Brothers Collected Popular Fairy Tales : 200th Birthdays of Grimms Celebrated

Once upon a time, there were two young brothers who enjoyed collecting fairy tales.

Although they would one day become great linguists and open new frontiers in the study of languages, they would be remembered most for the collection of stories that spread their fame far and wide and enchanted children the world over.

Unlike the stories that made them famous, the tale of the two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, is true and this year the region of central Germany where they gathered such tales as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “Little Red Riding Hood” has begun celebrating the 200th birthdays of its two famous sons.

Although now viewed as benign stories for children, the fairy tales have stirred controversy virtually from their beginnings.

Useless Superstition

Renaissance Europe viewed the early, pre-Grimm versions disparagingly and dismissed them as useless superstition. Following World War II, the Grimms’ tales were banned for nearly two years in the British zone of occupied Germany in the belief that their sometimes gruesome content had helped pave the way for the German people to accept Nazi atrocities.

The tales the were attacked by Europe’s New Left of the 1960s as reactionary and a generation of American parents worried openly that the tales were too violent.

But these reservations have done little to blunt the enormously widespread popularity of the tales. They have been translated into 70 languages from Tajik to Thai, with each culture having its own favorite tales.

According to Heinz Roelleke, Wuppertal University professor and a respected authority on German folklore, Japanese children love the fantasy in the stories, such as Sleeping Beauty’s 100-year sleep or the appearance of fairy godmothers. Soviet versions invariably concentrate on the coziness of tiny houses or little families, while Americans tend to accentuate the glamor.

“Americans like the powerful king, the large weddings or the big castles,” Roelleke said. ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White’ are always included in American editions.”

Special Stamp Issue

Although several cities plan festivals this summer highlighting stage performances of the fairy tales and the West German Post Office has prepared a special issue of stamps illustrating the stories, the biggest exhibitions cast the Grimms as key figures in Germany’s cultural and political history.

These exhibitions will emphasize the intellectual achievements and political commitments of the brothers’ most productive years. Viewed by many Germans as far more important than the fairy tales, they remain largely unknown to the world outside.

“The Grimms are known too much as simple storytellers,” noted historian Klaus Becker, official spokesman for a major exhibit planned this summer at the Brothers Grimm Museum here. “Our aim is to show more of their role as intellectuals who yearned for democracy and German unity during a period of French domination.”

Third Brother

Three exhibitions, including one devoted to the illustrations drawn by a third Grimm brother, Ludwig, are planned for Kassel, the city where the brothers lived while gathering the fairy tales.

Symposiums on linguistics and German etymology are planned for West Berlin, Marburg and Kassel. The West German state of Hesse, where much of the Grimms’ work took place, alone hasbudgeted $600,000 to promote the celebrations.

For many Germans, the most important effort of the brothers’ lives was to begin work on a major dictionary that shed new light on the development of the German language and set a new standard internationally for linguistic histories.

Although Wilhelm died in 1859 as work on the letter D was being completed and Jacob lived four years longer, reaching only the letter F, the project survived both world wars and Germany’s post-war division before it was finally completed in 1960.

In the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s, work on the Grimm dictionary was a rare point of official contact between East and West Germany, and today the two states share the publishing rights. A commemorative paperback version published last fall in West Germany has already gone into its second printing.

More Ambitious

The elder brother, Jacob, born in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau in January, 1785, was the more ambitious of the two.

He joined the Hessian delegation to the Congress of Vienna in 1814 which determined the shape of post-Napoleonic Europe, but when the task proved as boring as it was weighty, Jacob amused himself by learning seven languages, including Serbian, Russian, Greek and Latin. Serbian, up to this point, had existed only as a spoken dialect but Jacob persuaded a Serbian friend to commit the language to writing. Later, Grimm helped write a grammar textbook for the language, which became known as Serbo-Croat.

Wilhelm, 13 months younger than Jacob and the second of the six Grimm children, interested himself more in the style and esthetics of his work than Jacob, who provided the analytical, scientific drive for the pair’s work.

It was Wilhelm’s decision to soften the collection of fairy tales with diminutives, cozy once-upon-a-time beginnings and reassuring happily-ever-after endings that made them unique and gave them their enormous popularity.

Both brothers were politically active and, as professors at Goettingen University, were part of the “Goettingen Seven” group of academics expelled from the Hanoverian kingdom in 1833 for protesting the new monarch’s decision to arbitrarily suspend the constitution.

It was a protest a more radical professor named Friederich Engels decided not to make. But both Engels and his colleague Karl Marx respected the Grimms’ political commitment and their contributions to the German language. As a result, their fairy tales have always enjoyed official sanction in the Soviet Union, and this year Moscow plans to publish special commemorative editions to mark the bicentennial.

Erasing Myths

Historians such as Becker also hope to use this year’s celebrations to erase some of the myths that have built up around the fairy tales themselves. For example, the image of the Grimms traveling through the German countryside noting down peasant tales is no more fact than the tales themselves, he pointed out.

“Most of the stories were related by middle-class friends or came via servants or tradesmen around the Grimm home in Kassel,” Becker said.

According to Roelleke, 90% of the fairy tales were contributed by women, including Wilhelm’s wife, Dortchen.

It was “Old Maria,” a blacksmith’s daughter who was the widow of a Hessian mercenary killed in the American Revolution, who related “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty” and “The Valiant Little Tailor” to the Grimms, while “Cinderella” came to them from a middle-class family in neighboring Westphalia.

But the most prolific contributor was Dorothea Viehmann, who delivered 37 mainly lesser-known stories to the Grimm home in addition to a daily supply of fresh vegetables.

Cultural Heritage

Although the Grimms saw their work largely as an attempt to preserve and better understand German cultural heritage, many of their fairy tales have non-German origins.

“Snow White,” for example, first showed up in a 16th-Century collection of Italian folklore, while “Little Red Riding Hood” preceded the Grimms in France by several generations.

However, the dark, forbidding forests and large castles that serve as the eerie backdrop for so many of the fairy tales, reflects the heavily wooded regions of central Germany and were almost certainly local embellishments.

Time and tradition also altered the tales before they were recorded by the Grimms.

At one time, Roelleke said, Cinderella was a handsome boy, who, with the help of a fairy godmother, escaped his domineering brothers to marry the sought-after princess.

“Only in the last two to three hundred years, as women took over the job of story-telling, did Cinderella and most other key figures in fairy tales become female,” Roelleke said. “The nucleus of the tales didn’t change, but details varied with time and the region.”

Wilhelm Grimm’s decision to give the tales happy endings and to expunge sexual references also brought alterations.

Heroine Dies

In the French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the heroine dies after being eaten by the wolf, but Grimm brought her back to life. And the long, erotic kiss that awakened the Sleeping Beauty of the original French tale was reduced by Grimm to a peck.

Although the Grimms assembled their fairy tales while both were in their 20s, their interest in folklore persisted through their lives.

More than 1,000 unpublished legends, myths and portions of other fairy tales gathered by the Grimms remain stored in the West Berlin State Library. Although most of the material is said to be fragmentary and of no great value, the bicentennial celebrations could awaken new interest.

“It would be interesting to see what’s there,” Roelleke noted. “But it would take years to sift through it all.”