Masters of Horror and Magic
The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by Ann Schmiesing; Yale University Press, 360 pp., $35
Midway through the 1944 liberation of Paris, Ernest Hemingway told his newest fiancée: “Some of the patrols we made would scare you worse than Grimms’ Fairy Tales.” Hemingway would know; like Auden and Faulkner, Willa Cather and Toni Morrison, he was a lifelong Grimmophile. Even today, the mild and retiring siblings from Hanau, Germany, remain the world’s top purveyors of horror and magic. No German authors have been more translated, not even Goethe.
In the first full life-and-times study in 50 years, Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, adroitly maps two sober 19th-century lives and one world-changing collaboration. It’s a bravura performance, an archival marvel, not least because the Grimms are such a biographer’s nightmare. The arc of the brothers’ conjoined lives is pleasingly riches to rags to riches: their middle-class family slid into poverty until the brothers earned law degrees and could support their four younger siblings and their widowed mother. Wilhelm was the natural salesman; Jacob, one year older, the natural scholar (the crucial shift in phonology among Indo-European languages is still known as Grimm’s Law). When Wilhelm married, Jacob promptly joined the new household, and their lives were soon anchored in lexicography, librarianship, and Lutheranism. They did not travel. They did not hobnob. They sat at facing desks, and wrote.
As scientists of language, the Grimms compiled a massive survey of mythology, edited epic poems, launched a historical dictionary—and collected old stories. As cultural detectives, they cast a wide net, creating a history for a nation that did not yet exist. The idea of one Germany was itself a fairy tale, a political construct shopping for an origin myth, and neither brother lived to see Otto von Bismarck’s triumphant unification of Germany in 1871.
The Grimms lived for a decade under French occupation (Jacob worked as private librarian to Napoleon’s brother Jerome) and like good Romantics, they despised the Gallic plagues of industry, development, and general effeteness. Yearning for a hearty Teutonic past, they learned at the University of Marburg how to coax music and stories from farmers and fishermen and old women at spinning wheels. Peasant purity, that was the ticket. Oral tradition. Volksgeist, the spirit of a people. Schmiesing makes clear that being “among the foremost contributors to the post-Napoleonic German national awakening” also meant that the Grimms did some of their best work in parlors, thanks to middle-class women like Wilhelm’s wife, Dortchen, and her educated friends, who shared many eerie tales lifted from French chapbooks or told by nannies and housekeepers.
Collecting and connoisseurship breed anxiety. Is this real? How do I know? As Schmiesing notes, “The preoccupations of the Grimms and their contemporaries with attempting to define and discern what constituted a genuine folk text versus a corrupted one resonate with modern efforts to distinguish what is organic or unduly processed, real or doctored, naturally or artificially generated.” The first edition of the Tales (published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815) was presented as serious scholarship. It took decades to lose the footnotes—and to tame the weird. The Grimms saw the folktale genre as a damaged heritage in need of restoration, and tried to keep their prunings gentle, but the temptation to embroider won out. Wilhelm, the primary curator, is the one who nails the flat, incantatory tone, from “Once upon a time” to “And they all lived happily ever after” (or, in German renditions, “And if they are not all dead, they may be living still today.”) He added dialogue and description, kept the violence, cut most of the sex and all the incest. Macabre gore and contract murders remain, but slowly, female characters fall silent, and some original inclusions vanish altogether, like “The Starving Children”: Once upon a time there was a woman with two daughters, so poor that they no longer had even a piece of bread, so hungry that their mother became unhinged and desperate and said, “I must kill you so I can get something to eat.”
Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales) went through seven complete and 10 abridged editions in the brothers’ lifetime, inspiring folklorists throughout Europe and Great Britain. It even became a mass project, as readers and colleagues sent in variants; adults of many nations shared the brothers’ strong sense of obligation to juvenile readers. But even the decorous definitive edition of 1857 is rough going. The coolly homicidal Hansel and Gretel. Rapunzel, kidnapped, seduced, pregnant, abandoned. Rumplestiltkin, ripping apart his own body in manic rage. Cinderella, watching birds pluck out her stepsisters’ eyes.
Love the word, love the fatherland. The Grimms’ instinct for Germany, bright and dark, was their making and, for a time, their undoing. The Nazi regime co-opted their work, along with Wagner’s music, to foster pride in racial purity, ordering every household in the Reich to own a copy of the Tales. After the war, Allied officials briefly banned the Grimms in German public schools. Schmiesing deftly tracks the stories through more recent popular culture, from therapist’s couch to page and screen. (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as Teutonic ghostbusters Will and Jake Grimm in a 2005 film adaptation are clearly “what the Grimms themselves frowned on: radical artistic reshapings.”)
In any format, children worldwide have gobbled up the Tales, from Snow White and The Frog King to the extremely strange The Juniper Tree. If the nation-building subtext has faded, the stories still burst with good advice: how to thwart witches, foil wolves, blend families, pick a mate, demand justice, face fears, navigate adulthood’s quicksands.
A shy girl in London loved these stories once. So did a boy from South Africa, and one in Belfast, and another in California. When their own narratives flowered, Beatrix Potter, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and George Lucas knew whom to thank. Without the labors of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, there would be no Peter Rabbit, no Middle-earth, no Narnia, and definitely no Star Wars.
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