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Apr 7, 2022 · The chapter also reconstructs the curiously thin nature of Grimm’s political beliefs: while he was confident, insistent, and at times even strident in debates over the territorial shape of the nation, he was considerably less vocal on other, domestic political issues, including discussions of rights and the distribution of goods in a society ...
Apr 7, 2022 · In the first comprehensive English-language portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as political thinkers and actors, Jakob Norberg reveals how history’s two most famous folklorists envisioned the role of literary and linguistic scholars in defining national identity.
- Overview
- Beginnings and Kassel period
Brothers Grimm, German folklorists and linguists best known for their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22; also called Grimm’s Fairy Tales), which led to the birth of the modern study of folklore. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. January 4, 1785, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel [Germany]—d. September 20, 1863, Berlin) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. February 24, 1786, Hana...
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest in a family of five brothers and one sister. Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, a lawyer, was town clerk in Hanau and later justiciary in Steinau, another small Hessian town, where his father and grandfather had been ministers of the Calvinistic Reformed Church. The father’s death in 1796 brought social hardships to the family; the death of the mother in 1808 left 23-year-old Jacob with the responsibility of four brothers and one sister. Jacob, a scholarly type, was small and slender with sharply cut features, while Wilhelm was taller, had a softer face, and was sociable and fond of all the arts.
After attending the high school in Kassel, the brothers followed their father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Marburg (1802–06) with the intention of entering civil service. At Marburg they came under the influence of Clemens Brentano, who awakened in both a love of folk poetry, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny, cofounder of the historical school of jurisprudence, who taught them a method of antiquarian investigation that formed the real basis of all their later work. Others, too, strongly influenced the Grimms, particularly the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, with his ideas on folk poetry. Essentially, they remained individuals, creating their work according to their own principles.
In 1805 Jacob accompanied Savigny to Paris to do research on legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages; the following year he became secretary to the war office in Kassel. Because of his health, Wilhelm remained without regular employment until 1814. After the French entered in 1806, Jacob became private librarian to King Jérôme of Westphalia in 1808 and a year later auditeur of the Conseil d’État but returned to Hessian service in 1813 after Napoleon’s defeat. As secretary to the legation, he went twice to Paris (1814–15), to recover precious books and paintings taken by the French from Hesse and Prussia. He also took part in the Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815). Meantime, Wilhelm had become secretary at the Elector’s library in Kassel (1814), and Jacob joined him there in 1816.
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By that time the brothers had definitely given up thoughts of a legal career in favour of purely literary research. In the years to follow they lived frugally and worked steadily, laying the foundations for their lifelong interests. Their whole thinking was rooted in the social and political changes of their time and the challenge these changes held. Jacob and Wilhelm had nothing in common with the fashionable “Gothic” Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their state of mind made them more Realists than Romantics. They investigated the distant past and saw in antiquity the foundation of all social institutions of their days. But their efforts to preserve these foundations did not mean that they wanted to return to the past. From the beginning, the Grimms sought to include material from beyond their own frontiers—from the literary traditions of Scandinavia, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, England, Serbia, and Finland.
May 2, 2018 · And as he compared tales, attempting to reconstruct the distant beginning of German culture, Jacob Grimm grew more interested in language. Language was a vehicle that could reach even further back to the authentic and original German past. How and why did words change from different Germanic languages or dialects to other Indo-European languages?
Through historical analysis, Norberg reveals how the Brothers Grimm used their writing — including their folk tales, fairy tales and linguistic works — to help construct and define national identity and German nationhood, weaving a political agenda into their works even though they might not appear explicitly political.
- Haley Warren
Sep 18, 2013 · So here's a response to that - a tongue-in-cheek politically correct version of Snow White in which the stepmother used a magic mirror because 'years of social conditioning in a male hierarchical dictatorship had left the queen very insecure about her own self-worth'.
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Apr 7, 2022 · The chapter reconstructs Jacob Grimm’s political thought in the 1840s when he emerged as a leader of the new association of Germanists and a prominent delegate in the first German national parliament.
