Scholé News – September 2026

Dear friends of Scholé

This summer I took time off and noticed how many buried childhood memories, poems and song lyrics pushed their way back into my everyday awareness. I also felt the need to reread some old books after many years.

The after-effects of my favourite children’s books, such as The Little Prince or Andersen’s fairy tales, have always been very present to me. I was surprised, however, at how fresh even folk tales that I could not make much of as a child had remained in a back room of my memory. Thanks to my life experience, I appreciate and understand them much better today than I did then. They do not tell individual adventures; rather, they condense the social experience of entire peoples and prepare young people for the temptations they will face: if someone promises to spin straw into gold for you – that is, to create money out of nothing – he demands your dearest possession in return, your child. But if you manage to identify him and call him by his name, he disappears back into the underworld from which he came. In fairy tales, the urge for fame and riches always ends badly; only helpfulness and a pure heart secure you the support of kind fellow human beings, of animals and of the spiritual world.

Nothing has changed about that to this day; I just wonder what people who grow up with the children’s literature common today are supposed to fall back on. Fortunately, the way to the source is open to everyone; deep within, every human being carries an unerring moral compass. Proven signposts on the way there, in the form of songs, fairy tales and fables, can make life much easier and more beautiful, though. Sing heart-warming songs with your children and read them legends, fairy tales and fables! You give them provisions for the journey that will nourish and strengthen them for life.

The classic fables also serve as useful guidance for life: the poem about the raven who, seduced by the fox’s flattery, drops the piece of cheese from his beak to let his beautiful voice be heard. I learned it at the age of 6 and have often remembered it since: “A piece of cheese is a fair price for the insight that every flatterer lives at the expense of the one who listens to him.”

The anthropologist Wolf Dieter Storl explores a universal message: he collects and interprets those fairy tales that illustrate natural cycles and rhythms in which all peoples are embedded, each of them honouring its particular nature deities through special rituals over the course of the year. Seen from this angle, it is also easier to understand how, despite all differences in landscape, language and customs, such closely related patterns and fairy-tale motifs can be found all over the world.

It only remains to be hoped that what is close to the earth and conservative will not be pushed aside and denigrated for much longer by the social forces currently in power, because they believe they see in it a threat to progress and diversity. The opposite is true! Humanity’s oldest traditions can teach us unity in diversity. And without the careful preservation and cultivation of what earlier generations conceived and built, no progress is conceivable.

The wheel of time keeps turning inexorably and brings constant change. In my youth it was the left who were insulted by those in power and held back in their striving forward; today it is committed people on the right who have to defend themselves against furious accusations and insinuations. High time to finally bury the hatchet and come to the realisation that both “camps” need each other because they complement each other. How comforting that people who vibrate especially high can already perceive in the subtle realms that this epochal change of humanity is indeed imminent.

Wishing you all a fairy-tale beautiful and fruitful autumn,

Alexandra .