Re: THE PICTORIAL LANGUAGE OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH
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Grimm, Brothers
By Brian Vick
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm, usually referred to as "the Brothers Grimm," were among the most illustrious figures of German cultural and political life during the first half of the nineteenth century. They also often figure prominently in histories of German antisemitism, yet this view is problematic and needs to be set in its proper context. Moderate liberals, the Grimms did not differ from many other German liberals of the day in their ambivalence about German Jews. The brothers had imbibed many elements of the anti-Jewish stereotype so prevalent then in Germany, yet they did not support anti-Jewish measures in politics.
Examples of anti-Jewish stereotyping can be found in the Grimms' correspondence, but it is above all to that most enduringly famous of their works, the German Fairy Tales, that scholars have usually pointed when they identify the brothers as antisemitic. The brutal and degrading tale "The Jew in the Thorns" stands out in this regard, though it should be noted that similarly disturbing stories can also be found in the Grimms' collection of German Legends, including "The Jews' Stone" and "The Girl Who Was Killed by the Jews." Historians have debated whether these tales reflect the Grimms' own views or only those of the common people from whom the tales ostensibly came. In either event, it is important to recognize that such negative images of German Jewry were commonplace in German culture at that time and that they did not automatically entail political consequences, much less racial antisemitism. That the Fairy Tales, aimed at children as they increasingly were in later editions, may have played a role in the propagation of anti-Jewish prejudice into the later nineteenth century and fed the growth of actual antisemitism is another matter and one that deserves closer investigation.
For the Grimms, as with many other nineteenth-century German liberals, negative sentiments about Jewry could and did coexist with support for Jewish emancipation. Liberals sometimes supported emancipation as a means of "improving" the Jews and demanded reforms as its price; others did so without conditions and simply hoped for a certain degree of assimilation to occur afterward. The opinions of the Grimms on this question are hard to discover, but Jacob, at least, was among the delegates to the 1848 Frankfurt parliament who voted nearly unanimously for unconditional civic and political equality for German Jews. [?]
The Grimms are also often noted in histories of antisemitism for their contributions in three other fields: the development of the ethnic Volk concept in German nationalism; the propagation of interest in a pure, mythic Germany prehistory; and the promotion of notions of a conquering diaspora of Aryan peoples defined by linguistic affinity. In none of these cases, however, did the Grimms actually apply these ideas to their thinking about Jews; rather, it was left to later interpreters of German nationalism to do so. Here, as with the Fairy Tales, the Grimms' legacy proved much more troubling than their original ideas.
See also Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von: 1848: Emancipation: Jewish Question; Jews' Beech, The; Volkisch Movement and Ideology
References:
Snyder, Louis L. Roots of German Nationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978)
Vick, Brian E. Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Universitoy Press, 2002), chap. 3