him on trial. The people who had actually lived through the war — who carried real losses, real displacement, real memories with weight in them — read his books to their children and their grandchildren without apparent crisis of conscience. Over twenty schools across Germany put his name above their doors. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung named him the greatest German-language children’s author of his time. In 1998 Preußler himself said of Krabat: “It is simultaneously my story, the story of my generation, and the story of all young people who come into contact with power and its temptations — and get entangled in them.”
He said it plainly. He always had, to anyone willing to listen.
Then, in 2015 — two years after his death at ninety — a literary scholar discovered Erntelager Geyer, and the machinery began to turn.
The Timeline of a Completed Erasure
The sequence matters. Every date is a data point.
2013: The gymnasium in Pullach, Bavaria — one of over twenty schools bearing his name — formally adopts the name Otfried-Preußler-Gymnasium. The local council had already voted against it that year, citing “no connection to Pullach.” They take the name anyway.
2018: The school begins what it calls an “intensive examination” of Preußler’s biography.
January 2024: The school formally applies to the Bavarian Ministry of Education to remove his name.
March 2024: The municipal council votes unanimously to support the removal. The application goes to the ministry.
September 2024: New school year begins. The ministry is still “reviewing.” The school opens under the name it no longer wants.
October 2024: Preußler’s daughter and estate executor, Susanne Preußler-Bitsch, withdraws the naming rights herself — calling the school’s conduct “unwürdig und rufschädigend”: undignified and reputation-damaging. She states that it would be against her father’s wishes for any institution to carry his name while actively rejecting it.
January 22, 2025: The Ministry approves the renaming.
March 1, 2025: The wall is scraped clean. The school is now Staatliches Gymnasium Pullach im Isartal. A neutral name. An empty name. As intended.
The school cited, officially, two grounds for removal. First: the 1940 novel. Second — and here the mask slips entirely — that some of Preußler’s books contain “conflict resolution through violence and/or witchcraft” and are therefore “questionable” for a modern gymnasium.
The little witch, formally, is part of the indictment.
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Join Now →The Hypocrisy Writes Itself
One German commentator observed what needed observing: “The longer the Third Reich is dead, the stronger the resistance against Hitler grows.” The retroactive courage is remarkable in its selectivity.
Jürgen Habermas — Germany’s most celebrated living philosopher, the dominant intellectual voice of the Federal Republic, the man the establishment treats as its conscience — was a Jungvolk leader in 1944 and 1945. Untouched. Celebrated. His chair at Frankfurt is not under review.
Günter Grass — Nobel Prize laureate, author of The Tin Drum, the man who spent decades lecturing Germans on their moral failures — was a member of the Waffen-SS at seventeen. He admitted it publicly only in 2006, sixty years later. His Nobel Prize was not revoked. His name was not scraped from anything.
This is not incidental. We have written at length about how the Frankfurt School — the intellectual architects of postwar Germany’s psychological transformation — identified specific Germans to be elevated into positions of cultural authority. The selection criterion was not clean hands. It was compatible character structure: those whose psychology had been shaped away from what the re-educators called the “authoritarian personality.” We covered this in depth here.
Habermas was a direct student of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the re-established Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung in the 1950s. He absorbed Critical Theory at the source. He became the postwar German establishment’s philosopher of choice — the man who gave intellectual legitimacy to the entire project of a permanently guilty, permanently supervised, post-national Germany. His past was not erased. It was useful. A man with a past can be managed.
Otfried Preußler had no such use. He wrote stories about witches and ravens. He did not lecture. He did not theorize Germany’s guilt for them. He just gave children the old Bohemian stories his grandmother had given him, and trusted the children to know what to do with them.
That is apparently the more dangerous position.
What Is Actually Being Removed
The school board says it is protecting students.
From what, exactly? From stories about witches and magic that carry folk wisdom older than Bavaria, older than the church that eventually tried to suppress that wisdom, older than any modern nation in that landscape? From the question Krabat never stops asking: how do you know when you’re inside the dark mill, and what does it take to find your way out?
That last question is not historical. It is not about the 1940s. It is the question every generation faces when it is offered power, belonging, certainty, by someone who holds it first. It is the question Preußler said was his story and every young person’s story.
Remove the name and you remove the question.
Replace it with a clean wall and a neutral designation and the implicit message that complexity is a problem to be solved rather than a condition to be inhabited honestly.
Goethe saw this mechanism clearly. Tätige Unwissenheit — active ignorance — is not the ignorance that simply doesn’t know. It is the ignorance that moves. That acts. That scrapes names off walls with administrative efficiency, files the paperwork, awaits ministerial approval, and calls the whole process a considered educational decision.
It never knows what it’s destroying. That is precisely what makes it frightful.
The Gravestone Stays
The gravestone in Rosenheim still says: Kinder brauchen Geschichten.
Children need stories.
He earned the right to say it. He knew what it cost to carry stories out of an expelled culture across a collapsed world and give them to children who had no idea where they came from — the dark mills, the friendly ghosts, the little witch who only wanted to be good.
His daughter said it plainly when she withdrew his name from Pullach: the school’s treatment of her father was undignified. She was right. The school had adopted his name in the year of his death, when he could no longer respond, and spent the next decade manufacturing distance.
The Orwellian part is not the renaming. The Orwellian part is the machine that makes it feel like progress.
First you remove the name. Then you remove the memory of what the name carried. Then you remove the capacity to ask why it was removed. What remains is a clean wall. And a generation of children who never met the little witch, never followed Krabat into the winter dark, never learned that the way out of a corrupted initiation is to be truly known by someone who loves you.
Active ignorance does not know what it destroys. That is precisely what makes it frightful.
The conscience-police didn’t appear from nowhere. Read where they came from: https://www.maier-files.com/the-camps-we-dont-talk-about-how-allied-pow-re-education-created-west-germanys-ruling-class/
Related: They Fled Hitler. Then They Destroyed the West. — The Frankfurt School’s long march from Weimar to your school curriculum.
