Who's Fairy Tale?-Aaron Deck

In this week’s reading Yours, Mine, or Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales, by Donald Haase I found some pretty though provoking information. I started off the college experience with my undergrad degree in history, so usually, I find all things historical interesting. It is also very fascinating how history plays into literature, and of course, history was a large part of this Fairy Tale course as well. With all that being said, I had no idea that the Grimm’s tales played a huge role in the nationalist movement in Germany with Hessians. I knew that some of the Prussian Army fought with Napoleon, but I’m sure that this was an occupational thing and totally against the German nationalist mindset. It was probably insulting to the Hessians as well.

Germans are typically a proud people, and this pride has traditionally been linked to strong nationalistic fervor, along with a strong military presence. I’m speaking before to and up until World War II, so it is very intriguing historically the dialogue between French and German when it comes to the nationalistic vibe of the Grimm’s fairytales. I also was not aware that as Haase stated “by the end of World War II, the German fairy tale had fallen into such disrepute that during the Allied occupation of Germany fairy tales were viewed with serious suspicion and banned from the public school curriculum” (438). And this postwar view continued almost 40 years later into the 1980s according to the essay (Haas 438). I’m not sure what childhood would have been like without some of these fairytales, I would feel differently about these fairy tales because they would be unfamiliar. Maybe this is also why Disney decided to use a Perrault version of Cinderella opposed to a typically Grimm version. There’s not much difference honestly, but it was interesting to read that essay because I’ve never thought of fairy tales being any particular nation’s property. Whether there were German elements, or French, I’ve always thought of these stories as being a shared collection of tales which do change and may be considered sacred, although I couldn’t imagine a childhood without fairy tales and the stirring of a child’s imagination.

 

Haase, Donald. “Yours, Mine, Ours? Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and the Ownership of Fairy Tales.” The Classic Fairytales, 2nd ed. Edited by Maria Tartar, W.W Norton and Company, 2017, pp. 435-446.