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"Fairy Tales and the Transmission of Prejudice" is a unit in a lecture course on fairy tales that draws on research on anti-Semitism in 18th- and 19th-century German literature and culture, mapping questions raised in 18th- and 19th-century tales onto contemporary issues: The unit traces a trajectory from the Enlightenment to the present, and from Germany to the United States, analyzing a variety of texts, including Lessing's drama "Nathan the Wise" (1779), the three Grimms' tales about Jews -- "The Clear Sun Will Bring it to Light" (1815), "The Jew in Thorns" (1815), and "The Good Bargain" (1819) --, Spiegelman's graphic Holocaust narrative "Maus" (1980), and Sendak's illustrations for Wilhelm Grimm's "Dear Mili" (Grimm & Sendak, 1988). This article outlines the course, its background, and how the texts and their contexts are implemented in class. Throughout the course unit, the discussion of anti-Semitism in the fairy tales is broadened to one of prejudice in general. The article concludes with a brief discussion of student reactions to this unit.

Shared reading represents an established practice to foster preschool vocabulary development, particularly when coupled with explicit instruction in word meanings. However, a question remains as to whether explicit word definitions detract from story delivery and hence language learning. Accordingly, this study compared explicit versus story-focused, elaborative storytelling in a 2 × 2 pre-posttest randomized and counterbalanced mixed design with 63 preschoolers. Children were told two fairytales daily across three sessions in either explicit or elaborative conditions, whereby target words were accompanied with either an explicit (e.g., definition, question) or elaborative (e.g., gesture, metaphor, rhetorical question) word learning technique. Stories were either read aloud or freely told by experimenters. Both conditions resulted in similarly large gains in target vocabulary and performance on a story retelling. Some differential effects were found, with there being a larger difference between explained versus incidental words in the explicit condition. Furthermore, children in the elaborative condition were less restless during storytelling. The findings suggest that both elaborative as well as explicit approaches promote vocabulary growth and provide some evidence of differential effects for child behavior during storytelling.

Discusses the work of Frenchman Charles Perrault, the seminal figure in fairy tales, and puts it in context of the French fairy tale fashion. Describes how the fairy tale came to England. Describes how the Germans revived the fairy tale at the end of the 18th century, and discusses the work of the Brothers Grimm. (SR)

Describes a tour of the German Fairy Tale Road, which extends through northern Germany, where many fairy tales originated. (BB)

This article deals with the use of a 600 km long route through Germany, the "German Fairy Tale Route" in foreign language German lessons. In the context of the discursive approach, an attempt is made to create a didactic proposal on the topic of the "German Fairy Tale Route". In order to increase the interest and motivation of those learning German, an attempt is made to create didactic suggestions on the topic of "German Fairy Tale Route" with discursive regional studies using authentic and versatile materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Fairy tales often occupy only a superficial role in German language classrooms, used to check a culture box and teach the simple past tense. However, teaching fairy tales can engage students' analytical faculties and expose them to the culturally and linguistically embedded nature of folktales, leading them to a deeper appreciation of language, culture, and history. This article examines a course titled "Fairy Tales and German National Identity," and discusses ways to incorporate fairy tales into a course focused on German and intercultural literacy. Instructors can assist in developing students' critical thinking and writing abilities by highlighting the deep connections between language, culture, politics, and history as well as cross‐cultural awareness. Students apply cross‐ and intercultural lenses to the study of excerpts from Goethe's Das Märchen, a selection of Grimm tales (especially those that fall out of or were added to subsequent editions), Heine's Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, and other secondary and student‐selected readings. Students learn to contextualize the tales within discreet German and contemporary political and historical frameworks through discussion, writing, and lectures. They may also adopt a new perspective on how high and low cultural artifacts influence social, cultural, and political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the reception history of the Danish Poet and fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen in 19th-century Germany and its influence on his (auto)biographical depiction. Like many Scandinavian poets, Andersen discovered Germany's literary potential and took advantage of it to further his career. In most cases, he was pictured as a genius who suffered systematic underestimation in Denmark. This narrative which determined his reception plays a central role in his German autobiography Märchen meines Lebens (Fairy Tale of my Life). Analyzing Andersen's autobiographical discourse, I will reconstruct the process of the construction of Andersen's (auto)biographical myth, emphasizing translation's role in shaping autobiographical narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large body of research consistently found cultural differences in cognition between Westerners and East Asians. We undertook a study to explore whether culture-specific thinking models may influence how German and Chinese children understand fairy tales. By transferring the established theoretical framework of individualism versus collectivism from cultural psychology to literary studies, we hypothesize that readers in western Europe prefer an individualistic-oriented thinking model for character evaluation, adventurous attitude to plot development, as well as concrete time and spatial perception; by contrast, their counterparts in East Asia use social-oriented interpretation styles for character judgment, a self-restrained attitude towards plot development, and a symbolic time and spatial imagination. The method we used relies on questionnaires, item-based analysis and factor analysis to learn about the most salient dimensions for cross-cultural story comprehension. We found differences in all three dimensions of story comprehension, namely character evaluation, plot development, and time/space imagination. The results reveal how culture shapes the way we read and point to the important role of embedded schematic knowledge for story comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the most recent TV adaptations of the Grimms' fairy tales by public broadcasting. Realized and marketed as a season which started in 2008, the thirty-four currently existing individual films constitute a significant national project that presents highly appealing notions of the German past to an audience divided over national conflict and demands of globalization. With children and adolescents at the centre, the films offer the young as a generation of moral superiority that facilitates social harmony and moral consensus. This post-unification utopia is beautifully realized on screen but rests on very conservative assumptions about gender, social driving forces, and political order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates tropes of sovereignty and revolution inDas Leben der Hochgräfin Gritta von Rattenzuhausbeiuns, a novel-lengthKunstmärchenwritten in 1840 by Gisela von Arnim with her mother Bettine. In its renditions of authority and resistance, the Gritta tale contains both an archive of the political frictions of theVormärzperiod and an object-lesson in the ambiguous status of female authorship at the time. This reading calls attention to the proliferation of sites of precarious authority in the tale, from the eccentric Count's gimcrackRettungsmachine(rescue machine)—a throne with an ejector seat that flings off anyone who sits in it—to the not-quite-satisfying fairy-tale ending, which raises Gritta herself to the role of sovereign even as it excludes her from the story's truelocus amoenus: a “nature convent” in line with Schillerian ideals.I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank the students in my Reed College seminar, “Law and Outlaw in German Literature.” Our lively conversations about the Gritta story planted the seed that became this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article provides an overview of the roles of dwarfs in German legends, sagas and fairy tales. The article discusses, among other things, Ruodlieb, the Nibelungenlied, and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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.

This article discusses the origin of the Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales and the role played by the clergy in some of the tales. The Grimms had begun to collect the tales from a number of informants and literary sources in 1805 when Napoleon had invaded Germany, and when as a result, a good many Germans had become concerned with problems of national as well as cultural autonomy. It was the explicit intention of the authors to save from extinction something they believed to be quite essentially German and which they hoped to forge into an instrument of socialization. The clergy would appear to be of quite special interest because of the ambiguities of esteem in which they were, and still are held in Europe, especially in those countries which were affected by the Enlightenment. Members of the clergy, consisting of clergymen, sextons and popes, occur in episodes in 14 out of the 200 of these tales. Altogether, 17 individuals, that is approximately 0.1% of the total human population of these tales are involved. These tales may be divided into three major categories: two tales in which clergymen are presented as anthropomorphised animals or plants; two rather fanciful tales concerning the papacy; and ten tales in which the interaction of clergymen with their alters is central to the episodic theme and focuses on and discloses their possession of specific characterological attributes.

1. Nationalism played a vital rôle in the lives and works of the Grimm brothers, who were convinced that all their writings, including the fairy tales, derived their strength "from the soil of the German Fatherland." 2. From the beginning of their work the Grimm brothers took the Romantic position, closely allied with the rising German nationalism, in which they stressed the claims of the imagination, emotions, and feelings. 3. In planning and collecting the fairy tales the Grimms, consciously or unconsciously, were motivated by a desire to glorify German traditions and to stimulate German national sentiment. 4. An analysis of the Märchen gives ample evidence to show an emphasis upon such social characteristics as respect for order, belief in the desirability of obedience, subservience to authority, respect for the leader and the hero, veneration of courage and the military spirit, acceptance without protest of cruelty, violence, and atrocity, fear of and hatred for the outsider, and virulent anti-Semitism. 5. The fairy tales thus played a significant role, hitherto little recognized outside of Germany, in the development of modern integral German nationalism. "They have enabled us to understand that we, the German people, bear the power and conditions in ourselves to take up and carry on the civilization of old times, that we are a folk with a high historical mission" (8). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about a German language storytelling conference held on September 1-4, 2008 in Bursfelde, Germany. Subjects under discussion included the influence of popular stories on the creation and production of fairy tales, newspaper reports, and biographies. Presenters included European storytelling scientists Thomas Geider, Gundula Hubrich-Messow, and Sabine Wienker-Piepho.

Presents the fairy tale 'Dearest Roland,' translated from the German by Lore Segal.

The article offers information on the task force of juvenile literature on whether fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm are still attractive to young readers, to be held in Hofgeismar, Germany on November 16 until 18, 2012.

Examines the fractures in the literary fairy tale in Germany. Analysis of a feminist on the relationship of women authors to the written fairy tale; Influence of Grimm tradition on the European imagination; Issues on earlier feminist literary criticism.