The Hidden Fairy Tale: Oskar Kokoschka’s Die träumenden Knaben

Abstract

Kokoschka’s first literary work The Dreaming Youths (Die träumenden Knaben) was published in 1908. The work includes a poem with eight colored and two black and white lithographs. Although the young artist was commissioned by the Wiener Werkstätte to make a children’s picture book, the end result seemed quite different: a sort of personal tale of self-discovery and sexual awakening during puberty placed in a dream scenario. Kokoschka himself remembers in his autobiography only following the task in the first lithograph. The aim of this paper is to show how Kokoschka actually continued to draw on the language of fairy tales, although apparently taking distance from it. The crucial role of children’s literature in adult life emerges especially within the process of shaping childhood memories and approaching traumatic experiences. The use of fairy tales becomes, therefore, an autobiographical urge and a means to tell personal experience through a universal language.