Brothers Grimm

This article is about the authors the Brothers Grimm. For information about the fictional movie loosely based on these writers, see The Brothers Grimm.

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm

The Brothers Grimm (Gebrüder Grimm) are Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm and were well known for publishing collections of German fairy tales, as Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales"), in 1812, with a second volume in 1814 ("1815" on the title page), as well as many further editions during their lifetimes.

Biography

Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhem Karl Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786, respectively, in Hanau near Frankfurt. They were educated at the Friedrichs Gymnasium in Kassel and later both read law at the University of Marburg. From 1837 until 1841, the Brothers Grimm joined five of their colleague professors at the University of Göttingen to protest against the abolition of the liberal constitution of the state of Hanover by King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover. This group came to be known anywhere in Germany as Die Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven). Invoking their right to resist on reasons of natural and constitutional justice, they protested against the King´s hubris to abrogate the constitution. For this, all professors were fired from their university posts and some even deported. Though politically divided by borders of duchies and kingdoms at that time, public opinion and academia in Germany almost unanimously supported the Grimms and their colleagues against the monarch. Wilhelm died in 1858; his elder brother Jakob died in 1863. They are buried in the St Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The Grimms helped foment a nationwide democratic public opinion in Germany and are cherished as the progenitors of the German democratic movement, whose revolution of 1848/1849 was crushed brutally by the Kingdom of Prussia which reinstalled an absolute monarchy.

Later editions

Along with the original German works, many originally French tales entered the Brothers Grimm collection through a Huguenot tale-teller that the Grimms used as one of their main sources. English translations of the 7th edition (1857) remain popular, and they exist now predominantly as highly expurgated and saccharine versions intended for children, even though the folk tales that the Grimms had collected had not been previously considered stories for children. Witches, goblins, trolls and wolves prowl the dark forests of the Grimms' ancient villages, as well as the deeper psyche of the insular German city-states of the time. However the Grimms often rewrote the stories to suit what was considered appropriate for the time, especially when the folk tales often could be quite sexually explicit.

Modern analysis

Modern psychologists and cultural anthropologists theorize that the stories that are often read to children at bed-time in the West are actually representations of emotional angst, fear of abandonment, parental abuse, and/or sexual development. The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in his book The Uses of Enchantment believes the familiar Grimms' fairy tales to be Freudian myths. A modern editor of the Brothers Grimm and interpreter of the fairy tales tradition is Jack Zipes. The most prolific writer on Grimm's fairy tales in Germany today is Eugen Drewermann who has interpreted more than twenty of the tales psychologically as stories that speak about various struggles on our way to become and to be fully human.

Linguistics

In the very early 19th century, the time in which the Brothers Grimm lived, the Holy Roman Empire had just met its fate, and Germany as we know it today did not yet exist; it was basically an area of hundreds of principalities and small or mid-sized countries. The major unifying factor for the German people of the time was a common language. There was as yet no significant German literary history. So part of what motivated the brothers in their writings and in their lives was the desire to help create a German identity.

Less well known to the general public outside Germany is the Brothers Grimm's work on a German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. Indeed, the Deutsches Wörterbuch was the first major step in creating a standardized "modern" German language since Martin Luther's translation of the Bible from Latin to German. Being very extensive (33 volumes, weighing 84 kg) it is still considered as the standard reference for German etymology.

The brother Jakob is recognized for enunciating Grimm's law, Germanic Sound Shift, that was first observed by the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask. Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change ever to be discovered.

Miscellaneous

The Brothers Grimm on a 1000DM banknote.

Between 1990 and the 2002 introduction of the euro currency in Germany, the Grimms were depicted on the 1000 Deutsche Mark note - the largest available denomination.

Selection of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm

• The Almond Tree
• The Blue Light
• Brave Little Taylor
• Brother and Sister
• Cinderella
• The Bremen Town Musicians
• The Elves and the Shoemaker
• The Fisherman and His Wife
• The Five Servants
• The Frog Prince
• The Gallant Sailor
• The Golden Bird
• The Golden Goose
• The Goose Girl
• The Greatful Beasts
• Hansel and Gretel
• Iron John
• Jorinde and Joringel
• King Thrushbeard
• The Little Farmer
• Little Red Riding Hood
• Mother Hulda
• Old Sultan
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin
• Rumpelstiltskin
• Rapunzel
• The Raven
• The Salad
• Six Soldiers of Fortune
• The Six Swans
• Sleeping Beauty
• Snow White
• Snow-White and Rose-Red
• The Three Little Men in the Woods
• The Three Spinsters
• Tom Thumb
• The Twelve Brothers
• The Twelve Dancing Princesses
• The Water of Life
• The White Snake
• The Wonderful Musician

The Brothers Grimm (1982). Fairy Tales, Julian Messner. ISBN 0-671-45648-2 AACR2.

External links and references

Texts and recordings

• Free eBook of Grimm's Fairy Tales at Project Gutenberg
• Free eBook of Grimm's household tales with the author's notes at Project Gutenberg. Translated by Margaret Hunt.

Other

• The Museum of the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, Germany
• Grimm's Märchen tiefenpsychologisch gedeutet by Dr. Eugen Drewermann (in German)