The Brothers Grimm Were Dark for a Reason
Their version of “Cinderella” or “Rapunzel” could be disturbing. But turning Germany into a unified nation, they believed, meant unearthing its authentic culture.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-brothers-grimm-a-biography-ann-schmiesing-book-review
Jennifer Wilson:
The Grimms were Germanists before there was a Germany. When they were born, “Germany” contained what the historian Perry Anderson describes as a “maze of dwarfish princedoms,” and they died not long before the country’s unification, in 1871. In between, the outlines of their homeland shifted again and again, with the Napoleonic invasion of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. Amid such geographic disarray, the Grimms believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. All that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel.
Their version of “Cinderella” or “Rapunzel” could be disturbing. But turning Germany into a unified nation, they believed, meant unearthing its authentic culture.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/11/11/the-brothers-grimm-a-biography-ann-schmiesing-book-review
Jennifer Wilson:
The Grimms were Germanists before there was a Germany. When they were born, “Germany” contained what the historian Perry Anderson describes as a “maze of dwarfish princedoms,” and they died not long before the country’s unification, in 1871. In between, the outlines of their homeland shifted again and again, with the Napoleonic invasion of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. Amid such geographic disarray, the Grimms believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. All that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel.