alt Hacker NewsThe Brothers Grimm: A Biography
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I wonder why the most important element of their political biography is not mentioned: they were among the Göttingen Seven.[1]
My favorite book about the Brothers Grimm is "Fairy Tales: A New History" by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.
She argues persuasively that the conventional origin normally told about the Grimm's fairy tales—-that they were recited by old peasant women remembering the ancient oral folktales of the Germanic people—-is not really true.
In fact the tales mainly came from middle class storytellers. And the two most important sources of the Grimm's tales were two Italian literary story collections from the Renaissance by Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.
It upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the origins of fairy tales.
I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as German.
In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something invented because it made the factories and the trains run better. It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.
1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.
For those interested: https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=A00001
Parsing "Magic: The German" made my brain glitch
Some very nice writing here by author Anne Matthews. I especially liked her closing paragraph:
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.