VIENNA. The creator of “Benjamin Blümchen” and “Bibi Blocksberg”, Elfie Donnelly, responded to the renaming of a kindergarten in Bautzen with an appeal against wakefulness. The facility is now called “Spreewichtel” and no longer “Benjamin Blümchen”. Reason: The talking elephant also feeds on sugar cubes and no longer fits into today’s world.
The newspaper Krone said the 74-year-old children’s author: “But the worst part is that sometimes I have scissors in my head when I’m writing. Can I still write ‘fat’? No. Can ‘Foreigners’ have an audible accent in the radio play or do you find that disrespectful, even though that is the reality?”
“Benjamin Blümchen stands for tolerance”
Donelly added: “The Wakefulness kill me anyway. I think gender is completely unnecessary.’ She always said ‘fireman’, but ‘firefighter’ wouldn’t bother her either. “We also have ‘humanity’ and not ‘femaleness’.”
Regarding the new name of the Saxon daycare, the Austrian said: “I just find it a bit ridiculous to reduce the pachyderm to his preference for pieces of sugar. He is simply a sugar eater, but hunting for sugar is not his main task.”
Benjamin Blümchen’s most important quality is a strong sense of justice. The elephant is “empathetic to the point of self-sacrifice” and “very, very tolerant”. Donnelly emphasized: “The fact that in, in my opinion, politically questionable corners of Germany, pieces of sugar are more important than moral values speaks volumes.”