When Eli enters her grandmother’s house with her mother Renate for the first time, it quickly becomes clear why she has never met her grandmother. When Eli opens the forbidden cellar door, she not only learns about her mother’s cruel past, but also unleashes Struwwelpeter – and with him the violence inflicted on Renate as a child, embodied in the form of the ill-mannered child that should have stayed in the cellar forever. Struwwelpeter now avenges the past and the injustices of harsh, authoritarian child-rearing.
