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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.
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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 1859;
his elder brother Jakob died in 1863. They are buried in the St Matthäus
Kirchhof Cemetery in Schöneberg, a 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 was crushed brutally by the Kingdom of Prussia in the
revolution of 1848.
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
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.
****
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URL of Original Article:
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Date Article Copied:
December 8, 2005
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