KASSEL, West Germany — Once upon a time, there were two young brothers who enjoyed collecting fairy tales.
Although they would one day become great linguists and open new frontiers in the study of languages, they would be remembered most for the collection of stories that spread their fame far and wide and enchanted children the world over.
Unlike the stories that made them famous, the tale of the two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, is true and this year the region of central Germany where they gathered such tales as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Sleeping Beauty" and "Little Red Riding Hood" has begun celebrating the 200th birthdays of its two famous sons.
Although now viewed as benign stories for children, the fairy tales have stirred controversy virtually from their beginnings.
Useless Superstition
Renaissance Europe viewed the early, pre-Grimm versions disparagingly and dismissed them as useless superstition. Following World War II, the Grimms' tales were banned for nearly two years in the British zone of occupied Germany in the belief that their sometimes gruesome content had helped pave the way for the German people to accept Nazi atrocities.
The tales the were attacked by Europe's New Left of the 1960s as reactionary and a generation of American parents worried openly that the tales were too violent.
But these reservations have done little to blunt the enormously widespread popularity of the tales. They have been translated into 70 languages from Tajik to Thai, with each culture having its own favorite tales.
According to Heinz Roelleke, Wuppertal University professor and a respected authority on German folklore, Japanese children love the fantasy in the stories, such as Sleeping Beauty's 100-year sleep or the appearance of fairy godmothers. Soviet versions invariably concentrate on the coziness of tiny houses or little families, while Americans tend to accentuate the glamor.
"Americans like the powerful king, the large weddings or the big castles," Roelleke said. 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White' are always included in American editions."
Special Stamp Issue
Although several cities plan festivals this summer highlighting stage performances of the fairy tales and the West German Post Office has prepared a special issue of stamps illustrating the stories, the biggest exhibitions cast the Grimms as key figures in Germany's cultural and political history.
These exhibitions will emphasize the intellectual achievements and political commitments of the brothers' most productive years. Viewed by many Germans as far more important than the fairy tales, they remain largely unknown to the world outside.
"The Grimms are known too much as simple storytellers," noted historian Klaus Becker, official spokesman for a major exhibit planned this summer at the Brothers Grimm Museum here. "Our aim is to show more of their role as intellectuals who yearned for democracy and German unity during a period of French domination."
Third Brother
Three exhibitions, including one devoted to the illustrations drawn by a third Grimm brother, Ludwig, are planned for Kassel, the city where the brothers lived while gathering the fairy tales.
Symposiums on linguistics and German etymology are planned for West Berlin, Marburg and Kassel. The West German state of Hesse, where much of the Grimms' work took place, alone hasbudgeted $600,000 to promote the celebrations.
For many Germans, the most important effort of the brothers' lives was to begin work on a major dictionary that shed new light on the development of the German language and set a new standard internationally for linguistic histories.
Although Wilhelm died in 1859 as work on the letter D was being completed and Jacob lived four years longer, reaching only the letter F, the project survived both world wars and Germany's post-war division before it was finally completed in 1960.
In the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s, work on the Grimm dictionary was a rare point of official contact between East and West Germany, and today the two states share the publishing rights. A commemorative paperback version published last fall in West Germany has already gone into its second printing.
More Ambitious
The elder brother, Jacob, born in the Frankfurt suburb of Hanau in January, 1785, was the more ambitious of the two.
He joined the Hessian delegation to the Congress of Vienna in 1814 which determined the shape of post-Napoleonic Europe, but when the task proved as boring as it was weighty, Jacob amused himself by learning seven languages, including Serbian, Russian, Greek and Latin. Serbian, up to this point, had existed only as a spoken dialect but Jacob persuaded a Serbian friend to commit the language to writing. Later, Grimm helped write a grammar textbook for the language, which became known as Serbo-Croat.
