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Der Beitrag untersucht den kulturellen und kolonialistischen Kontext, aus denen heraus Grimms Märchen in den 1920er Jahren in Korea übersetzt wurden. Es wird gezeigt, wie und inwiefern diese Übersetzungen der Strategie folgten, die japanische Kolonialherrschaft anzuklagen und sich zugleich der kulturellen Eigenständigkeit Koreas zu versichern. Der Fokus richtet sich auf grausame Szenen in Grimms Märchen, die einerseits wortgetreu, andererseits abmildernd übersetzt wurden. Dabei spielte die erste Richtung auf Grausamkeiten der Kolonialmacht an und pointierte die Bestrafung des Bösen, die zweite setzte mehr auf die Erziehung von Kindern und Jugendlichen als den Hoffnungsträgern für die Zukunft der Nation. Damit folgten koreanische Übersetzer wie Choi Nam Seon und Bang Jeong Hwan nicht zuletzt Intentionen, wie sie die Brüder Grimm unter napoleonischer Herrschaft in Deutschland vertreten hatten. This article examines the cultural and colonial context in which the Grimms' fairy tales were translated in Korea in the 1920s. It is shown how, and to what extent, these translations pursued the strategy of criticizing Japanese colonial rule and at the same time laying claim to Korea's cultural identity. The focus is on brutal scenes in the Grimms' tales that were on the one hand treated literally, on the other toned down in translation. The first tendency alluded to the cruelty of the colonial power and foregrounded the punishment of evil; the second was directed more at raising children and young people as sources of hope for the nation's future. In this way, the intentions pursued by Korean translators such as Choi Nam Seon and Bang Jeong Hwan recall not least those that characterized the Brothers Grimm in Germany under Napoleonic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans love not only to tell stories, but to tell stories about stories. The stories that we tell each other about Brothers Grimms' fairy tales account for much of the writing that goes on in Grimms scholarship. The conventional narrative that has been constructed to explain the world-wide reception of Grimms' "Kinderund Hausmärchen" involves a series of transformations and paradoxes that raise interesting questions. It begins with Grimms' own alleged transformation of the oral tradition into published text, a metamorphosis that ostensibly renders the audible legible between the covers of a book. When this already transformed German original is then transmitted across cultures to Anglo-American readers, for example, that printed text undergoes another linguistic-cultural transformation, a metamorphosis that renders into English what was uniquely and historically German.

This article does not present definitive results, as far as definitive research results can be reached at all, but rather reflections or, better, formulations of questions following the analysis of Italian narrative material of the tale classified as "AaTh 566: The Three Magic Objects" and the "Wonderful Fruits," Fortunatus. This tale is thought to have originated in a late medieval exemplum included in the Gesta Romanorum, a collection of edifying tales to be used for sermon purposes. The mention of Fortunatus in the Aarne/Thompson catalogue refers to analogies with the famous German Volksbuch or prose novel, published in Augsburg in 1509, by the editor Johann Otmar. The work, which is still quite close to the form of the romance of chivalry, but in which a completely new role is played by the merchant class of the early Renaissance and the system of values it established, was not only successful in the German language.