Daily News Item 2024-11-08 14:23

Jennifer Wilson writes for the New Yorker about the fairy tales written by the Brothers Grimm, and how their aim in collecting stories was “to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.” Wilson explains: “The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war.” Since then, scholars have emphasized that “their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil.” Still, as Ann Schmiesing explains in her new book, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography (Yale University Press, 2024), writing about the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is difficult, and requires a balancing act: It “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”