Waldemar Bonsels

Maya the Bee, published in 1912, sends a young bee out of the hive into a summer a good deal more brutal than the later cartoon suggests, and it sold in enormous quantities across Europe. Bonsels had helped found a publishing house and travelled in India, which produced Indienfahrt, a travel book that did well in Germany between the wars. The awkward part of the record is the 1930s and 1940s: he welcomed the new regime in print, and published a story in 1942 attacking Jews. German critics have been arguing since about where that sits beside the children's book. He died in Bavaria in 1952.