by Maria Tatar
THE CHILDREN
LIVING IN A
TIME OF FAMINE
here once lived a woman who fell into such deep poverty with her two daughters that they didn’t even have a crust of bread left to put in their mouths. Finally they were so famished that the mother was beside herself with despair and said to the older child: “I will have to kill you so that I’ll have something to eat.”
The daughter replied: “Oh, no, dearest Mother, spare me. I’ll go out and see to it that I can get something to eat without having to beg for it.”
And so she went out, returned, and brought with her a small piece of bread that they all ate, but it was too little to ease the pangs of hunger.
And so the mother said to the other daughter: “Now it’s your turn.”
But she replied: “Oh, no, dearest Mother, spare me. I’ll go out and get something to eat without anyone noticing it.”
And so she went out, returned, and brought with her two small pieces of bread. They all ate them, but it was too little to ease their pangs of hunger. After a few hours, the mother said to them once again: “You will have to die, otherwise we’ll all perish.”
The girls replied: “Dearest Mother, we’ll lie down and go to sleep, and we won’t rise again until the Day of Judgment.” And so they lay down and slept so soundly that no one could awaken them. The mother left, and not a soul knows where she is.
A summary of a seventeenth-century written account of a mother who threatened to kill and devour her daughters so that she could survive a famine, “The Children Living in a Time of Famine” is less fairy tale than sensational news story. It is telling, however, that the Grimms elected to include this kind of account in their collection. Clearly, for them there was no distinct dividing line between the fiction of fairy tales and the facts of everyday life, or at least the most sensationalistic aspects of everyday life. What really distinguishes this report from fairy tales is the absence of magic and the sudden appearance of a way out—a way for the two sisters to rescue themselves from the cannibalistic ogre who is their mother. But the many faces of maternal evil in fairy tales no doubt led the Grimms to believe that this account did not deviate radically from fairy-tale narratives.
THE STUBBORN CHILD
here once lived a stubborn child, and he never did what his mother told him to do. And so our dear Lord did not look kindly on him and let him become ill. Doctors could not cure him, and before long he was lying on his deathbed. His coffin was being lowered into the grave and they were about to cover it with earth when suddenly one of his little arms emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back in again and covered the coffin with more earth, but it was no use. The little arm kept reaching out of the grave. Finally, his mother had to go to the grave and strike the little arm with a switch. After she did that, the arm withdrew, and the child finally began to rest in peace beneath the earth.
“Eigensinnig,” the German term for stubborn, suggests a strong will, a desire to have things your own way. In their annotations, the Grimms point to superstitious beliefs surrounding children who strike their parents—they evidently are not able to rest in peace and their arms emerge periodically from the grave to make beating gestures. This tale is included in the standard collections of Grimms’ fairy tales, and, like “The Jew in the Brambles,” remains of historical interest, even if it is not appropriate as a story for children. Some child readers, nonetheless, find this tale fascinating, and it has been viewed by some adult readers as a tale for mothers who need reassurance that the process of grieving for a child that has died must find an end. The German version of the tale does not specify the gender of the child.
THE ROSE
nce upon a time there lived an old woman who had two children. Every day the youngest had to go into the forest to fetch wood. Once, when he had gone very far into the forest, he met a small, but sturdy, child who worked hard to help him find wood and bring it right up to the house. The child vanished in the blink of an eye. The boy told his mother all about what had happened, but she didn’t believe him. Later the boy brought his mother a rose and told her that the beautiful child had given him the rose and would come again when it was in full bloom. The mother put the rose in water. One morning the child did not get out of bed. The mother went over to the child’s bed and discovered that he had died. But he looked peaceful. And the rose was in full bloom that morning.
The ten legends for children appended to the two hundred tales in the Children’s Stories and Household Tales are more religious parables than fairy tales. One replicates the structure of the kind and unkind girls, with Saint Joseph as the figure who rewards and punishes. A second tells of twelve starving brothers who are rescued by angels to become the twelve apostles. A third tells of a widow with five children whose sister refuses to share food with her. When the sister’s husband, who is “as rich as a gold mine,” cuts a slice of bread, blood gushes from the loaf. He rushes over to the sister’s house and finds her praying and holding her two surviving children. She refuses the offer for food and expires with the two children before his eyes. These tales, like “The Rose,” were designed to provide comfort and consolation to those living in hard times, with the promise of a glorious afterlife that would compensate for earthly hardships. A motif from this tale appears in Maurice Sendak’s illustrations for Wilhelm Grimm’s tale “Dear Mili.”
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
“ilence was their real element. . . . I remember how as a child I would walk about in the studies of my father and ‘Apapa,’ as we children called Jacob Grimm. All you could hear was the scratching of their pens, and sometimes Jacob’s frequent little coughs. When writing, he bent down close over the paper, the ends of his quills were cut off short, and he wrote quickly and with excitement. . . . My father left the goose quills unplucked, and he wrote more deliberately. The facial features of both were in constant motion: their eyebrows would move up and down, at times they stared into space. Often they would get up, take out a book and turn the pages. I cannot imagine that anyone would dare interrupt this sacred silence.” Wilhelm Grimm’s son, Herman, captured in this vignette what the Grimms are perhaps best known for: a passion for scholarly matters and a collaborative vigor that began when they were young and continued into old age. Dedicating their lives to philology, literature, and history, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected texts, studied them, annotated them, compared them, and engaged in their analysis. Their lives form a tribute to the pleasures and challenges of scholarly pursuits. Laboring next to each other for most of their lives, they collaborated on volumes that laid the foundations for the study of German language, literature, and folklore and that set the standard for scientific research in those fields.
“Many are the fairy tales and myths,” Jack Zipes has observed, “that have been spread about the Brothers Grimm.” For some, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are cultural heroes, men who pioneered the study of philology and folklore in Germany and who left a remarkable legacy in the volumes they published during their lifetimes. As the scholar Murray Peppard puts it, “the fairy tale brothers lifted the musty veil obscuring Germany’s past and wove it into a magic web that captured the imagination of all Europe.” For others, the Grimms were proto-fascists who promoted nationalistic sentiment and values that are unacceptable to us today. The distinguished American folklorist Richard M. Dorson underscored the link between what the Grimms published and what the Nazis found appealing: “In the wake of the Grimms, late nineteenth-century nationalists extolled the brothers and their Märchen for helping acquaint Germans with a sense of folk unity and historical past. Under the Nazis the originals of the tales with their bloodletting and violence were reintroduced.”
The brothers’ philological achievements (launching the German Dictionary, producing the German Grammar, collecting fairy tales and legends, and editing Old High German and Middle High German texts), their accomplishments in the arena of public service (as pr
ofessors, diplomats, and librarians), and their political engagement (most prominently as members of a group protesting the dissolution of parliament and revocation of constitutional rights in Hannover) have come to be dwarfed by their folkloric legacy.
Born in Hanau in 1785 and 1786, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest of six children. In his autobiography, Wilhelm recalled his childhood home—its garden wall, a peach tree that blossomed every year, and the old church at the center of town. The family was solidly middle class: Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, the boys’ father, was scribe and district magistrate in the town of Steinau, near Kassel, where he was given a generous salary and a comfortable home for his family. In the mornings, Jacob and Wilhelm received instruction in geography, history, and botany from their tutor Herr Zinckhahn; in the afternoon they attended private lessons in French and Latin. Jacob, who was being groomed for legal studies, received special lessons in law from his father. Still, there remained time for childhood games, and both brothers write at length in their autobiographical accounts about hide-and-seek, marbles, snowball fights, arts and crafts, along with afternoons devoted to long walks in the meadows or watching swallows build nests. It was, as the brothers recalled, an idyllic period in their lives. “I can still recall,” Wilhelm wrote many years later, “how the two of us, Jacob and I, would walk hand in hand past the market in the city to our French teacher, who lived next to the church. We would stand gazing in childish delight at the golden rooster on top of the tower, watching it turn in the wind.”
The “collector spirit,” or Sammlergeist, was a quality that both brothers cultivated early in life. Wilhelm not only collected insects and butterflies but also drew sketches of them in his notebook. Jacob and Wilhelm both made a habit of copying passages from books, preserving them for later perusal. These hobbies foreshadowed their joint interest in collecting legends, myths, folktales, folk songs, and proverbs, along with the thousands and thousands of citations that were gathered as part of their project for a German dictionary.
In 1796 Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, described by his son Jacob as “hardworking, methodical, and affectionate,” came down with pneumonia and died. In an autobiographical statement penned in 1831, Jacob Grimm still had vivid memories of the black coffin in which his father was carried to the cemetery. Without a government pension, Dorothea Grimm was forced to draw on savings to support herself and her six children. She moved from the comfortable home in Steinau with Jacob, Wilhelm, and their three younger brothers (Carl, Ferdinand, and Ludwig) and sister Lotte to a more modest dwelling. The following year, Henriette Zimmer, Dorothea’s sister, invited the two older boys to live with her in Kassel so they could attend the prestigious Lyceum Fredericianum. Wilhelm, the more physically fragile of the two brothers, suffered under the strict educational regimen and struggled periodically with bouts of colds and asthma. Jacob, more physically robust, was troubled by social slights that he and his brother had to endure. It was in Kassel that Jacob developed a keen sense of social justice and a devotion to democratic rule in all spheres of life.
Both brothers graduated from the lyceum at the head of their classes, but both also had to request special dispensation to study law at the University of Marburg. Their work ethic was unparalleled, and material hardship served to spur their efforts. In his autobiography, Jacob observed that “poverty is an inducement to diligence and hard work—it protects from many a distraction and inspires a healthy sense of pride based on the consciousness of one’s own merits by contrast to what is bestowed on others for their rank or wealth.” In Marburg the brothers launched their legal studies, with Jacob enrolling at the university in 1802 and Wilhelm beginning his studies the following year. The year-long separation weighed heavily on the brothers, who were accustomed to sharing everything, including a single bed. Living modestly—only members of the aristocracy and rich landowners were given stipends, much to Jacob’s dismay—they were more absorbed by their studies than by concerns for material comfort. While other students gambled, played cards, dueled, and rode horseback, they remained dedicated to the curriculum.
Under the tutelage of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, founder of the historical school of law, the brothers discovered the importance of philological studies and historical research. In Savigny’s library, they had a chance to browse books and manuscripts from an earlier era and to indulge their love of matters both literary and historical. When Jacob published his German Grammar, he dedicated the volume to Savigny, whose lectures had modeled the scientific method of research for him and his brother. In Marburg the Grimms also discovered Romantic literature, reading such authors as Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel with enthusiasm, and working through texts from the Middle Ages, to which they would later return in their scholarly studies. When asked to go on an outing, Jacob often refused, saying that he intended to “take a walk in literature.”
Savigny invited Jacob to accompany him to Paris as his research assistant at the university, where he was writing a history of Roman law in the Middle Ages. Jacob’s letters to Wilhelm reveal his avid interest in the culture and politics of the French capital. Fluent in French, Jacob was offered a position at the Hessian War Ministry in 1806 and quickly accepted with the hope of providing support for his brother, mother, and siblings. Separation was not easy, and Jacob wrote from Paris that he hoped the two would never again part ways: “If at any time in the future one of us should be sent away, the other must give notice at once. We are so accustomed to being together that the mere thought of separation causes me deep distress.” Forced to wear a stiff uniform with powdered wig and high collar and to perform mind-numbing work, Jacob was nonetheless prepared to carry out his duties in exchange for a modest salary. Political events produced momentous changes, and that same year Kassel became the capital of the new kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jérôme.
During the years of the Napoleonic occupation, Jacob Grimm reflected on the gradual shift in his interests from law to literature: “I consider myself qualified to seek a position in the public library in Kassel, especially since I had some practice in the reading of manuscripts and reasonable familiarity with the history of literature through private study. I also felt that I would make stronger progress in that field, rather than in the field of French law, which I detested, and into which our entire system of jurisprudence was about to be transformed.” Jacob sensed that the pursuit of legal studies had been determined less by intellectual inclination than by a sense of filial responsibility. Wherever there were books, he felt at home, and the position of librarian and archivist, with its low-key social dimension and opportunities for immersion in reading, had a powerful appeal for him. “My uncle loved books,” Herman Grimm observed, capturing Jacob’s real passion in life.
Jacob’s efforts to secure a position in Kassel were finally successful in 1808, when King Jérôme offered him a position as royal librarian in Napoleonshöhe, formerly known as Wilhelmshöhe. Just weeks before the appointment, Dorothea Grimm died, leaving Jacob and Wilhelm to manage family matters and to care for their four siblings. The new position provided financial stability and was something of a sinecure, requiring only a few hours a day of cataloging new entries. Jacob had ample time to use the resources of the Royal Library to pursue his own research interests, even after he was made auditor to the Council of State.
It was during Jacob’s tenure at the War Ministry and at the Royal Library that the brothers launched their efforts to collect folklore. These were not easy years for the Grimms, and in 1809 Wilhelm’s health had declined so dramatically that he was sent to Halle for treatment with the famed physician Johann Christian Reil. The costly “magnetic” treatments lasted nearly six months and significantly depleted the family resources. Years later, Wilhelm described the precarious state of his health in his autobiography: “To the shortness of breath which made climbing a few steps a terrible burden and the constant fierce pains in my chest were now added a heart condition. The
pain, which felt like a fiery arrow was being shot repeatedly through my heart, left me with a constant sense of anxiety. Sometimes I experienced violent palpitations. . . . I was not completely distraught by my illness, and when things were tolerable, I was able to work, even finding some pleasure in it.”
The plan of Clemens Brentano, a close friend to both brothers, to issue a volume of folktales inspired the Grimms to collect oral tales in the region of Kassel and to identify written versions of tales. This was a period of unprecedented productivity in the lives of the brothers, and they published volumes on songs, ballads, tales, and in 1812, the first installment to the Children’s Stories and Household Tales. Their turn to older German literature and to folklore can be seen in some ways as a form of passive resistance, a quiet protest to the Napoleonic occupation, in its effort to establish the basis for a German cultural identity. Wilhelm wrote in his autobiography about the political dimension he perceived in the scholarly turn taken in their work: “The days marking the collapse of all previously existing establishments will never be forgotten. . . . The zeal with which we pursued our studies in older German helped overcome our spiritual depression. . . . Undoubtedly the world situation and the need to withdraw into the tranquillity of scholarship contributed to the reawakening of the long-forgotten literature, but we were not just seeking solace in the past, we also hoped that the course on which we had embarked would contribute somehow to the return of a better day.”