Ann Schmiesing is the author of the new book The Brothers Grimm: A Biography. She also has written the book Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms' Fairy Tales. She is professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the Brothers Grimm?
A: Over many years of teaching and giving public lectures on the Grimms, I’ve been inspired by students and audience members who have shared memories related to when they first read or were told a particular Brothers Grimm tale or tales.
For example, an elderly man told of boyhood nightmares after reading the Grimm tale “The Goose Girl,” in which a dead horse’s severed head starts talking of an evil character’s treachery.
A German woman described the cigarette-package illustrations of Grimm tales she collected as a girl at the end of World War II, when her mother suppressed her appetite with smoking so her daughter could have their food rations.
Millennial and Gen Z students have spoken of Disney films and Grimm-inspired manga, video games, and fan fiction.
The Brothers Grimm: A Biography was inspired by these memories and the individuals sharing them, who have frequently asked me to recommend a biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and translations of their tales.
For years, I’ve pointed to Jack Zipes’s beautiful translation of the Grimms’ collection, but I’ve had to caution against decades-old English-language biographies, since they contain myths about the Grimms that subsequent scholarship has dispelled.
Dispelling these myths opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose.
I was thus inspired to write a biography that situates the “once upon a time” of the fairy tales in the fullest context of the Grimms’ lives and their time.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book begins with: “The real Brothers Grimm are rescued from Disneyfication and myth.” What do you think of that description, and what would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about the Grimms and their stories?
A: It’s true that misconceptions about the Brothers Grimm and their famous fairy-tale collection abound. Some readers mistakenly assume that the Grimms authored their tales themselves, when in fact they collected tales and then frequently made alterations.
Contrary to a myth that arose already in the 19th century, the Grimms did not venture out into fields, spinning parlors, or peasants’ cottages to collect tales directly from the mouths of the rural people.
Few of the storytellers they interacted with came from the lower socioeconomic classes, and they actually received many of their tales from middle and upper-class young women.
As for the edits they made, the Grimms often merged two or more versions of a tale into one, and they also altered tales to make them conform to 19th-century bourgeois norms.
For example, the mother in “Hansel and Gretel” was originally the children’s biological parent, but the Grimms later changed this to a stepmother, implicitly suggesting that a biological mother could not possibly abandon her children.
The Grimms also expunged or softened sexual references that went against social mores.
“Rapunzel” illustrates this well. In the first edition of the Grimms’ tales, the sorceress learns that a man has been in the tower when Rapunzel complains that her clothes have become too tight; in later editions, this reference to pregnancy is removed, and Rapunzel instead blurts out that the sorceress is so much heavier to hoist up into the tower than the prince.
The Grimms also added or enhanced Christian references in many tales and tried to make the tales folksier in tone by adding rhymes and sayings. In several tales, female characters become more dependent on male characters as a result of the Grimms’ edits.
In addition, the Grimms frequently added or intensified violent punishments for bad behavior, as when doves peck out the stepsisters’ eyes in “Cinderella.”
Indeed, some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales, especially compared to Disney or other popular retellings. Having heard of this violence, however, other readers are surprised to find that not every Grimm tale is saturated with gruesomeness.
While the Grimms did not believe that such violence made the tales inappropriate for children, it’s notable that they also did not intend their collection to be solely for a young audience. On the contrary, they maintained that their tales would appeal to all ages, and they also had scholarly goals for the collection.
Moreover, at a time when Germany was still a patchwork of principalities, they hoped that their fairy tales and other works might help to bring about Germany’s political unification by giving Germans a greater sense of their cultural heritage.
Today, the Brothers Grimm are known the world over for their fairy-tale collection. Although the collection enjoyed seven complete and 10 abridged editions during their lifetimes, it was not the bestseller they hoped it would be. Instead, it gained in popularity principally at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between the brothers?
A: The writer Clemens Brentano described his friends Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as a double hook. This image of the Brothers Grimm as two conjoined prongs aptly conveys how close they were throughout their lives.
Jacob (1785–1863) was born just over a year before Wilhelm (1786–1859). They slept in the same bed as boys, shared the same room as university students, and as adults either had two desks in the same study or two studies next to each other under one roof.
Their personalities complemented each other well. Wilhelm was outgoing, while Jacob tended to be more introverted. Wilhelm married, but Jacob remained a lifelong bachelor and lived with Wilhelm, his wife, and their children.
During the relatively few times in their lives when travel separated them, they found being apart from each other disorienting.
For decades, Wilhelm experienced recurring bouts of serious illness, during which Jacob was consumed with worry for his brother and felt that his life would be destroyed if Wilhelm died.
They were both drawn to the study of language, literature, and folklore, but they had somewhat different views and areas of emphasis. Jacob was more scientific in his approach to editing texts and tales, whereas Wilhelm was more attuned to making them appealing and accessible to a nineteenth-century audience.
Wilhelm worked methodically, while Jacob tended to produce scholarship at a breakneck pace. Jacob distinguished himself in linguistics and is still known today for “Grimm’s Law,” his groundbreaking detection of linguistic sound shift patterns. Wilhelm’s talents lay more in the study of folklore and medieval literature.
Q: How did you research their lives, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The Brothers Grimm not only collected the fairy tales for which they are famous today, but also explored mythology and medieval literature, embarked on a monumental German dictionary project, and broke scholarly ground with Jacob’s linguistic discovery known as Grimm’s Law, among other achievements.
Their correspondence with scholars in Germany and abroad is vast. Researching the Grimms’ lives thus entailed studying their voluminous publications, notes, and letters and delving into decades of Grimm scholarship.
But to get a better sense of them as people, I also needed to understand their familial relationships and the world in which they lived.
To this end, in addition to poring over published and digitized material available to me in the United States, I made several trips to Germany to visit museums, archives, and historical sites in cities including Hanau, Steinau, Marburg, Kassel, Göttingen, Hannover, Nuremberg, and Berlin.
In the small mountain town of Steinau, I visited the 16th-century magistrate’s house where the Grimm family lived while their father was district magistrate, as well as the church where their grandfather had served as pastor.
Walking the steep streets of the Grimms’ university town of Marburg brought to mind Jacob’s observation that there were more staircases out in the walkways and alleys in hilly Marburg than in the houses themselves.
At the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, I viewed the Grimms’ mahogany desks and the fossils, shells, figurines, inkwells, and feather pen holders that had adorned them.
In the Grimm archives in Berlin, I saw the pressed flowers and other mementos that the Grimms used as bookmarks in their personal copies of their works and also read the notes—messier in Jacob’s handwriting than in Wilhelm’s—scribbled in the margins and on prefatory pages.
Viewing their personal objects, the places they lived, and their handwritten notations helped me to understand them as people and to visualize their world.
I also read 18th and 19th-century travel accounts to glimpse the cities and regions where the Grimms lived through the eyes of their contemporaries.
Last but not least, I delved into their relationships with their younger brothers and with women including their mother, aunts, sister, Wilhelm’s wife, and the female storytellers from whom they collected tales.
There were many surprises along the way, but what repeatedly astounded me is both the sheer magnitude of the Grimms’ achievements and the formidable challenges they overcame. They were fairy-tale collectors, linguists, librarians, and civil servants.
Their father died when they were boys, and they also endured war and occupation, ill health, and dire financial circumstances. They were fired from their university positions when they and five other professors refused to take an oath of allegiance to the king of Hannover in protest over the king’s revocation of the constitution.
The biography tells the story of how the collection of fairy tales developed over several decades, and how it and the Grimms’ other projects gave the brothers a sense of self‑preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a couple essays that I put aside while finishing the biography. One pertains to the Grimms’ “Rumpelstiltskin,” and another has to do with the 19th-century Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, on whom I’ve written before.
I’m also engaged in research for a book project on the siblings Clemens Brentano and Bettina von Arnim. The Brothers Grimm will appear in this book, too. The Grimms became acquainted with Clemens Brentano as university students in Marburg, and they contributed to The Boy’s Magic Horn, a collection of folk songs that Brentano published with the writer Achim von Arnim.
Arnim married Bettina, herself a writer. Over several decades, Bettina von Arnim was among the Grimms’ closest friends, as their dedication of the fairy-tale collection to her shows.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I mention in the book that the Grimms chose to put “The Golden Key” at the end of their fairy-tale collection. A mere one paragraph long, it’s a tale in which a poor boy has to go outside in deep snow to collect wood. Wanting to warm himself up, he clears some snow away so that he can build a fire.
As he digs, he discovers a small golden key and then a little iron casket. He begins to turn the key in the casket’s lock, at which point the narrator tells us that we’ll have to wait until the boy opens the casket to discover what marvelous things he finds in it. The tale ends there. We’re left to wonder what’s in the casket.
By placing this tale at the end, the Grimms suggest that their collection is just a small slice of a dazzling spectrum of folkloric creativity, with always more to be opened and explored.
I think of the Grimms themselves in a similar light: there is always more to discover about their lives, their works, and their enduring legacy. I hope that readers will find in my book an opening to learn more about the Brothers Grimm and their world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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