2024-07-28 08:46:19
The Bautzen daycare center “Benjamin Blümchen” has a new name. The inventor of the talking elephant cannot understand this.
The creator of the character Benjamin Blümchen shows little understanding for the renaming of a Bautzen daycare center. For 30 years, it bore the name of the talking elephant, from now on it is called “Spreewichtel”.
The old name is no longer “contemporary,” the city explains the renaming in a press release. “The comfortable, sugar-crushing elephant” is “no longer compatible with the concept.” In addition, the children’s hero figures have changed. According to the city, some children “only know the comfortable elephant from stories told by their parents.”
The creator of Benjamin Blümchen has no understanding for this. “I just find it a bit ridiculous to reduce the pachyderm to his preference for sugar cubes,” says Austrian author Elfie Donnelly to the “Kronen-Zeitung”. Chasing sugar is not his main occupation.
She also questioned why this process was taking place in Bautzen of all places: “The fact that in what I consider to be politically questionable corners of Germany, sugar cubes are more important than moral values speaks volumes.” Bautzen is in Saxony. According to current polls, the AfD will be the strongest force in the state elections on September 1st.
Donnelly also stressed that she is fundamentally dissatisfied with the current zeitgeist: “Wokeness is killing me anyway. I think gender is completely superfluous.” Nevertheless, the debate influences her when she writes. “The worst thing is that sometimes I have the scissors in my head when I write. Can I still write ‘bold’? No. Can ‘foreigners’ in radio plays have an audible accent or do people find that disrespectful, even though that’s the reality?” she said.