In a review of Friedhelm Rathjen’s retranslation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1997, quoted at the beginning of Bermel’s study, the reviewer Denis Scheck gives the following account of the German reception of this and other classics:

Dieser Roman wurde geschändet, misshandelt und verstümmelt. Generationen von selbsternannten Jugendschützern und Tugendwächtern haben ihn nach Gutdünken gekürzt und verlängert, umgeschrieben und bearbeitet, ganze Kapitel vertauscht, hinzugefügt oder einfach weggelassen. Die Geschichte von Mark Twains “Huckleberry Finn” im deutschen Sprachraum gleicht der von Cervantes’ “Don Quichotte”, Swifts “Gulliver’s Travels” oder Carlo Collodis “Pinocchio”. Kurz: Die Geschichte dieses Romans ist eine Tragödie. (p. 7).

This judgment is characteristic for most critical commentaries on the phenomenon of adaptations of classical texts for young readers. Based on a normative concept of translation, it sees every form of adaptation as deficient and all adaptations for children as a trivialisation of the original. In her comprehensive account of adaptations of Gulliver’s Travels and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Sabine Bermel acknowledges the pivotal role played by adaptations in the history of the reception of the novels in Germany. Rather than looking merely to register loss of quality, her declared approach is to work within the framework of descriptive translation studies, asking the key questions formulated by Harald Kittel in 1988: “WAS wurde WANN, WARUM, WIE übersetzt und WARUM wurde es so übersetzt?”, taking into account the specifics of children’s literature and factors influencing its production, including notions of what is ‘suitable’ for children in terms of language, subject matter, formal features, assessments of the psychological developmental level of child readers and their interests. “Kindgemäßheit”, as Bermel rightly emphasises, is not “ein statische(r) Begriff” but “eine Größe …, die zeitgebunden und von gesellschaftlichen Rahmenbedingungen abhängig ist” (323), and she illustrates this by looking closely at the historical context in which the texts were produced.