Red Fairy-Tales in Black and White

In 1950 Pavel Kohout published under the title O cernem a bilem ['About the black and the white'] a book of fairy tales, which appeared in 1953 in East Germany under the title Dreizehn rote Rosen ['Thirteen red roses']. If one can still recognize elements of (literary) fairy tales in the original agitative text, these are largely obliterated in the translation. The fairy tales lose the elements that marked them as fairy tales. In East Germany, the early Soviet fairy tale criticism, which had lost its sharpness at the Soviet Writers' Congress in 1934, is taken over, while in Czechoslovakia it is still represented only by orthodox criticism.