THE BROTHERS GRIMM ALSO BY JACK ZIPES Unlikely History: The Changing German-Jewish Symbio­ sis, 1945-2000 (editor, with Leslie Morris) The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children s Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western Fairy Tale Tradition from Medieval to Modern (editor) When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition. Yale Companion ofJewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1066-1966 (editor, with Sander Gilman) Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales, Children, and the Culture Industry THE BROTHERS GRIMM r:Fro 7ft EJicAaJifed r:Fo relfl fo fAe JvtoderJi Y/ortd JACK ZIPES THE BROTHERS GRIMM Copyright © Jack Zipes, 2002. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the * case ofbrief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE lVIACMILLANTM 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE lVIAClVIILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillandivision of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-312-29380-2 ISBN 978-1-137-09873-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-09873-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zipes, J ack David. The Brothers Grimm: !Tom enchanted forests to the modern world / by Jack Zipes. p. cm. Includes references and index. 1. Grimm,Jacob, 1785-1863. 2. Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786-1859. 3. Philologists-Germany-Biography. 4. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. 5. Fairy tales-Germany­ History and criticism. 1. Tide. PD63.z57 2003 430'.92'243-dc21 [B] 2002070390 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Letra Libre, Inc. First edition: December 2002 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Transferred to Digital Printing 2007 Por Donald Haase CONTENTS Preface to the 2002 Edition ix Preface to the 1988 Edition XVll 1. Onee There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm: A Reintroduetion 1 2. The Origins and Reeeption of the Tales 25 3. Exploring Historieal Paths 65 4. From Odysseus to Tom Thumb and Other Cunning Heroes: Speeulations about the Entrepreneurial Spirit 91 5. The German Obsession with Fairy Tales 107 6. Henri Pourrat and the Tradition of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm 135 7. Reeent Psyehologieal Approaehes with Some Questions ab out the Abuse of Children 153 8. Semantie Shifts ofPower in Folk and Fairy Tales: Cinderella and the Consequenees 187 9. Fairy Tale as MythJMyth as Fairy Tale: The Immortality of Sleeping Beauty and Storytelling 207 10. The Struggle for the Grimms' Throne: The Legaey of the Grimms' Tales in East and West Germany sinee 1945 231 Notes 271 Bibliography 297 Index 321 PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION rr ourteen years have passed since the first edition of The J Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern Warld was published. It followed numerous celebrations of the two hun­ dredth birthdays of the famous Brothers Grimm held in 1985 and 1986 and was intended to be a "critical" tribute to their lives and works. Yet, in the meantime, their names and accomplishments appear to have been diminished and distorted, if not obfuscated­ at least in English-speaking countries. In the summer of 2001, I conducted a storytelling session with a group of ten-year-olds in College Park, Pennsylvania, and at one point I told aversion of "Snow White" and asked the students whether they knew who had written the tale. None of them knew except one sm all boy who stated confidently, "Walt Disney." N ow, this is not exactly wrong, but Iwanted to be a bit more his­ torical. So, after agreeing with the boy, I went on to explain that there were also two brothers named Grimm who lived in Germany some 200 years ago, and they were really the first to have written down the tale, but the students were not particularly interested. Moreover, they had never heard of the Grimms. Did it really matter? Does it really matter that in the film Ever After (1998), the Grimms are summoned to a castle bya French baroness played by areal French actress, Jeanne Moreau, who tells them a preposter­ ously radical version of "Cinderella," indicating that they had got their story wrong? In fact, the film intends to show that the Grimms had not done their homework-and it also manipulates history to reveal how a feisty young woman inspired by Thomas More's Utopia becomes the Queen ofFrance. THE BROTHERS GRIMM Films (like many historians) have a propensity to twist history to reinvent it, and we have a propensity to accept what is cinemat­ ically popular as history. Thus Hans Christian Andersen, the trou­ bled and desperate writer, be comes a cheerful singing bungler played by Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen (1952), and the Grimms have fared no better. For instance, there are two god­ awful, kitschy films about the Brothers Grimms' lives and how they came to write fairy tales-The Wondeifzll World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), starring Lawrence Harvey and Claire Bloom, and Once Upon a Brothers Grimm (1977), featuring Dean Jones and Paul Sand. Both "frame" the Grimms in such a way that the back­ ground to their lives and the purpose of their collecting tales are totally distorted to create lively entertainment. In both films, the Grimms come off more as loveable fops than serious scholars, and history itself is mocked. Entertainment is always more important than truth. We live in realms of fiction. Even the news is part of popular culture. So, perhaps the only way we can glean some truth about the Brothers Grimm will be through fiction and popular culture. For example, it is not strange to find a novel ab out the Grimms, Grimm's Last Fairy Tale (1999), written by the historian, Haydn Middleton, who has done an abundant amount of research and is obviously well-versed in German culture. Yet, he had to "resort" to fiction to write ab out the brothers, even though we still do not have a "definitive" biography of the Grimms in English. Indeed, Middleton comments in an author's note: "According to the Ger­ man Romantic writer Novalis (1772-1801), novels arise out of the shortcomings of his tory. In creating this fiction based on the lives of the Brothers Grimm, I have tried to write a novel that is not in itself another shortcoming."l As fiction but not as history, the novel is a provocative ques­ tioning about the personallives of the brothers.2 Middleton sets the story in 1863, the last year of Jacob's life, and he interweaves three plot lines: Jacob takes a trip to Steinau, Hanau, and Kassel, the places ofhis birth and childhood, because he knows he may die soon and wants to revisit these memorable sites; he has visions that turn into a fairy tale told throughout the novel and interwoven with the actual plot line of Jacob's journey; he is accompanied by his niece, Auguste, daughter of WIlhelm and Dorothea, who sus- PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION xi pects that Jacob, the inveterate bachelor, may be her real father and wants to discover the "truth" before he dies. During the course of the novel, Auguste has abrief affair with aJewish servant named Friedrich Kummei, and Middleton adds a leitmotif to his novel by revealing how much of the Grimms' patriotic dedication to building a united Germany in a liberal humanitarian sense was warped by "blood and soil" nationalists and eventually led to the exclusion of Jews and the rise of Nazism. These trends were al­ ready apparent to the Grimms during their own lifetime, and they were disappointed by them. And certainly they would have been horrified if they had lived during the rise of fascism. Of course, Middleton's novel is all speculation. There was no Friedrich Kummel. There is absolutely no proof thatJacob had an affair with his sister-in-Iaw. If anything, he was more in love with his brother Wilhelm (who was never called "Willy," as he is in the novel) and his research than anything else. There was no trip at the end of J acob's life. But the knowledgeable Middleton does take the Grimms seriously, and there are revealing insights into the great tenderness and compassion among the members of the Grimms' family. Middleton also makes us think ab out the tragic and ironic aspect of the Brothers' achievement. Highly acclaimed as the founders of the popular fairy-tale tradition in the West, if not in the entire world, the Grimms aspired as brilliant philologi­ cal scholars to glorify the greatness of the German popular tradi­ tion and believed deeply that their voluminous works on the German language and customs would have a moral impact on the German people. There was always a profound political and moral commitment to what they thought the German people and nation could be. Unfortunately, their utopian vision for Germany in the nineteenth century turned into a nightmare. It is to Middleton's credit that he uses the novel form to unveil the irony of the Grimms' accomplishment. F ortunately, there was much more of a utopian residue in the Grimms' fairy tales than they realized, and the tales, rather than their remarkable pioneer philological studies, have continued to give hope to millions of readers and spectators in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.