Meditation on

The Polar Express

Writing The Polar Express was actually easier than other stories I've written. [. . .] The Polar

Express was more like a daydream that felt like a memory. I didn't actually have to write it, I

only had to recall it. —Chris Van Allsburg, Scholastic interview

If I have an unusual gift, it is not that I draw particularly better than other people—I've never

fooled myself of that. Rather, it's that I remember things other people don't recall; the sounds and

feelings and images —the emotional quality of particular moments in childhood.

—Maurice Sendak quoted in Cech

Picture books are in a sense a stealth art form. So long as a certain decorum is observed, almost

any image in them will be persistently seen as sweet and non-serious, no matter how potent. A

case in point: in terms of its dominant visual allusions, Chris Van Allsburg's Caldecott-winning

picture book The Polar Express can be summarized as "René Magritte journeys to Nuremberg

to meet Adolf Hitler." The sleigh bell that provides the book's overall thematic thread recalls the

mysterious sleigh bell motif found in dozens of Magritte paintings, and the 1930s black steam

locomotive intruding into a suburban space evokes Magritte's famous image in "Durée

Poignardée (Time Transfixed)" (above top). [note 1] But most startling of all, the North Pole

scenes in The Polar Express reenact Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film about Hitler, Triumph of the

Will. Yet according to most reviews of the book since its 1985 publication, The Polar Express is

a heartwarming and magical story of faith.

Chris Van Allsburg is an academically trained artist whose historical allusions must generally go

unidentified by his readers. But it would be a mistake, in my view, to see this lack of recognition
primarily in terms of child (or children's book reviewer) naiveté versus adult sophistication. The

surrealist collision of Santa and Hitler in The Polar Express is not merely a wink to those in the

know; it is the central motif of the book. However, calling attention to this unholy union

contradicts the heart-warming aura that surrounds this picture book and its Christmas theme. By

adult convention, the picture book format and the Santa Claus myth are heavily defended

childhood preserves of wonder and joy in the midst of adult doubt and "fallen"-ness; adults are

expected to support the Adult United Front by seeing and reporting only optimistic life lessons

with respect to these two cultural preserves, especially when in the hearing of children. But art

finds a way to express itself using the taboos as well as the tools at hand, and Van Allsburg's

picture book does so with a jolt. Santa Claus and Hitler clearly collide in The Polar Express,

with all the disturbance that this collision implies. But because it happens in an American picture

book, this collision went virtually unmentioned for twenty years until the movie adaptation was

released, and even then the book‘s magic circle remained largely intact.

Shocking incongruity is what surrealism is best known for, and Van Allsburg (with fellow

picture book auteurs Anthony Browne and Maurice Sendak) brings a frankly surrealist

sensibility to the comfortable world of British and American children's picture books. Although

surrealism is known for mixing high and low adult tastes in shocking ways, picture book auteurs

of the last 100 years have practiced a hidden form of surrealism, putting together unfathomable

disjunctions between child and adult perceptions under the cover of picture books‘ manifestly

rosy worldview.
One could argue, of course, that children's books pioneered surrealism—Joseph Stanton points

out that the early surrealists were themselves inspired by Alice's Adventures in Wonderland—but

the picture book remains, in the public adult mind at least, a preserve of touching or amusing life

lessons even when close inspection of actual books reveals otherwise. As a small theatre of still

images that adults and children hold and look at together, picture books provide a potent space

capable of revealing disturbing truths from a child's perspective, albeit as expressed by adult

artists. As in Magritte‘s painting of a train piercing the wall of a domestic space, the pages of a

picture book can have the quality of a frozen shriek. The picture book‘s still, small, quiet

succession of images often shows what could not be said at a moment when a child‘s world

changed forever. This revolutionary and revelatory potential is in constant tension, however,

with the format's abiding social function: to reassure small children of adult understanding,

protection, and care.

How might a serious picture book artist express surreal childhood perception while observing the

socially sanctioned purpose of picture books to reassure, comfort, and provide adult guidance?

This question brings impossible juxtaposition into the very definition of picture books as an art

form and indeed, into the representation of existential childhood experiences of the adult world. I

argue that in their most serious artistic manifestation, picture books inevitably show an absurd

intrusion of a hugeness—the looming traces of an artist's actual life-altering childhood

experiences of adult failures—into the conventional social representation of adults and children.

Sendak draws attention to these two poles of considering childhood experience—experiences of

living as an actual child versus childhood as generic slate on which to write life lessons—and

catches himself just as he is about to slide into the conventional adult view:
 It's those freak moments that really excite me, and how does the kid, the

person, the animal, whatever get through that, survive. I'm not going to go on

to say, as I almost did, God help me, and learn from it. No. I don't believe we

can learn anything. (Jeffrey Brown interview)

Several of Chris Van Allsburg's picture books derive their surreal atmosphere from large and

unusual vehicles absurdly out of place: an ocean liner obtrudes into a Venice canal (The

Mysteries of Harris Burdick), a sailboat flies over a bay (The Wreck of the Zephyr), a steam

locomotive looms on a quiet suburban street (The Polar Express). But The Polar Express

provides a particularly jarring and even distressing example of surreal juxtaposition, not only for

its Magritte-like image of a train pulling up to a suburban house to take a child away [note 2],

but through its overall narrative enactment of Triumph of the Will.

Before 2004, connections between The Polar Express and Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 film about

Hitler went almost unmentioned; reviews sometimes referred to Van Allsburg‘s edginess or

darkness, but without getting specific. In his suggestively titled 1990 article ―How Picture Books

Mean: The Case of Chris Van Allsburg,‖ Peter Neumeyer commented on the ―statuesque

immobility‖ of Santa and the elves in The Polar Express, but did not connect this monumental

quality specifically to Riefenstahl. In 1996, Joseph Stanton articulated the allusion more

pointedly in ―The Dreaming Picture Books of Chris Van Allsburg‖:

We might expect to lose the dangerous edge of surrealism in Van Allsburg's embrace

of Jolly Old Saint Nick, but when we consider the intrusion of a massive train into a

quiet suburban street, the restrainedly demonic nature of Van Allsburg's North Pole
 with its bizarrely vast snow-covered urban appearance, and the quietly nightmarish

hugeness of the crowd of identically dressed elves turned out to hear Santa's speech—

when we consider all the elements of this late-night sojourn—we find the surrealist

edge of danger subtly implicit. It might even be said that there is something about the

visualization of Santa's speech to his army of elves that is reminiscent of the famous

filmed sequences of Hitler addressing his storm troopers. Although Santa is treated as

an unambiguously benign being in the context of the book, there is an unsettling

quality to the North Pole scene that adds an aesthetically interesting element of

disorientation to the miraculous presence of the godlike Santa figure. (174-75)

As a scholar particularly concerned with the aesthetics of picture books, Stanton was not shy

about discussing the book's references to the Third Reich, but he did not find them overly

troubling. Though he characterized these echoes as ―dangerous,‖ ―nightmarish,‖ and ―demonic,‖

he saw them as "subtly implicit" within the compellingly imagined dreamscape that is Van

Allsburg's book (personal communication).

Film critics, however, were not inclined to give a pass to Third Reich allusions when they

spotted them in the 2004 film adaptation of The Polar Express. They seized upon them as bizarre

and confounding and as threatening the ―life lesson‖ apparently valorized by the story—that

believing is ipso facto wonderful. Bombarded though they might be by the amorality of popular

culture (Denby), film critics were clearly taken aback by the movie's seemingly sincere advice to

children—BELIEVE—in light of the fascist propaganda techniques and allusions used to pound

the message home. Still, their perplexity did not stop them from characterizing the weird

commingling of myths in phrases gleefully calculated to shock:

 Now it can be said, Santa Claus is a fascist dictator who likes to kidnap and endanger

children so that they can learn the true value of Christmas. (Alexandria)

Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied

elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's

Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. (Dargis)

Enter the titular train, which [. . .] ferries kids to the North Pole for an audience with

Dur [sic] Fuhrer Claus in a North Pole that looks suspiciously like Nuremberg. (Chaw)

When Santa emerges to be hailed by vast ranks of elves, and gives the boy a sleigh bell

as his token of faith [. . .], it's like a weirdly infantile update on ―Triumph of the Will.‖

(Elliott)

[W]hen they finally get to the North Pole, the movie becomes "Perry Como's Triumph

of the Will": the Santa worship, the Stasi-ish way how it turns out Santa watches all the

world's children, the Nazi-like field rally with the elves. . . .[I]f you ever have seen

Triumph of the Will then you'll probably see these things too. And really, isn't The

Polar Express supposed to be a propaganda movie for Santa Claus? (Knight)

Though these comments refer to the 2004 Zemeckis film adaptation of The Polar Express, they

equally apply to the original 1985 picture book. The masses in the plaza, the architecture of the

city, the Great Leader, the militaristic bearing of the reindeer, the subservient and anonymous
elves, the illumination of the nighttime scene, the crouching upward perspectives on the Leader,

the rooftop perspective on the scene anticipating the Leader's arrival, the special intimate

moment with a chosen child, the aerial view of the Leader flying over the crowded cityscape, the

repeated motif of a strip of lights across the middle of the picture—in the 1935 film these are the

lights of Hitler's hotel; in the book they are the lights of the train windows—and of course the

Leader's arm raised at the climactic moment: all these invoke Leni Riefenstahl‘s film that both

celebrated and fostered a mass movement of disastrous ecstasy and belief.

Images 3-6.

The most specific and astonishing parallels between the Riefenstahl film and The Polar Express

picture book concern the City of Nuremberg, which acts as the mythic setting for Triumph of the

Will and almost certainly serves as the model for the City at the North Pole in The Polar Express.
A medieval city that hosted Nazi Party Congresses from 1927 until 1939, Nuremberg is a potent

location in German history (Brockmann). Its ―truly unique streets, houses, buildings, bridges,

merlons and gables, bays and galleries‖ (Brockmann 218) are iconic of a mythic German past,

and the city is the site of many parades and festivals, including a centuries-old annual Christmas

celebration now known as Christkindlesmarkt, in which an Angel appears to children. The city is

known for its manufacture of toys, and it even calls itself ―The Christmas City‖ in its tourist

materials (City of Nuremberg, Hayes). The heart of the annual Christmas celebration is the

Hauptmarkt, or main city square, which was the site of many rallies during the Reich years,

when it was known as Adolf Hitler Platz.

Images 7-10.
The sixth through eleventh panoramic layouts in The Polar Express strongly evoke the city of

Nuremberg in architectural style and atmosphere even if locations are not precisely copied.

These same images also recreate particular moments in Riefenstahl‘s film. In the 1935 film, the

triumphant parade into the city stops at Hitler‘s favorite hotel, the Deutscher Hof, across the

street from the Opera House and adjacent to Richard Wagner Platz. Hitler always stayed in the

same room at the hotel, and in Riefenstahl‘s film, the face of the hotel has been decorated with

lights around the window of Hitler‘s room (World War II Forums). After his arrival, Hitler

makes a bravura appearance at this window to a roar of acclaim, and in the night rally that

follows, the strips of lights from the face of the hotel glitter above the crowd. In the seventh

image of The Polar Express, the train enters a cityscape that strongly evokes not only the

architectural style of Nuremberg, but particular sensory moments of the night rally in front of

Hitler‘s hotel shown in The Triumph of the Will.

The lights of the elevated train in the seventh Polar Express image (Image 7), interrupted by the

gaps between cars, blaze among festive lights on the roofs of buildings and an emblem of Santa‘s

face appears on the face of a building; these motifs hauntingly recapitulate the archways, strips

of lights, and emblems on Hitler‘s hotel as seen in the night rally (Images 8 and 10). In the eighth

layout of The Polar Express (Image 11 following), the train stops in the middle of a crowd next

to a building (astride the gutter of the book) that eerily resembles the Deutscher Hof (Image 12

below).
Images 11-12.

In the ninth layout of The Polar Express, Santa makes his appearance to the crowd in a scene

highly evocative of the analogous moment in the Riefenstahl film when Hitler appears at the

window. And when Santa flies away from the city two page turns later, an aerial view of a square

filled with people evokes multiple aerial views of Hitler‘s plane, gathered crowds, and crowded

plazas in Triumph of the Will [note 3]:

Images 13-15.

In addition to its uncanny resemblances to locations and narrative line from Triumph of the Will,

The Polar Express showcases Riefenstahlian effects on almost every page. As B. Ruby Rich

notes, there is an ―absence of any middle ground‖ (206) in Riefenstahl‘s films—all is intimate

close-up and grand vista. Dramatic light and dark, steam and fog, upwards and downwards
perspectives throughout The Polar Express betoken Riefenstahl‘s translation of German

Romantic landscape painting into an auteur film with Nuremberg at its center. [note 4]

Though it does so less intimately and specifically than the picture book, the 2004 movie

adaptation of The Polar Express also evokes Nuremberg, as the quoted movie blurbs attest. [note

5] But even as film critics interrogated the Polar Express movie for this and other allusions to

Riefenstahl, they continued to give the picture book a free ride. Peter Sobczynski, for example,

commented that the movie ―may well remind viewers of a certain age of certain scenes in

‗Triumph of the Will,‘‖ but he goes on to describe the picture book as ―a sweet and charming

story about the importance of faith that is the perfect thing to read to restless kids before bed.‖

Because the picture book makes this connection primarily through images that are dissonant with

the content and tone of the text, and because the book is a beautifully executed work by a living

artist, and because it is beloved by many families as a touching testament of faith, critics seem

loath to explore an allusion that ruins the picture book‘s aura of purity.

But the Riefenstahl connection goes beyond mere allusion; it suffuses the book‘s visual fantasy.

Once the fusion of Christmas picture book and fascist propaganda film has been admitted to

consciousness, what are we to do with it? Why is it there? What to make of it all? I am not

implying that Chris Van Allsburg is a closet fascist or that his book should not be read. I am

asking what I see as the questions raised by the book's own presentation. If the book refutes itself

as a simple and heartwarming tale by its governing allusion, then what is the book expressing

through its complex fusion of myths?

One could simply take the Riefenstahl reference in The Polar Express as a sign of how

trivialized once-monstrous images have become. As Susan Sontag pointed out in 1975, with the

passage of time even the Third Reich has practically become de-historicized into just another

style. Perhaps the reference is a clever quotation of Riefenstahl‘s film that should not be taken

seriously. Kenneth Kidd points out in his review of Philip Nel‘s The Avant-Garde and American

Postmodernity that the historical corpus of art is now raided routinely as a kind of all-purpose

refrigerator of images. Or perhaps it is a parodic reference (see Beckett and Valleau), and we are

meant to laugh, but this would make its linking to the main theme of believing even more

problematic. These various ways of taking the Riefenestahl allusion don‘t accord with its

pervasiveness in the picture book, the precision and care of its execution, or its implications for

the book‘s message about believing. I consider the reference as serious and complicating,

because the book signals for it to be taken so, despite and even because of all the distracting

noise working against this approach.

Picture book artists are commonly expected to stand in front of audiences of school children and

answer this most-asked question: "Where do you get your ideas?" The hard part of this isn't that

children wouldn't understand— as Anthony Browne has observed, the only adults who think

children don't "get" the most profound implications of good picture books are those who are

disconnected from actual children (Elias interview). The hard part is, I am convinced, that the

place such ideas come from in real artists is so private and vulnerable that the artist was

compelled to create the book as a metaphor in order to "speak" from it at all, and that there is no

public mode of adult-child discourse about this level of experience other than the picture book

itself.
A further difficulty: even serious artists have a duty not to break faith with their child audience,

as they may feel free to do with adult audiences. The obligation of adults to help children and not

to distress them unnecessarily is not just bourgeois cliché but the most heroic of mammalian

imperatives. To be an artist of integrity and simultaneously an adult shielding children from adult

craziness is a tightrope too delicate for all but the brilliant few. The push for a false closure to

the disturbing material that their work evokes is thus even more compelling for picture book

artists than for artists addressing adult audiences. Still, the best picture books manage to ―show

what could not be said‖ without traumatizing their audience or falsifying their material; they

continue to fascinate readers by entering into forbidden arenas of intimate childhood experience

even as they seem to stay within bounds.

The Polar Express picture book uses the pervasive Magritte motif of a sleigh bell as a symbol of

huge and private significance—―the effusion of private feeling into the social field of

communication‖ (Perrot 129). It is a sound that can only be truly heard in the depths of oneself.

Such private symbolism, which captures moments and meanings too intricate, near, and huge for

direct expression—is at the heart of what art does. One study of Magritte's work describes the

repeated motif of the sleigh bell in the following terms: "the bell makes the transition from the

wonder of childhood to an anguish caused by an unknown danger" (Virtuo). [note 6] The full

freight of the bell‘s resonance cannot be felt by anyone but the person who underwent the

particular life-changing experience that gave it weight, but we sense its gravitas. Something

deeply personal must be expressed through Magritte‘s bell, and Van Allsburg draws on this

symbolism to create a geological echo. Artists find the right vehicle to carry intimately
significant freight, with or without awareness or understanding of this process, and readers feel it

when they do, whether or not we can articulate this process, and whether or not we are currently

children.

Some picture book masters—among them Sendak and Raymond Briggs—have illuminated

through published commentary or memoirs the connections between their childhood experiences

in the 1930s and 40s and their picture books published in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These artists,

along with younger surrealist Anthony Browne, have sometimes been criticized for writing more

for themselves than for children. The implication of this accusation is that artists who create

images and stories out of their own deepest childhood experiences are indulging themselves

rather than acting as adults on behalf of children. While this charge should be taken seriously for

the reason mentioned above—protecting children is a primary directive for all adults—I would

counter that only artists whose ultimate touchstone is their own childhood experience create

masterpieces for children; this is why Sendak, Briggs, and Browne are among the most honored

and respected of picture book auteurs [note 7].

Chris Van Allsburg is another auteur whose overall oeuvre seems to come more from self-

expression than from an adult agenda with respect to a child audience [note 8]. To paraphrase

Randall Jarrell‘s definition of a novel, an artistic picture book is 32 pages of image and story

with something disturbing about it. But considering The Polar Express as such an artistic

expression carries a fundamental implication that sets it apart from other picture book classics.

Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen resonate with the artist‘s

childhood understanding of what was happening to his European Jewish relatives in the 1930s
(The Jewish Museum). World War II as evoked by Raymond Briggs‘ The Snowman and When

the Wind Blows resonates with his personal experience of evacuation during the Blitz and a

particular ―flashbulb moment‖ of being under the bombs (Briggs, Ethel and Ernest). Knowledge

of biographical-historical back stories adds startling and intimate dimensions to the child

character‘s nested fantasies within these books. These different dimensions of the story have a

harmonic synergy; the oscillation of surface and depth produce different tones that, although

sometimes shocking, don‘t cancel each other. The Riefenstahl allusion in The Polar Express, on

the other hand, creates a dissonance that forces a reconsideration of the whole work. The Santa

story aligns the fictional child‘s wish-fulfilling desires with a magical journey of hope; the Hitler

allusion harnesses the child‘s fantasy to a mass fantasy that ultimately killed millions of people.

By its presentation of the primal position of those under the spell of mythic power, The Polar

Express does something risky and truthful. But the book seems to be having it both ways. Even

as the images ring alarm bells against true belief through visual metaphor, the text‘s punchline

swells with the joy of true belief: ―Though I‘ve grown old, the bell still rings for me as it does for

all who truly believe.‖ The riddle remains: what is being expressed here? The value of a work of

art is not primarily in its ideological angle or even its mythic significance, but in what falls

through the cracks—the presentation of a wild truth. And I do think a lot falls through the cracks

of The Polar Express. For the remainder of this article, I will present what I see in the book that

eludes ideological argument—the child character‘s existential predicament.

If the boy in The Polar Express is in the position of the chosen child in Triumph of the Will, he is

in danger and he will become a danger to others. Ironically, given the theme of both works of
rescuing and bolstering a child-like faith, close-ups of children adoring the leader are used in

both works to add credibility to a leader whose legitimacy (or existence) has been questioned:

Riefenstahl‘s depiction of the 1934 Nuremburg rally builds much

of its celebratory message on children‘s symbolic potential. Children figure

consistently in the early crowd scenes in Triumph of the Will. They are lifted on

shoulders and pushed to the front of crowds lining the streets to see the Führer

drive by; they gaze at his passing figure with wide, excited eyes as the camera

isolates their faces. (Frost 80)

Whatever the bell means to the boy in The Polar Express, Santa displays this symbol publicly–in

a gesture fraught with the Heil Hitler salute—as an emblem of group solidarity and justification.

But whereas Triumph of the Will “renders childhood itself as abstraction‖ (Frost 82), using the

glad and authentic faces of children in order to exalt the Great Leader‘s close-up, The Polar

Express shows us the private longings of a particular child, even as it suppresses an objective

view of the individual child‘s face (the boy‘s face appears clearly in only one image—

significantly, the meeting with Santa). As Sandor Ferenczi argues in ―Confusion of Tongues‖

(another work of the 1930s), the language of tenderness and need in a child has been historically

twisted by the language of the adults he depends on, leaving him with no language but that of the

symptom—or of art. In this light, the urgent necessity the boy feels to believe in a distant Santa

who visits once a year bespeaks lack of tenderness from those close to him, and the shades of the

Third Reich warn that a child‘s hunger for joyful intimacy can be hijacked and harnessed to a

horrific adult agenda.

The Polar Express is at war with itself as a public statement, but it may perfectly capture a

singular and private truth. One of Van Allsburg's trademarks is to play peek-a-boo with the

fictional and para-fictional aspects of his picture books, so as to make a teasing game out of

separating the work of fictional art from its frame of actual production and existence. The most

obvious case of this is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which presents itself in a preface,

normally a "straight" part of a book, as being a found compilation of pictures left off at a

publisher's office by a mysterious man named Harris Burdick. In another Van Allsburg book,

Bad Day at Riverbend, a universe of people living inside (as we learn gradually) a child's

coloring book are horrified when greasy colors start appearing on people and animals. The first

time one sees the pages, the crayon markings appear to have been added to the book by an actual

child reader rather than being a surprise meta-level of the picture book's fantasy world.

In a similar vein, an author's note was added to the tenth anniversary edition of The Polar

Express on parchment paper slipped in front of the title page. In (seemingly) the author‘s own

hand, the message begins thus:

Dear Reader, Over the years many people have asked me how I came up with the idea

for the "Polar Express" [sic]. I've always avoided giving an honest answer. But now, after

ten years, my conscience obliges me to tell the truth—I stole the story from a little beggar

child who shared the tale with me after I purchased a box of matches from him one

snowy night.
There is a riddle at the heart of The Polar Express, and the trickster‘s message here admonishes

the curious not to expect easy clues to the answer. So we are left to puzzle for ourselves. The

picture book is not, after all, about Adolf Hitler or even Santa Claus, any more than it is about a

little match seller, except as these fantasy characters resonate with the child character‘s interior

plot: the search for a potent and alive adult savior in a cold world. Van Allsburg wasn‘t born

until 1949, so the book‘s many period references to the 1930s (the train, the Magritte painting,

Riefenstahl‘s film, the Third Reich rally in the plaza—even the toy truck under the Christmas

tree appears to come from that decade) cannot be based on his own memories from that era. But

metaphor is an infinite field of play. I see the book's publicly accessible images as carrying the

weight of an unknown experience from the artist's own childhood that cannot be conventionally

talked about—an event that crosses in some deeply personal way with these historical and artistic

allusions. There is something of incalculable but specific childhood weight in the picture book

The Polar Express. It sits in the book like a locomotive on a quiet suburban street, but its content

remains a conjecture: a huge childhood experience of emptiness, and the thrill of being singled

out for favor by a powerful, distant, and charismatic man.

Both in text and in image, but particularly in image [note 9], The Polar Express bespeaks cutoff

from parents, who never appear in actual warm and close interaction with the boy (here, as in

many of Van Allsburg's books, parents are mentioned in the text but don't appear in the pictures;

they are absent from his most important experiences and they cannot hear the bell). The only

picture in The Polar Express that shows intimate human caring is the one in which the other

children console the boy for the loss of his bell. They touch the boy and look around in vain for

adult help and presence as the train goes on its way. This alienation from actual adults motivates
the boy's search for a personal connection with the universe outside his beautiful but lonely home

(see the first picture of him looking out the window into the snowy expanse outside), and the

arrival of this connection, like a train pulling up on a suburban street, gives rise to a surreal

consciousness that combines rapture and nightmare.

Chris Van Allsburg's picture book The Polar Express stages an evocative and impossible

meeting of two poles of art: confidently happy public spectacle (the Santa fantasy, Triumph of

the Will as it was originally offered, the conventional adult perception of children and their

picture books) and the formalized portrayal of private anguish (the boy character's alienated

existence, the stillness of Magritte's bell, and speculatively, something of the picture book artist's

primal self). An existential crisis leads to a surrender of self [note 10] and to a shock forever

frozen in consciousness—a train stopped in the snow, a bell that no one else can hear anymore.

By this light, The Polar Express takes readers far from the usual landscape of the picture book

while never leaving home.

Mary Galbraith

Acknowledgements: Thank you, William J. Rapaport and Ellen Fager, for your extensive support

and encouragement with this article. Thank you for kind suggestions and critiques, Judith Plotz,

Roni Natov, and Adrienne Kertzer. For providing scanners and photo capture technology when I

started this project, and for their professionalism and kindness, I‘d also like to thank the Faculty

Computer Room and Instructional Technology Services at San Diego State University.
 Notes

1. The English title of Magritte‘s painting does not carry the same jolting connotation as the

French title: ―Durée Poignardée‖ is closer to ―Time Stabbed‖ with time in the sense of

lived duration rather than objective clock time.

2. According to Wikipedia, the train in Magritte‘s painting is a Black Five 4-6-0 steam

locomotive from the 1930s ("LMS Stanier Class 5 4-6-0"); the train in The Polar Express

movie is said to be a Baldwin 2-8-4 S-3 class steam locomotive built in 1931. I‘m not

enough of a train buff to discriminate whether the train in the picture book is the same

class as the one in the movie. But in any case, all three trains are black steam locomotives

built in the 1930s. The idea of such a train pulling up in the night to carry a child to a

distant location is connected inevitably with unbearable historical experiences.

3. Another layer of the complex Nuremberg allusion: Nuremberg was devastated by the

British in January 1945 in a bombing raid aimed at destroying Hitler‘s beloved capital

and deflating German dreams of a return to a grand past. The bombing targeted the city

itself rather than any military installation. Frank Petch, an Australian who was part of an

RAF bombing crew, recalls his distress about the mission:

This was the only time in my whole tour of operations that an entire city was

designated as target. [sic] The purpose was to weaken German morale by

bombing the city that gave Nazism its birth.

 As a school boy I had watched films showing Nazi party rallies at a vast

stadium in Nuremberg. I can remember Adolf Hitler shouting incoherently,

stirring up both hatred and prideful emotions of the large assembly. Other

sequences showed buildings of medieval charm with strange heraldic banners

floating from the windows. The cobbled streets below rang out with the rhythmic

pounding of iron-heeled jackboots of storm troops, followed by squads of blond-

headed youth. Their arrogant demeanour showed that they believed they were the

master race. It was an enthralling but frightening demonstration of might. [. . .]

Nuremberg was not expecting an attack as the lights of a far distant suburb

were on. It seemed we were almost roof top height as our Lancaster skimmed

over the city. With snow on the ground and its medieval buildings, it resembled a

Christmas card scene. It did not seem right to disturb this peacefulness by

dropping bombs. (Diefenbacher & Fischer-Pache 1-3)

Hitler‘s hotel, which was purchased by the Nazi Party in 1936, was extensively damaged

by bombs during the war. The hotel was reconstructed after 1945. In fact, the roof of the

building in The Polar Express, with its dormer windows, follows the details of the rebuilt

hotel (see Walden photo above).

4. Van Allsburg mentions in an interview with Anita Silvey that German Romantic painter

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) was his painterly inspiration for The Polar Express,

particularly with regard to the striking brown color palette and the atmospherics of figure

and landscape (Silvey). The cover artwork of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick and The

Wreck of the Zephyr appear to be homages to particular Friedrich paintings, and browns

are dominant in most of Van Allsburg‘s color picture books.

5. As seems to happen inevitably when a picture book classic is adapted as a Hollywood

blockbuster, the movie drowns out the potent qualities of the book in a sea of frenzied

noise and activity. (The picture book The Polar Express in many respects makes the

opposite move; the picture book transforms the large, loud public spectacle of Triumph of

the Will into a quiet interior experience.) Though the Zemeckis movie works hard to

preserve the colors and pictorial style of the book, the hyperactivity and noise of the

movie dissolve the tension and potency that the book derives from being still, quiet, and

small. Padded with extra characters and incidents in order to give it the necessary length

as a movie, the elegance and interiority of the book is lost. And given the movie‘s own

betrayal of the homely virtues it is pushing (reminiscent of the movie How the Grinch

Stole Christmas (Howard), in which a multi-million dollar marketing extravaganza

preaches against Christmas commercialism), the already suspect adult ―life lessons‖ of

the book are even more painfully driven home.

6. According to music critic Raymond Knapp, Mahler‘s Fourth Symphony is another

complexly dissonant representation of childhood that connects sleigh bells to innocent

joy and adult nostalgia, but also to childhood suffering, vulnerability, and darkness.

Knapp points out the aptness of fellow music critic Mark Evan Bonds‘ use of the picture

book The Polar Express as his framing text for discussion of Mahler‘s Fourth (Knapp

233).

(Knapp‘s ―Suffering Children: Perspectives on Innocence and Vulnerability in Mahler‘s

Fourth Symphony‖ is a wonderful example of an expansive childhood studies approach

 to the concerns of the humanities, and many of its phrases have an uncanny resonance

with the present discussion. Mahler‘s finale, for example, is characterized as ―the

perverse confusion of many emblems of Christianity, and the intrusion of a nightmarish

version of sleigh bells‖ (Knapp 234).)

7. In addition to his many other honors, Anthony Browne was named Children‘s Laureate of

the United Kingdom in June 2009 (Armistead); Maurice Sendak and Raymond Briggs

have also established grandmaster status.

8. And even the best may have their off moments. Elizabeth Law cites Dr. Seuss‘s The

Butter Battle Book and Van Allsburg‘s Just a Dream as examples of picture books

lapsing into condescension. However, picture books that appear to be blunt instruments

for adult-approved messages may still leak more existential truths between the lines;

Sendak‘s Pierre comes to mind.

9. The text of The Polar Express offers a retrospective first-person view of the long-ago

experience, and it is much more culturally American than the pictures. For example, the

reindeer of the text are described as ―excited‖—―they pranced and paced‖ (Van Allsburg

17 by count). By contrast, the two reindeer depicted in the tenth image have the erect

carriage and discipline of German guards, complete with chin straps and narrowed eyes

(Van Allsburg 19-20 by count). German allusions prevail in the images of the fantasy

pictures (the second through thirteenth layouts), whereas the text and the ―real world‖

pictures (the first and fourteenth layouts) are more American. For a discussion of first-
 person narratives and the double tracking of image and text in picture books, including

The Polar Express, see Perry Nodelman‘s ―The Eye and the ‗I‘.‖

10. According to the testimony of many memoirs, the Nuremberg Congresses were

rapturous, life-changing events for the many children chosen to participate. An example:

Even though he had been a member of the Jungvolk for only five months,

Alfons was chosen to attend the Nuremberg Party Congress, the

Reichsparteitag, the ―high mass‖ of Nazism. For centuries Nuremberg. . . had

been the showcase city of German history. . . . A huge tent city was set up, and

for seven days people attended rallies praising Adolf Hitler, the power of the

Nazis, and the glory of the New Germany. ―Even for a 10-year-old,‖ recalls

Alfons, ―it was a near-feverish week-long high that lasted into one‘s dreams.‖

(Ayer 23)

After the dramatic appearance of Hitler and minutes of shouting Heil Hitler in response

to his speech in which ―his eyes seem[ed] to stare right at me,‖ Alfons Heck remembers

that ―[f]rom the moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul‖ (Ayer 24).
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