 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Wilhelm (Carl) Grimm (1786-1859) - see also Jacob Grimm |
|
Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm – famous for their classical collections of folk songs and folktales, especially for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales); generally known as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Stories such as 'Snow White' and 'Sleeping Beauty' have been retold countless times, but they were first written down by the Brothers Grimm. In their collaboration Wilhelm, who was the more imaginative and literary of the two, selected and arranged the stories, while Jacob was responsible for the scholarly work. "'Silly goose,' said the old woman. 'The door is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!' and she crept up and thrust her head into the oven. Then Gretel gave her a push that drove her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh! then she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death." (from 'Hansel and Gretel') Wilhelm Grimm was born in Hanau. His father, who was educated in law and served as a town clerk, died when Wilhelm was young. His mother Dorothea struggled to pay the education of the children. With financial help of Dorothea's sister, Jacob and Wilhelm were sent to Kasel to attend the Lyzeum. Wilhelm always suffered from poor health, which made regular work difficult. He was was nonetheless more animated, jovial, and sociable than Jacob. After studying law at Marburg, he worked as a secretary at Kassel, where Jacob served as librarian. In 1812, the year their fairy tales were first published, the Grimms were surviving on a single meal a day. Between 1821 and 1822 the brothers raised extra money by collecting three volumes of folktales. With these publications they wanted to show, that Germans shared a similar culture and advocate the unification process of the small independent kingdoms and principalities. Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms.
Probably
the German writer Clemens Bretano first awoke their interest in folk
literature. Bretano asked them to collect folk tales for his own work,
but he lost the fifty-four texts they send him. Their first tales date
from 1807. The first volume, which
contained 86 items, was published by Georg Andreas Reimer at Berlin.
The most important informants included Dorothea Viehmann, the daughter
of an innkeeper, Johann Friedrich Krause, an old dragoon, and Marie
Hassenpflug, a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a
well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie's stories blended motifs from
the oral tradition and Perrault's Tales of My Mother Goose
(1697). From Dorothea Viehmann the brothers got the story about
'Cinderella'. The most prolific of the storytellers in Kassel was
Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild, the daughter of a well-to-do
pharmacist; Wilhelm eventually married her in 1825, but the most
romantic letters he ever wrote he sent to Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff, a
wealthy young woman who collected fairy tales. The brothers moved in 1829 to Göttingen, Wilhelm becoming assistant
librarian and Jacob librarian. In 1835 Wilhelm was appointed professor,
but they were dismissed two years later for protesting against the
abrogation of the comparatively liberal Hannover constitution by
the reactionary King Ernest Augustus (1771-1851). The Grimms were
members of the "Göttingen seven," eminent academics, who refused
to swear an oath to uphold the new constitution. All over Europe, they
were hailed as heroes. In 1840 the brothers accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to go to Berlin. There, as members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, they lectured at the university. In 1841 they became professors at the University of Berlin, and worked with their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a large German dictionary. Its first volume came out in the 1850s. The work, 32 volumes, was finished in the 1960s. Even after Wilhelm married his childhood
friend Dortchen Wild, the brothers
worked very close. Jacob
remained unmarried, but he took care of the family's children while living
in his household. Dortchen
joked about her "two husbands" and assisted them in the fairy tale
collection. Wilhelm and Dortchen had four children (Jacob, Herman,
Rudolf, and Auguste); the first died as a baby. When the revolutionary wave of 1848 swept over Europe, the brothers were not seen at the barricads, but Jacob spoke out for the democracy and German unity at the Frankfurt National Assembly. The term democracy was not included in their dictionary. Wilhelm died of infection in Berlin on December 16, 1859, and Jacob four years later on September 20, 1863. The Grimms came over a century after Madame d'Aulnoy and Charles Perrault, who between them first created and popularized the literary fairy tale. Grimms were more intent on capturing the genuine oral tradition – earlier Ludwig Tieck and Johann-Karl Musaeus relied more on the gothic tradition than folklore. In English Grimms' Tales are often referred as "fairytales", but only a few of them involve mythical creatures. The first English translation appeared anonymously in 1823, but it was the work of the London solicitor Edgar Taylor and his collaborator David Jardine. Noteworthy, this edition was illustrated by George Cruikshank; Jacob and Wilhelm themselves followed the example and encouraged their younger brother Ludwig Emil to illustrate the Kleine Ausgabe (1825). After its appearance, the Tales became to be regarded as a children's book. Kinder- und Hausmärchen was originally published in two volumes (1812-1815). Sales were were relatively good: nearly all 900 copies of the first volume had been sold by 1815. When the brothers finally did get paid it all went to their many debts. The final edition – the last to appear during their life time – was published in 1857 and contained 211 tales; a further 28 had been dropped from earlier editions, making 239 in total. The stories were not intented to be read by children. Moreover, Kinder- und Hausmärchen received relatively little attention compared to Deutsche Sagen (1816-1818, German Legends). Wilhelm Grimm didn't even bother to mention the work in his curriculum vitae from 1831. In their own time, the brothers they were mainly cited for this work and various medieval poems, Hildebrand und Hadubrand, Das Weissenbrunner Gebet, and their translation of the Old Norse Poetic Edda. ('Introduction' by Terry Gunnell, in Grimm Ripples: The Legacy of the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe, edited by Terry Gunnell, 2022, p. 1) The Grimms wrote down most of the tales from oral narrations, collecting the material mainly from peasants in Hesse. The first edition included stories in 10 dialects as well as High German. Among the best-known stories are 'Hansel and Gretel,' 'Cinderella,' 'Rumpelstiltskin,' 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' and 'The Golden Goose.' The stories include magic, communication between animals and men, and moral values, teachings of social right and wrong. The term 'Hausmärchen' in the title refers to 'Hausmärlein,' a term created by Georg Rollenhagen in 1595; 'household tales' were meant to serve as a guide for Christian upbringing. The brothers are generally treated as a team, though Jacob
concentrated on linguistic studies and Wilhelm was primarily a literary
scholar. Jacob wrote down most of the tales published in the first
volume. From 1819 onward, Wilhelm supervised all subsequent editions on
his own, because Jacob was repeatedly away on diplomatic missions.
During the editing phase they constantly consulted each other. Both
brothers suffered from ill health. Wilhelm had heart problems and he
had a tendency toward depression. "Sometimes my heart would suddenly,
without any external cause, begin a tremendous pounding which would
then just as suddenly come to a stop. Once it lasted twenty hours
without interruption . . . ", Wilhelm wrote in Selbstbiographie (org. 1830, rpt 1881). Jacob believed that he will die an early death, he suffered from sore eyes and had severe headaches. Affected by the ideas of Enlightenment and the German Romanticism and its interest in mythology, folklore and dreams, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm established the historical tradition of "authentic" folk tales. In his masterly guide The March of the Literature (1938) the English writer Ford Madox Ford sees that their work was more than a mere reflection of German romanticism: "But the real apotheosis of this side of the Teutonic cosmos came into its own through the labors of the brothers Ludwig Karl, and Wilhelm Karl Grimm for whom the measure of our administration may well be marked by the fact that there is nothing in the world left to say about their collection of fairy tales. It is, on the whole, wrong to concede the brothers Grimm to the romantics. They belonged to the earth movement and are known wherever the sky covers the land. That is the real German Empire." Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm argued that folktales should be collected from oral sources, which aimed at genuine reproduction of the original story. Their method became model for other scholars. However, in practice the tales were modified. In
later editions of the fairytales Wilhelm's editing and literary
aspiration were more prominent. He continued to reshape the tales up to
the final edition of 1857 – he also removed any hint of sexual
activity, such as the premarital couplings of Rapunzel and the prince
who climbed into her tower. "At first Rapunzel was frightened, but soon
she came to like the young king so much that she agreed to let him
visit every day and to pull him up. The two lived joyfully for a time,
and the fairy did not catch on at all until Rapunzel told her one day:
"Tell me, Godmother, why my clothes are so tight and why they
don't fit me any longer." "Wicked child!" cried the fairy." "What proper mother or nanny could tell the fairy tale about Rapunzel to an innocent daughter without blushing," said the historian Friedrich Rühs. (The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: Expanded Second Edition by Maria Tatar, 2003, p. 18) In 'The Frog Prince, or Iron-Henry' a beautiful princess loses her ball into a well. A frog promises to bring the ball back to her, if she loves the frog, lets it be her companion and play-fellow, and sleep in her bed. Actually the frog is a prince, bewitched by a wicked witch. In spite some changes, the cores of the stories were left untouched. The Grimm's tales are in fact much closer to genuine folk origins than Hans Christian Andersen's tales – he is considered the best-known tellers of fairy tales. While collaborating with Jacob was Wilhelm's contribution to science is his collection Die deutsche Heldensage (The German Heroic Tale). In 1840 the Brothers Grimm began the Deutsches Wörterbuch, intended as a guide for the user of the written and spoken word as well as a scholarly reference work. Wilhelm's work proceeded to the letter D, Jacob lived to see the work proceed to the letter F. Both brothers argued that folktales should be recorded and presented in print in a form as close as possible to the original mode. It also meant that some of the stories contained unpleasant details. Doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella's stepsisters, and in 'The Juniper Tree' a woman decapitates her stepson. A witch kills her own daughter in 'Darling Roland.' "These stories are suffused with the same purity that makes children so marvelous and blessed," wrote Wilhelm Grimm in the preface to the Nursery and Household Tales. In practice the brothers modified folktales in varying ways, sometimes even intensifying violent episodes. Especially references to sexuality embarrassed the Grimms'. In
'The Snow White' the violence was toned down by later editions: at the
end of the story the wicked Queen is forced to put on red-hot iron
slippers and dance till she dies. The witch ends up in the oven
and is baked alive. In 'Hansel and Gretel.'"Oh,
you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to
you." (from 'Hansel and Gretel') Gianbattista Basile's seventeeth-century Neapolitain version of 'Sleeping
Beauty,' in which the young woman is named Thalia, she is raped and
abandoned by a king. Talia gives birth to twins, still deep in sleep. Sigmund Freud commented on 'Little Red Riding Hood' in 'On the Sexual Theories of Children' (1908), dealing with children ignorant of the birth process. According to Freud, they might assume that babies who grow in the body of the mother, "must be expelled like excrement. . . . If in latter childhood the same question is the subject of solitary reflection or of a discussion between two children, the explanations probably are that the baby comes out of the navel, which opens, or that the belly is slit and the child taken out, as happens to the wolf in the tale of Little Red Riding.Hood." ('Interpreting Little Red Riding Hood Psychoanalytically' by Alan Dundes, in The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, edited by James M. McGlathery, 1991, p. 30) In Nazi Germany 'Little Red Riding Hood' was turned into a symbol of the German people, saved from the evil Jewish wolf. In the 1970s the tales were scorned for promoting a sexists, authority-ridden world view, and largely banned from the German nursery. However, the Grimm's world has been utilized by many modern fantasists and filmmakers, including Tanith Lee, Robin McKinley, Patricia Wrede, and the director Terry Gillam. The 200th anniversary of the publication of Die Kinder und Hausmärchen in Kassel in 2012 launched the 2013 celebrations of the brothers. For further reading: Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. by Elmer H. Antonsen (1990); The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Maria M. Tatar (1990); The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, ed. by James M. McGlathery (1991); The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics by Christa Kamenetsky (1992); Grimms' Fairy Tales by James M. McGlathery (1993); The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales, ed. by Donald Haase (1993); The Brothers Grimm: Two Lives, One Legacy by Donald R. Hettinga (2001); The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: Expanded Second Edition by Maria Tatar (2003); Grimms Wörter. Eine Liebeserklärung by Günter Grass (2010); Grimm Legacies: The Magic Power of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes (2014); Grimm Ripples: The Legacy of the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen in Northern Europe, edited by Terry Gunnell (2022). Herman Grimm (1828-1901), the second son of Wilhelm Grimm, professor of the history of modern art at University of Berlin (from 1873), essayist, whose style of controlled improvisation influenced deeply the development of the genre in Germany. Herman Grimm dedicated his first collection, Essays (1859), to Ralph Waldo Emerson. His works were rediscovered in the 1940s. Leading German Romantics: J.W. Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Schiller. Note: In Finland Elias Lönnrot (1802-1884), who created the Finnish national epic Kalevala, collected the material - ballads, lyrical songs and incantations - from oral sources as the Grimms. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) studied Irish legends and tales, which he published with George Russell and Douglas Hyde in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). Film: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), dir. by Henry Levin, George Pal, starring Laurence Harvey, Karl Boehm, Claire Bloom, Barbara Eden - an account of the lives of the brothers, supplemeted by three stories, "The Dancing Princess," "The Cobbler and the Elves," and "The Singing Bone." Selected works:
|
