The Brothers Grimm: A Biography | Hacker News Reader

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography

theamericanscholar.org

79 pointsbenbreen18 comments

Some very nice writing here by author Anne Matthews. I especially liked her closing paragraph:

A shy girl in London loved these stories once. So did a boy from South Africa, and one in Belfast, and another in California. When their own narratives flowered, Beatrix Potter, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and George Lucas knew whom to thank. Without the labors of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, there would be no Peter Rabbit, no Middle-earth, no Narnia, and definitely no Star Wars.

I wonder why the most important element of their political biography is not mentioned: they were among the Göttingen Seven.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6ttingen_Seven

This is a short book review.

I have looked at the book contents and large parts of two book chapters are about this event, in one chapter about the circumstances that lead to the protest and in the other about its consequences.

Thanks for the Wikipedia link, I was not aware that the very important physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber (for whom the magnetic flux unit is named), took also part in this protest.

I've really been fascinated with how explicitly people set out to build nations in the 19th Century. I read Christopher Krebs' _A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich_ and it traces a different lineage in the same process- the process of turning someone who, say, lived in Mainz and thought of themselves as Hessian in 1800, into the person who lived in the same building in 1900 and thought of themselves as German.

In some ways, I've long suspected that there was a lot of freedom in that to build a culture ideally suited for the then present situation. "Fuenf minuten vor der Zeit, ist des Deutschen Puenktlichkeit" (1) in particular always struck me as something invented because it made the factories and the trains run better. It was first written down in 1880, attributed by a Silesia newspaper to Pomerania, and I really don't know that many people 100 years earlier, say, would have had a conception of what a "German" was in that sense. And before trains and factories, in an era when time is primarily told by the bells of the town clock tower and looking at the angle of the sun, no one would have had a real conception of what five minutes meant. So it couldn't really have been some ancient saying, carried down for hundreds of years. It had to be invented right around 1880.

1: German "on time" is five minutes before it starts.

> town clock tower

breaking days into two sets of 12 hours, and sixty minutes per hour with sixty seconds to a minute, has been practiced since Biblical times, no?

I mean, I think two sets of 12 hours dates back to Ancient Egypt, basically as old as the Pyramids, so quite a bit older than the Bible itself. But note that most of those cultures used equal divisions per day, expanding or shrinking the length of an hour depending on the season, e.g. Egyptian water clocks would have different gauges for each month. So they would hold dawn or dusk constant and expand or shrink the sizes of hours rather than our system of holding hours constant and letting dawn and dusk move around. Constant hours are a much more recent invention, generally speaking for most people (people who worked with the stars excepted) starting up around the time of railways, when it first started to matter what time was for an area larger than the hearing radius of a clock bell tower. (I don't care what time your town has versus my town, so who cares that your 5th hour of the night is more like my 4 hours and 45 minutes of the night? Until we need to run a train all the way through both of our towns and now we need to synchronize!)

How difficult or easy was that book as a read? Sounds interesting but Im hoping its somewhat casual?

You really need a good grounding in European history to follow it, I would say. Medieval/Renaissance is where I'm weakest so it's where I struggled the most, but he covers over 1800 years of history so he moves pretty fast and I would often have to flip back to remember who Ulrich von Huten was. I don't remember many difficult words or anything, just a lot of assumed context.

(German Text:)

"JETZT WEISS JEDES KIND, DAS ES ALS TRICK GELTE, SICH IMMER WÜNSCHE ÜBRIGZUBEHALTEN.

DOCH WER TATSÄCHLICH MAL EINEM DJINN BEGEGNET UND ÜBERLEBT, ODER IN WESSEN KULTUR EIN DEMENTSPRECHEND WARNENDES PENDANT, EINEN WOMÖGLICH ANDEREN NAMEN TRÜGE,

WISSE WOHL, DAS WIEDERHOLTES KONSUMIEREN VON WÜNSCHEN, NUR DER GEWÖHNUNG DIENE, BESTENFALLS NOCH DEM ABSENKEN KÜNFTIGEN ZUFRIEDENHEITSPOTENTIALs,

...ZUMINDEST SO LANG DEM NICHT IN WELCHER FORM AUCH IMMER, EINSCHRÄNKUNGEN AUFERLEGT."

(HINT: "VOM GLAUBEN, ALS SELBSTWIRKSAM ZU GELTEN." maybe ...um...a comic text...)

(-;

[weekendmodus]

edited: ' " '

One has to be careful not to backdate our current understanding of identity. Identities were rich and very fluid, being German was an identity, which the Dutch ("Deutsch") had until very recently. But for example religion was very important as an identity, as well as even European once like being a Frank. The Roman Empire was much more important than often credited in German/Prussian history, because it was precisely part of the nation building process to downplay the Empire, to build a Prussian Germany. My parents are boomers, and I remember how my mother was complaining about Prussian coffee. Also in Highschool I was learning Saxonian history, right now my daughters are also learning Hamburg's history.

For those interested: https://woerterbuchnetz.de/?sigle=DWB&lemid=A00001

My favourite entry is the one for "Armee" (army).

Haha, do you know of any other such gems?

"Amtmännin": the nickname of their mother.

"Adelung": alludes to a predecessor dictionary editor.[1] The old high german word "adalunc" in its etymology was made up.

I became aware of these lemmata through this article: https://www.welt.de/kultur/article4127427/Es-war-einmal-das-...

[1] Johann Christoph Adelung (1732-1806): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Christoph_Adelung

Oh linguistic purism, never seems to change

My favorite book about the Brothers Grimm is "Fairy Tales: A New History" by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.

She argues persuasively that the conventional origin normally told about the Grimm's fairy tales—-that they were recited by old peasant women remembering the ancient oral folktales of the Germanic people—-is not really true.

In fact the tales mainly came from middle class storytellers. And the two most important sources of the Grimm's tales were two Italian literary story collections from the Renaissance by Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.

It upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the origins of fairy tales.

The historical dictionary is the Deutsches Wörterbuch with a long history:

The Brothers Grimm started working on it 1838. Wilhelm died around the letter D, Jacob at the entry for "Frucht". Afterwards other Germanists started continuing that work, later Bismarck provided state funding. At the start of the 20. Century the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin took over the project with major work in Göttingen.

Then WWI, Weimar Republic, Hyperinflation, Hitler, WWII.

After the war the work was continued with Göttingen in West Germany and the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, East Germany collaborating. The final volume was published in 1961, with a sources supplement in 1971. In 2006 a project was started to update A-F to modern standards, finished in 2016.

Parsing "Magic: The German" made my brain glitch

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