Christine Nöstlinger
Children’s writer who celebrated naughtiness and was hailed as a ‘reliably bad child-rearing influence’
CHRISTINE NÖSTLINGER, who has died aged 81, was regarded on mainland Europe as one of the best children’s writers of her time, admired for her crisp writing and subversive sense of humour, though she was little known in Britain.
Christine Nöstlinger had an instinctive understanding of children’s delight in naughtiness, her English translator, Anthea Bell, observing that she knew “the importance of not being earnest”. When in 2003 she shared the inaugural Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the world’s largest prize for children’s and young-adult literature, with the writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, the jury praised her “disrespectful humour”, noting that she was “a reliably bad child-rearing influence” of the same calibre as the Swedish creator of Pippi Longstocking.
In Britain she was probably best known for Conrad, the Factory-made
Boy, published in English in 1976, in which the scatty, artistic and improper Mrs Bartolotti receives a parcel in the post containing a tinned factory-made child called Conrad, a well brought-up seven-year-old boy who is much better behaved than his new parent. But they become very fond of one another, and when the factory decide they have made a mistake and want him back, Conrad does not want to go. In order to prevent himself being taken from his new home, Conrad has to be become an ordinary, obnoxious boy.
Christine Nöstlinger was born Christine Göth in Vienna on October 13 1936 to politically active socialist parents. Her father was a watchmaker and her mother a kindergarten teacher who was forcibly retired after the Nazis came to power to prevent her from indoctrinating her young charges. Christine Nöstlinger’s book, Fly Away
Home, published in 1973 and written from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old girl, was her way of processing her own wartime childhood: “Good cellars,” she wrote, “are important, more important than elegant living rooms or fine bedrooms, on account of the bombs.”
Her family was made homeless by Allied bombing and for a time they led a precarious existence eking out food stores and anticipating horrors from the invading Russian army. In the book, however, the soldiers turn out to be quite friendly, and the worst they do is get drunk and fire their guns.
Fly Away Home was adapted into an Austrian film in 2016. Meanwhile its sequel, Zwei Wochen im Mai (“Two Weeks in May”, 1981) told the story of how the poor watchmaker’s family tries to survive and find some semblance of normality amid the ruins.
Christine studied graphic arts at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna and worked as a graphic artist for a few years. An early marriage ended in divorce in 1957 and in 1959 she married Ernst Nöstlinger, a journalist.
For some years she concentrated on bringing up her two daughters (the older being from her first marriage), and she was 34 when she made her debut as a children’s author with Fiery
Frederica (1975). “I began writing because I was not a good artist,” she recalled. “I illustrated a picture book and wrote my own text for it. The book was published. The text won more approval than the pictures. As I was very keen on approval at the time, I took to writing.”
The book tells the story of a young girl, bullied on account of her red hair, who finds she can make her hair catch fire and use it to fly. It was the first of many tales mixing humour, fantasy and social engagement. Altogether Christine Nöstlinger published some 100 children’s books, both realistic and fantastical, always featuring a child at centre stage. She also published collections of poetry.
When in 1984 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for children’s literature for Conrad, the
Factory-made Boy, the jury drew attention to the “clear moral” in her work: “No one should be made to suffer just because [they are] different. No one should believe that their position, as parent or teacher or official, gives them the right to exercise undisputed authority over others, including, and especially, children.”
Christine Nöstlinger explained that she sought to encourage children to create a better world: “Since children live in an environment which offers them no encouragement to develop Utopias for themselves, we have to take them by the arm and show them how beautiful, cheerful, just and humane this world could be.”
In 2015 she gave a speech on racism and xenophobia at a commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp at the Austrian parliament.
Her husband, Ernst Nöstlinger, died in 2009. Her two daughters survive her.