Tomi Ungerer is a household name in the German-speaking world - at least in that portion of it which raises 1.6 children. He has published 120 books, many of them for children; in 1997 he won the Hans Christian Andersen Prize. He was born into a famous family of clockmakers in 1931, and raised in a suburb of Colmar, one of those idyllic medieval towns on the Rhine that seem lost to time.

LRB 19 July 2001 | PDF Download