Red Zora and Her Gang (Die rote Zora und ihre Bande) and the Croatian Canon of Children’s Literature

Red Zora and Her Gang1 (orig. Die rote Zora und ihre Bande) is a 1941 novel by the German-Swiss author Kurt Held (Kurt Kläber), inspired by the Croatian mentality and Croatian history. While it was enormously popular in Germany, the Croatian translation was issued only in 2017. In this paper, we analyse the hypothetical position of Red Zora within the Croatian canon of children’s literature established at the time the novel was written. Red Zora tends towards realism in shaping children’s reality based on unusual adventures in common with the most dominant of children’s novels so that it fits into the contemporary novelistic matrix, however with a distinctive detail – a girl as “gang leader” – which goes beyond the trends of Croatian children’s literature of the time. The paper considers the hypothetical question of the possible influence of the novel on the development of Croatian children’s literature regarding the construction of the female character.