'Picture Books and Multiple Readings: When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat by Peter Stamm and Juta Bauer.'

Abstract

The award winning picturebook 'When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat' by Peter Stamm and Jutta Bauer was originally published in German in 2005 and translated into English in 2006. It is a surreal picturebook that moves the child subject from place to place where the family temporarily lives. Many of these eighteen locations are surreal places such as ‘In Uncle’s Hat’. This chapter discusses the possible readings of this text; that of ‘proposed’ reading suggested by the publishers in their support for teachers’ activities with children; the differences in a reading which uses the original cover in German that depicted children in a play situation and finally, from that of an existentialist philosophical perspective combined with the surreal mode of the text