Page - 95 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Representations of Religion and Culture in Children’s Literature | 95www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 81–99 flict between faith and rationality. We cannot prove or fathom logically whether God exists, but there is no evidence that God does not exist.”39 The pupils spend one night at school, where they talk about faith, God and the infinity of the universe. The last part of the story demonstrates the author’s intention to represent faith in God as a proper way of life, with monotheistic religions portrayed as the ideal: “The one great God, the God of Christians, Jews and Muslims. The God in whom so many people of different religions believe in. All of them were looking for a way to God. Maybe those who did not believe also found a way to him.”40 The narration constructs otherness by contrasting people who believe in God with those who do not. CONSTRUCTING OTHERNESS Analysis of these two children’s books in light of culture, religion and migration reveals processes of othering. All the authors and graphic illustrators tend to stereotype and exaggerate difference similarly. Although the narrations broach difference as a central paradigm, each story refers to friendship and sympathy. Understanding of foreign identities is a product of knowledge about different ways of life. The teacher in Lara Lustig und der liebe Gott insists upon tolerance as the children should know each other’s religious practices and cultural tradi- tions and accept each other’s ways of life. The narrator – a schoolgirl – states: And when I looked back in the hall, I saw Lara Lustig and our class. Everybody was dif- ferent. Everybody has his legs, his nose, his thinking and feeling and also his culture and religion. And everybody had a mind full of images and ideas. Though, we were all together. Below the great, infinite starry sky.41 Although the narrator mentions difference beyond religion and culture, the de- mand for broad-mindedness and tolerance of foreigners consolidates and natu- ralises categories of difference such as culture and religion. People are diverse and prefer different ways of life, habits and moral concepts. The categorisation of culture and religion results in a construction of collective singulars, which are culturalising and essentialising. Culture and religion are fields that appear inalterable. But identities are interdependent – they are not based solely on nationality, culture and religion. The narrations focus on a strong correlation of national, cultural and religious affiliations in their construction of own and foreign identities. Characters that represent own identities are not explicitly constituted as German, but, by con- 39 Zöller 2006, 49, emphasis in original. 40 Zöller 2006, 123. 41 Zöller 2006, 122–123.