The brothers grimm autobiography vs biography

Once upon a time, a family by the name of Grimm carried on a life that was anything but. In the wooded German state of Hessen, Philipp, a town clerk, lived with his wife, Dorothea, and their children in a quaint cottage. Its exterior was an inviting light red, and its doors tan, as if made of gingerbread. The drawing room had been wallpapered with pictures of huntsmen, onto whose faces the two eldest boys, Jacob and Wilhelm (born in and , respectively), would cheekily pencil in beards. Soon, Philipp was promoted to serve as the magistrate of a town nearby, and the Grimms moved into a stately home staffed with maids, a cook, and a coachman. Every Christmas, the family decorated a tree with apples, as was the German custom. In the summer, the children ventured into the surrounding woods to collect butterflies and flowers, confident they could find their way back home.

Then, one day, a dark cloud appeared, as if summoned by a witch jealous of their domestic idyll. In , Philipp, only forty-four years old, succumbed to pneumonia. Jacob later recalled seeing his father’s body being measured for a coffin. Dorothea and her children were ordered to clear out. Without Philipp’s income, they were forced for a time to shelter in an almshouse just next door—cursed with a view of their former home and the courtyard where they once played, happily, until what came after.

Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, experienced the kind of sharp reversal of fortune characteristic of the genre that became synonymous with their name: the fairy tale. A prince turned into a frog; a beloved daughter reduced to a scullery maid. Where the French rendition of “Cinderella,” by Charles Perrault, opens with Cinderella already in tatters, laboring away for her stepmother, the Grimms’ version, “Aschenputtel,” begins with the heroine’s mother on her deathbed. Ann Schmiesing, the author of “The Brothers Grimm: A Biography” (Yale), observes that the change transforms a “story of ‘rags to riches’ to

The first English-language biography in over fifty years to tell the full, vibrant story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, known to history as the Brothers Grimm
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A New Yorker “Best Book of ” Selection
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“Ann Schmiesing . . . has brought the brothers to life in their fullness.”—Dominic Green, Wall Street Journal
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“Magisterial.”—Kirkus Reviews
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More than two hundred years ago, the German brothers Jacob Grimm (–) and Wilhelm Grimm (–) published a collection of fairy tales that remains famous the world over. It has been translated into some languages—more than any other German book—and the Brothers Grimm are among the top dozen most translated authors in the world. In addition to collecting tales, the Grimms were mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants, and above all the closest of brothers, but until now, the full story of their lifelong endeavor to preserve and articulate a German cultural identity has not been well known.
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Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses. They produced a vast corpus of work on mythology and medieval literature, embarked on a monumental German dictionary project, and broke scholarly ground with Jacob’s linguistic discovery known as Grimm’s Law. Setting their story against a rich historical backdrop, Schmiesing offers a fresh consideration of the profound and yet complicated legacy of the Brothers Grimm.

Ann Schmiesing is professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. She lives in Longmont, CO.

The Brothers Grimm (Die Brüder Grimm) are unique within the literary world. Despite their work being some of the most well-known on the planet, Jacob and Wilhem were not, strictly speaking, writers. They were librarians.

What, then, was so special about the dogged scholarly pursuits of Jacob and Wilhelm?

And why did the fruits of their research turn the brothers Grimm from unknown academics into literary superstars?

The brothers Grimm were born in Hanau, just east of Frankfurt, Germany – over the space of fourteen months. Jacob Ludwig Carl arrived on 4 January , and was followed by Wilhelm Carl on 24 February In , the Grimm family moved to the countryside town of Steinau, where, alongside a strict Calvinist instruction, the brothers developed a deep love of rural life.

The Brothers Grimm are unique within the literary world. They were librarians.

The brothers&#; father died in , plunging the Grimm family into financial hardship. When, two years later, Jacob and Wilhem moved to Kassel to attend the prestigious  Friedrichsgymnasium, it was paid for by a generous aunt. After graduating, the brothers attended the University of Marburg, where due to their lower-class background (the Grimm family were now living in near-poverty) they were excluded from much of student life.

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Despite these set backs, the Brothers Grimm, inspired by their law professor, Friedrich von Savigny, developed a keen interest in linguistics and medieval German literature. They were also inspired by Savigny&#;s wish to see the principalities of Germany unified in a single state, and by the Romanticist notion that German literature should return to Volkspoesie (natural poetry) as opposed to Kunstpoesie (artistic poetry).

In , Jacob was appointed court librarian to the King of Westphalia. Shortly afterwards, both he and Wilhelm became librarians in Kassel. Under the direction of their patron, the German Romantic Clemens Brentano, the b

The brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, were born towards the end of the 18th century but lived long enough to be photographed in old age in The two stooped scholars, beaky-nosed, straggle-haired and dressed in shabby frock coats, look uncomfortable posing. A book lies on the table before Wilhelm, the outgoing one; Jacob, the introspective one, is turned reluctantly towards the camera. The Grimms are today associated only with fairy tales, but their influence was far wider: they helped shift the gaze of northern European culture away from the dominant French neoclassicism and towards Volksgeist (‘spirit of the people’), with its roots in the distant past. In , when the writer William John Thoms came up with the term ‘folklore’ to define the study of the ‘manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc, of the olden time’, he called on the English to find their own Grimm to rescue the old stories from extinction.

Ann Schmiesing, a professor of German and Scandinavian literature, has written a double biography of the brothers, the first in English in over fifty years. This can’t have been an easy task. The book is impeccably researched and scholarly (the Grimms would expect nothing less). But the brothers’ main work of writing, cataloguing and researching is difficult to bring alive for the general reader. Against the odds, however, Schmiesing draws a vivid and often light-hearted picture of the Grimms’ circle of collaborators and friends, from gatherings of passionate medieval revivalists to endless bickering over authenticity. She loves her subjects and she conveys the delight of discovery and connection.

The Grimms were born (Jacob in , Wilhelm a year later) in Hanau, the most important town in the landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel. Their father was the town clerk. Aged five and six, the brothers moved to Steinau an der Strasse, where their father took the job of chief magistrate. The