It Gets Grimmer - Why Germany’s Most Famous Folklore is Even Darker Than You Think

Illustration by Pippa Mentzel.

Pecked-out eyes, mutilated feet and cannibalistic relatives. It sounds more like the recipe for a chilling horror story than the makings of a timeless fairy tale. These are, however, all staples of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s first collection of folklore published in 1812: their somewhat ironically titled Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children and Household tales).

You read correctly; the famous Grimm’s tales really were, for lack of a better word, grim. So much so that for some modern fairy-tale enthusiasts they might even seem unrecognisable. Certainly, the disney-fication of characters like Cinderella and Snow White has played a part in enlarging the distance between today’s reader and the work in its earliest forms. Nevertheless, there still seems to be a wider public awareness, or rather wariness, of the dark and violent underbelly of these tales. But is this concern misplaced?

Many of the Grimms’ tales have been adapted over the years in attempts to rectify their suitability for younger readers. This is not just a modern phenomenon. For as long as folklore has existed, it has resisted standardisation. Being disseminated via word of mouth, these tales have evolved countless times, making it difficult to find any one ‘original’ or ‘accepted’ version. As early as the Grimms’ second edition in 1814 did their stories start undergoing a kind of sanitisation, with many ostensibly ‘adult’ themes being removed or circumvented.

For instance, the Grimm's 1812 volume of tales included a version of Aschenputtel (Cinderella) in which the ugly stepsisters take to slicing off the heels of their feet to fit into the fabled slipper. This particular version also ends with the sisters’ eyes being pecked out by vengeful birds, leaving them blind. A version of Schneewittchen (Snow White) sees the evil stepmother eat what she beleives to be her murdered stepdaughters’ internal organs, while, in Von dem Machandelboom (The Juniper Tree), a step-mother decapitates her stepson, blames the murder on her daughter and cooks his remains into a soup she later serves up to his father. Charming.

Yet, where these splatters of blood and violence have been wiped clean from the tales’ subsequent editions, many remain steeped in a prejudice that feels harder both to identify and to extricate. So are these tales redeemable? Or are they, in true wicked stepmother style, rotten to the core?

Removing violence from these tales can lull us into a false sense of security. If there’s no longer any murder or cannibalism, it’s all to easy to assume that these tales must be harmless. But we should ask what constitutes this harm. Sure, we could argue that gory literature may do us harm by desensitising us to violence. This is something often talked about in relation to the effects of violent video games on adolescents: parents worry that their children will mimic the behaviour of what they see. However, according to psychologist and psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, this is not the case. The violence in fairy-tales is neither repulsive nor replicable. In fact, it offers security and a sense of retribution that is comforting to the developing child, who is in the throes of establishing a sense of justice. Hence, violence merely amplifies the story’s didactic effect. Bettelheim writes, ‘The child often feels unjustly treated by adults and the world in general, and it seems that nothing is done about it.... the more severely those bad ones are dealt with, the more secure the child feels.’ So, in many ways these violent or adult themes are healthily manifested in the fairy-tale form, also providing the child with a world in which “das Chaos in ihrem Unbewussten zu bewältigen" (to process their own fears).

Far more harmful to the reader is what is hidden: the latent prejudices that we take in without questioning. We can all hiss and boo at sex and violence, but we often don’t stop to think about the entrenched social attitudes that these tales promote. Unfortunately, the murderer is more conspicuous than the misogynist.

In the Grimms’ tales, women are made to fit into one of two categories: the domestic damsel or the wicked villain. In establishing this binary, the brothers’ make clear what they deem to be appropriate and inappropriate female behaviour, respectively. Where the villainous are active, outspoken and ugly, the heroines are passive, silent and beautiful.

In Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), a princess lies asleep until she is awoken by a non-consensual kiss. In Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood), a little girl is saved by a big, strong hunter. It’s no surprise that scholars and readers alike have accused the tales of inherent sexism. In 2019, a school in Barcelona even banned Rotkäppchen from its library on this account, while gender researcher, Dr. Stevie Schmiedel goes as far as to argue that we should consider the tales ‘die Geschichte der weiblichen Unterdrückung’ ( the story of female oppression).  

The trope of the evil step-mother has also proved persistent through the years. We might ask how suitable it remains, especially in Germany, a country where between 7-13% of all families are classed as Patchworkfamilie (blended families). Ironically enough, this villainizing stereotype first originated in an attempt to make the Grimms tales more ‘appropriate’. Due to the high mortality rate of childbirth in the 18th and 19th centuries, many children would be raised by step-mothers. According to Maria Tater, German folklore expert of Harvard university, roughly half of all children were growing up with one biological parent and one stepparent. As such, some argue that it is only natural that resulting familial tension be reflected in folklore of the period. It’s interesting to note, however, that many of these tales originally positioned the birth mother as the villain. When collating the tales for their collection, the brothers turned these mothers into stepmothers, supposedly to preserve the sanctity of motherhood so integral to Christianity. In this way, the Grimms’ tales reflect outdated ideals and social structures while unhelpfully stoking the fires of perceived female rivalry.

The Grimms also have a rather unfortunate fan club, with many of their most famous tales having been appropriated as propaganda for far-right, nationalistic movements. When the brothers first began collecting tales in the early 19th century, Germany was a fragmentary mess of small individual states. Their collation therefore had an explicit aim to unify this fractured nation. Dovetailing the prevailing romantic movement, the brothers encouraged a certain cultural nationalism that emphasised the precious singularity of German history and literature. As such, despite the fact that the origins of these stories, like most folklore, were ambiguous and manifold, the Grimms’ tales were touted as German stories for German folk. It may come as no surprise, then, that they were so easily exploited by the Nazi Party over a century later. Figures like Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella were turned into symbols of Aryan purity, while villainous figures like the Wolf were made to portray the foreign, or the other - clearly analogous for the persecuted jewish community.

Yet some of these tales did not require much contortion. In fact, at times the Grimms were blatantly anti-semitic.

In Der Jude im Dorn (The Jew among Thorns), a Jewish man is made to dance among brambles, tearing his flesh. This torture is stopped when the man offers up his own money in desperation. After complaining about having been extorted, the Jewish man is made to confess that the money he offered was stolen, and it is he who is hanged in the place of his tormentor. At other times, the Grimms’ prejudice is harder to identify. A lot of their tales rely on tropes that connect villany and wickedness to Jewishness. Witches serve as an apt example of this: with their characteristic ‘hooked noses’ and ritualistic, cannibalistic tendencies, witch-like traits are similar to those attributed to Jewish communities in traditional anti-semitic discourse. Further still, as Jewish author Naomi Novik explores in her novel Spinning Silver, the Grimms’ Rumpelstiltskin, while never explicitly alluding to Judaism, is rife with antisemitic coding.

Consequently, many argue that these tales gave rise to certain traits like those of obedience, authoritarianism and nationalism. TJ Leonard, a British major, contended that they taught German children how to assume the ‘role of the hangman’. Thus, after the second world war, the tales became less popular in Germany, while some schools in allied countries banned the tales for this reason, viewing them as proto-nazi texts.

These tales are by no means straightforward. They twist and turn and, like all folklore,  appear to evolve before our very eyes. As such, passing judgement on their suitability is dependent entirely on which exact edition and which exact audience are being discussed. It’s undeniable however that their appropriateness must account not only for their graphic or violent nature but also for whatever latent prejudices they risk disseminating. We should consider carefully whether modern society’s sensationalising focus on the detriments of violence has led to inadequate attention being paid to the tales’ socio-ideological potency.

Ultimately, whether the tales require reform or complete overhaul is contentious. For some, the very form and genre of the fairytale is hostile to notions of feminism and equality. Yet, others have proved that these tales and tropes can be reclaimed to empower those whose status they would otherwise denigrate. Whatever the verdict, we should not let ourselves be fooled by these tales’ seeming simplicity. Germany’s most famous folklore may be merely folklore, but its cultural and sociological import is by no means fantasy.