THE BROTHERS GRIMM

The real Brothers Grimm are rescued from Disneyfication and myth.

The timeless fairy tales Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected, nurtured, and published have survived to become part of the world’s popular and literary canon. Not so a sense of who the Grimms were and the breadth of what they achieved. Many of the works they published beyond the tales are largely forgotten. Few know of their extensive, often groundbreaking work on mythology and medieval literature, on legends, on a comprehensive German dictionary, Jacob’s scholarship on grammar, or the cultural significance they attached to their various projects. In her thorough, densely detailed biography, Schmiesing restores them to prominence. She places the Brothers Grimm in the context of a tumultuous era preceding 19th-century German unification, exploring the exceptionally close brothers’ personal lives, accomplishments, and striking inconsistencies. For much of the book’s length, the tales take center stage. The surprise is that the Grimms assembled these stories not from peasants telling folktales in the field, but from educated young women, whose recalled narratives the brothers sometimes reworked, not always remembering their own dictum that editing should be “a gentle nurturing that preserves the organic nature of the text.” The Grimms recovered many now-famous stories, wishing to preserve them before they were lost to the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and war. As Schmiesing demonstrates, the aim was not simply to preserve the stories and traditions, but to reveal how they had descended (in their view) from a vast store of ancient epic literature—the collective voice of a people. As such, the tales came to be seen by some as “dangerous,” reflecting a nationalistic fervor and image of Germanness that was “too easily appropriated by Nazi ideology.” Yet, as the author underscores, the Grimms were scholars of high aspirations, not ideologues.

A magisterial, if occasionally overfurnished, rendering of the Grimms’ lives.