''The Blue Boy'' is a

children's A child ( : children) is a human being between the stages of birth and puberty, or between the developmental period of infancy and puberty. The legal definition of ''child'' generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person young ...

picture book A picture book combines visual and verbal narratives in a book format, most often aimed at young children. With the narrative told primarily through text, they are distinct from comics, which do so primarily through sequential images. The images ...

Martin Auer Martin Auer is an Austrian writer. He was born in Vienna in 1951. After finishing school, he started but never finished the study of German and History. He was an actor, a singer-songwriter, a journalist, and a magician, before he published his ...

, with illustrations by Simone Klages. It was first published in

1991 File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Phi ...

in German as ''Der blaue Junge''.

Plot summary

The Blue Boy lives on a war-torn planet. When his parents get killed he does not want to love anyone anymore, because he has cried so much that he has no more tears left. He declines the company of a little dog, an old woman, and a girl. Instead, he builds himself a giant armoured robot to travel around in and starts looking for someone who cannot be killed by a gun. At last he meets an old man on the moon who cannot be killed by guns because there are no guns up there. But the Blue Boy has brought his gun with him. Only when the old men offers him to use his telescope to study the people down there on the blue planet and to find out why they fight wars and how this could be stopped he agrees to drop his gun so he can stay with the old man. "Who knows? Maybe he'll fly back one day and tell his people everything he's learned".

Background

The original was also translated into

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

. An American English translation was published in 1992 by Macmillan. Martin Auer first wrote the story for the German television series '' Siebenstein'' (

ZDF ZDF (, short for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen; ; "Second German Television") is a German public-service television broadcaster based in Mainz, Rhineland-Palatinate. It is run as an independent nonprofit institution, which was founded by all fe ...

). It was then published in book form by

Beltz & Gelberg Hans-Joachim Gelberg (27 August 1930 – 17 May 2020) was a German writer and publisher of children's books, who received several awards. Biography Gelberg was born in Dortmund and later lived in Weinheim, Baden Württemberg. Gelberg founded i ...

. The story is also part of the collection '' The Strange War'' by Martin Auer that has been translated in more than 25 languages.

External links

''The Strange War – Stories for a Culture of Peace''
1991 children's books Science fiction picture books German science fiction Works about orphans Picture books Anti-war books German children's literature Austrian children's literature 20th-century Austrian literature 20th-century German literature Beltz & Gelberg books {{child-picture-book-stub