Bin ich ein (glücklicher) Bär? Über Macht, Ohnmacht und das bleibende Fremde in Prozessen der Ichfindung

Abstract

The following article is about Oren Lavie’s picture book The Bear Who Wasn’t There, which has been congenially illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch. This picture book offers both: a story, that is easy to read, and the very complex and serious narration of someone seeking his identity. This turns out to be a process closely connected to mechanisms of power, as identity is as well something that overwhelms its future possessor from the outside (thereby the „Me“ gets colonized), as something that is created by its future holder himself (from this point of view, it is a process of colonizing the world). In Lavie’s story the seeker of identity seems to gain importance while struggeling to find out who he or she „really is“. Oren Lavies story and the pictures of Wolf Erlbruch let this process keep its ambivalence and doing so, they achieve to tell a cheerful story about something as difficult as identity. The profundity of their way to tell and show the bear’s development allows to read the book also in a Sekundarstufe II-classroom. The article tries to open some different ways to work with this book in a classroom, where literature, philosophy and learning about oneself and one’s way to inhabit this world are thought as closely associated to each other.