By the time of its final version, it contained 200 stories and it became the best known German language book ever created. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786, respectively, in Hanau, the sons of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a lawyer and court official, and his wife Dorothea Zimmer. They were educated in Kassel and they both read for the law at the University of Marburg.
When their widowed mother suddenly died in 1808, Jacob took a position as a librarian at Kassel to support the remaining family of nine other siblings, and Wilhelm followed suit. In 1818, they came out with two volumes of ‘Deutsche Sagen,’ a collection of 585 German legends. Their deep scholarly work on linguistics, folklore, and medieval studies continued. Forty people brought tales to the Grimms, the most important sources including Dorothea Viehmann, the daughter of an innkeeper, Johann Friedrich Krause, an old dragoon, and Marie Hassenpflug, a friend of their sister Charlotte.
When the Brothers Grimm lived in Kassel, they collected and wrote most of their folk tales shortly before Napoleon annexed it in 1807, and it became the capital of the Kingdom of Westphalia under Napoleon’s brother Jerome. Next, it was annexed by Prussia in 1866, and soon Kassel ceased to be a princely residence.
In 1825, Wilhelm Grimm married Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild, the daughter of a pharmacist and a prominent source of fairy tales for their collection, but Jacob was a lifelong bachelor. The Grimms resigned their positions as librarians in Kassel in 1829-1830 and accepted positions at the University of Göttingen as librarians and professors. The brothers joined five of their colleagues in a group later known as Die Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven) at the University of Göttingen from 1837 until 1841 in a protest against the abolition of the liberal constitution of the state of Hanover by King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover. The professors were all fired, including the Grimms.
They accepted appointments at the University of Berlin and remained there until 1848 and 1852 when they left to complete their own studies and research. The Grimms helped sway nationwide democratic public opinion in Germany and are respected as being inspirational to the German democratic movement which resulted in the revolution of 1848. Wilhelm Grimm died December 16, 1859, at the age of 73, and Jacob on September 20, 1863, at age 78. They are buried in Berlin.
Less famous outside of Germany is the Grimm work on a German dictionary, the ‘Deutsches Wörterbuch.’ Indeed, the Deutsches Wörterbuch was the first major step in creating a standardized “modern” German language since the Bible was translated from Latin to German by Martin Luther. Between them, the Grimms brothers published more than 35 books.
The folk tales that the Grimms collected had not originally been considered children’s stories. The brothers tried to keep the stories in a form as close as possible historically to the original mode. In the original ‘Snow White,’ for instance, the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she collapses and dies. Other characters are stripped, tortured, and thrown in nail studded barrels. Doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, and in ‘The Juniper Tree’ a woman decapitates her stepson.
In ‘Hansel and Gretel’ the witch ends baking alive up in the oven. Within Snow White, one finds cannibalism, hanging, stabbing, garroting and poisoning, not too far off from today’s news stories. These gruesome punishments inflicted on the Grimm villains caused some discomfort toward the stories. The Brothers initially refused even to consider illustrations, instead preferring scholarly footnotes. Later, when they realized that children were actually reading them, they often rewrote versions considered appropriate for the time, especially when the folk tales were quite sexually explicit.. Rapunzel really did let down her hair!
The works of the Brothers Grimm were among the thousands of German books banned and burned by the Allies after World War Two during the “re-education process” which destroyed literature of a “violent” nature in an effort to tame the Germans. Previously, on the night of October 22, 1943, British bombers destroyed 90% of the ancient city center of Kassel, the place where the Grimms lived as adults, in a gruesome firebombing that incinerated over 10,000 civilians. Their birthplace did not fare much better: Hanau, just east of Frankfurt and first mentioned in the year 1143, was unnecessarily destroyed by British airstrikes on March 19, 1945, a mere few days before it was inevitably taken by the US Army. 85% of the city was blown up. Violently.