Afterlives

The Grimm tales have been translated, illustrated, filmed, staged, taught, sold and used for political purposes. Most people now meet them in a form the brothers would hardly recognise. This chapter follows that afterlife: the early English translations, the film and Disney versions, the tourist industry in Germany, the use of the tales by the Nazi regime and the debates since. The political material is handled descriptively and carefully. Names, titles and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Translation and Reception

• Early English. An English selection by Edgar Taylor appeared in 1823 to 1826 with illustrations by George Cruikshank (check), and was an early success that shaped English readers' sense of the tales.
• Selection and softening. Translators have often chosen tales, shortened them and adjusted wording for their audience, so there is no single "English Grimm" (check the main translations).
• Spread. The collection has been translated into a very large number of languages, and is often counted among the most translated German books (check the claim and the figures).
• Illustration. Illustrators from Cruikshank to Arthur Rackham and many later artists have fixed the look of characters in readers' minds (check names).
• UNESCO. The brothers' handwritten annotated copies of the tales were added to UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2005 (check).

Film, Stage and Disney

Tourism and the Fairy Tale Route

• The Deutsche Märchenstraße. The German Fairy Tale Route, a tourist route set up in the 1970s (check), links towns associated with the brothers and their tales, running roughly from Hanau to Bremen.
• Places. It includes Hanau, Steinau, Marburg, Kassel and Hamelin, famous for the legend of the Pied Piper, which the brothers collected as a Sage (check the stops).
• Museums. Museums in Kassel and Steinau display material about the brothers (check which are open).
• Heritage and invention. Some associations are firm and some are marketing, and a visitor can usefully ask which is which.

Politics and the Nazi Period

The collection began as part of a scholarly and cultural project in the Romantic and early nationalist climate (Chapters 2 and 3), and it was later available for political use. The following points are widely discussed by historians, and details should be checked.

• A national book. By the later nineteenth century the tales were widely treated as a core of German national culture, and were taught in schools (check).
• The Nazi period. The regime promoted the collection as a national book, and used selected tales and readings to support its ideas, while some tales were criticised or removed from use as unsuitable (check the specific cases and the scale). Historians stress that this was a use of the book, imposed on it from outside, and not something that the brothers, who died decades earlier, could have intended.
• After 1945. Allied occupation authorities are reported to have briefly restricted the book, and it was soon back in use (check this claim carefully, since accounts differ).
• Later debates. Scholars have discussed antisemitic and gender stereotypes in a small number of tales, and the question of how to present them to modern readers (check which tales and the arguments).

Exercises