January Meme: German Folklore

[selenak]

Old joke from my university days: German folklore owes most of its existence to the Romantic Age. (And the ones immediately before and after, but English-speaking folk lump all those writers and professors together under the label "Romantic", so for the purposes of this entry, let's stick with that, otherwise the post will be over by the time I've explained about Sturm und Drang, Klassik, Vormärz und Biedermeier in addition to Romantik.) This is because in the last few decades of the 18th century, when our literature started to explode on the European scene, so to speak, one of the ways German-speaking writers got over the the long time inferiority complex which could be titled "The French Are Better At Everything" was to discover folk songs as "natural poetry". (Another was chucking out Corneille and Racine out of the window as literary models in favour of Shakespeare, but let's not get distracted.) Not only was it suddenly en vogue to collect Lieder, but to write them (and make them sound as if they were folk songs). This was also part of an attempt to establish a national identity, because there wasn't one in geographical terms. There was no Germany, there were a lot of German principalities. There was also first the French Revolution, and then Napoleon, who came, saw, and put the nominally still existing Holy Roman Empire out of its misery, reordering the various German states and establishing the Code Napoleon as law while he was at it. (This last one, btw, was not a bad thing, because it was a far more modern and equal civil code than anything our various principalities had to offer at that point.) So all that sudden interest in folk songs as a form of artistic expression, in medieval epics such as the Nibelungenlied and medieval poetry per se, and then, a generation later, also in folklore, with the Brothers Grimm the foremost (though neither the first nor the last) champions of collecting and publishing same came with a heavy dose of national identity searching (including wondering whether there was such a thing, and whether shared folklore and songs could contribute to define it).

However, as opposed to modern day anthropologists, all those German writers didn't exactly "collect", as in, hunt down songs and stories and transcribe them. It would be more accurately to say that a great many of them tried their hands and, well, writing their own. This is what happened with a famous three volume supposed collection of folk songs and folklore by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which was hugely influential, but even critics at the time could tell most of the stories and songs weren't centuries old but had sprung from the imagination of the two authors and were how they imagined folk songs and folk lore should sound like. Now, Brentano and Armin were a poet and a writer respectively. The Brothers Grimm, on the other hand, were scholars. They had gotten a taste of folklore collecting when Brentano & Arnim asked them to help out with the third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. But as it turned out, Brentano especially was so productive with his own stuff that what the Grimms had collected wasn't needed. They'd caught the bug, though, and decided to publish their own collection. That one, thought they, would follow the scholarly ideal of tracing down folklore in various villages across the countryside and transcribing it,thus securing German oral tradition for posterity.

Fat chance. For starters, these were two librarians (and future university professors) we're talking about. They hardly knew any "simple villagers". And while Wilhelm was more socially inclined than the sharp-tongued Jacob, they had, in pratical terms, not much of an idea of how to communicate with the idealized German peasant they'd imagined. (There were some very awkward and fruitless encounters indeed.) Which meant that most of the fairy tales that ended up in the famous collection didn't hail from old, wise villagers in Hesse or other German principalities, they came from mostly young women out of the Grimms' social circle (meaning they were well-read middle class and in two cases even nobility), several of whom came from French emigré families (Protestants who had fled France when Louis XIV had revoked the edict of Nantes, several generations earlier). The sources closest to the "wise old peasant" ideal were a) a middle aged female pub owner, Dorothea Viehmann, who accordingly was the only fairy tale source named by the Grimms in the foreword to the first edition, and b) two old soldiers. (If you're wondering why several of the fairy tales feature soldiers coming home from the wars and out of a job...) But, like I said: the majority of fairy tales were contributed by well-read young women who were, of course, very much influenced by their education. And then Wilhelm Grimm took editing up to a new level so those fairy tales at least sounded like they had a shared tone. It's Wiilhelm who invented that tone, who came up with "Es war einmal..."/"Once upon a time" at the beginning and "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" at the end (wich doesn't mean "and they lived happily ever after, btw; the German ending, literally translated, means "and if they didn't die, they're still alive today". If you compare, say, the fairy tale "The Princess and the Frog" (or, as it is known in German, "The Frog King") in the first edition to the second and then to the last edition published during Wilhelm's life time, the single opening paragraph evolves into one and a half pages in the last version (which is the one most often reprinted today), and incidentally, it's a showcase for Wilhelm's poetic gifts and some of his best choices of phrase. "In einer Zeit, in der das Wünschen noch geholfen hat...'" "At a time when wishing still helped..." Not a centuries old oral tradition, though. Pure 19th century Wilhelm Grimm.

However, all those songs and fairy tales then most definitely became folklore. To the point where I'm willing to bet not many people when first hearing or singing it are aware that Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn was written by the young Goethe. And there is the probably most famous and infamous example of all: Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten aka the Loreley song, originally written as an untitled poem by Heinrich Heine for his second poetry collection, Das Buch der Lieder. A composer named Friedrich Silcher then came up with an earworm of a melody for it, and it got enthusiastically sung as a folk song by Germans thereafter to this very day. Chances are that if you've ever heard a German folk song, it will be this one. (Well, okay, this one and "Muß I denn", but the later is Elvis' fault.)

The reason why I said its progression from poem by the sublimely ironic Heinrich Heine to folk song of folk songs is both famous and infamous is this: come 1933, the Nazis set out to eliminate, as you all know, artists from German cultural canon who were Jewish. Heine was. What's more, he also was famous for his biting satire about the German politics and habits of his day, and ended up in French (!) exile. (Being best buddies with Karl Marx. Though he also hung out with the Rothschilds, Parisian branch. Only Heine.) Otoh there was no way you could eliminate the Loreley song from the collective consciousness at that point. So what Goebbels & Co. did was to decree that the song would only be reprinted with the signature "old folk song, writer unknown"). If you think this was immediately revised after 1945, think again. It took a shameful time till "Text: Heinrich Heine" was restored in all reprints. (YouTube still calls it "old folk song", btw, though Heine's name duly given. )

If you're wondering: was Heine using, in his original poem, which is about a fisherman entranced by a mermaid and thus crashing on the Loreley cliff in the river Rhine, a popular fairy tale of his own day? Wellllll. Not really. The first guy who came up with the idea of using the name of the Loreley cliff as the name of a nymph whose beauty lures any man seeing it to his doom was, wait for it, Clemens Brentano (remember him?). Heine read Brentano's version and thereafter created his own.

In conclusion: German folklore: we have it! Straight from the late 18th and 19th century.

The Other Days

Comments

[sovay]

aka the Loreley song, originally written as an untitled poem by Heinrich Heine for his second poetry collection, Das Buch der Lieder. A composer named Friedrich Silcher then came up with an earworm of a melody for it, and it got enthusiastically sung as a folk song by Germans thereafter to this very day. Chances are that if you've ever heard a German folk song, it will be this one.

I learned it first as an art song, with credit to Heine, but I was definitely not in Germany at the time.

[jesuswasbatman]

This is not a purely German phenomenon - a lot of "English" and "Scottish" folklore comes from the same era or rather later. In our case, it was partly because of the Victorian and Edwardian conviction that all rural English popular culture had to be an indescribably ancient survival of pre-Christian pagan lore, something which is more and more challenged now - for example, the theory that the famously priapic Cerne Abbas Giant was created in the seventeenth century to troll Puritan sex-phobia, and the fact that Herne the Hunter doesn't appear to have any written record prior to the alleged legend's use as a plot point in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor.

[selenak]

Right - isn't Walter Scott basically credited with inventing kilts? (Am exaggarating for comic effect, but you know what I mean.)

Back when I first read American Gods, I looked up Easter/Eostre of the Dawn, whom I did not remember from the mythology, and bascically my dictionary told me Jacob Grimm made her up. (Well, came to the wrong conclusion about her existence, not deliberately invented.) Which strikes me as a very AG twist.

[watervole]

Too true. Morris dancing (and longsword) are both cursed by this. I still know teams that claim on their websites that they are dancing a pre-Christian pagan ritual dance.

All the evidence shows that morris is 600 years old max and that the dance has evolved a lot over that period.

The Cerne Abbas giant may be a product of the English Civil War - one theory has him being made by the Dorset clubmen. He was probably intended to represent Hercules - there are traces of a lion skin or similar hanging from his arm.

Wheras the Uffington white horse is genuinely ancient (I forget which dating system they used, but it was a proper scientific one)

[gehayi]

It's Wiilhelm who invented that tone, who came up with "Es war einmal..."/"Once upon a time" at the beginning and "und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute" at the end (wich doesn't mean "and they lived happily ever after, btw; the German ending, literally translated, means "and if they didn't die, they're still alive today".

The version I remember is, "And if they have not died, then they are living still." I always liked that better than "happily ever after."

[selenak]

That is a beautiful translation! *adapts*

[watervole]

Ironically, a lot of standard British fairy tales come from the Brothers Grimm. And Charles Perrault.

Several Scottish 'folk' songs that I know were written by a member of the nobility long after the event.

but as you say, stories become folk if they are told and retold, regardless of their origins. Pantomime is an important medium for preserving some folk stories in England.

[selenak]

*nods* Yes, and I think those 19th century intellectuals would be very pleased to have contributed to this!

[princessofgeeks]

This so cool. Thank you so much. I would read any amount of posts like this and recs for books.

THANK YOU.

[selenak]

You're very welcome.

[moon_custafer]

Reminds me of how a lot of modern werewolf “lore” was created by Curt Siodmak in The Wolf Man (1941.)

[selenak]

And he knew it and was proud of it, too. :)

[moon_custafer]

It gets more complicated with Bram Stoker and vampires – like, a lot of the modern imagery around vampires *is* derived from Dracula, but a lot of it is from later adaptations of Dracula. For example, Stoker did kind of base his title character on Vlad Tepes, but only in the sense that he was looking around for some cool eastern-European references and threw in a Wallachian prince without knowing anything much about the guy. That Tepes is supposed to have driven stakes through his enemies is just a coincidence.

Apologies if everyone here already knows all this; you seem like the kind of crowd who would.

[muccamukk]

Walter Scott actually got started out translating this kind of poetry out of German (the English were having a gothic moment, and he knew his audience). Then he decided to collect traditional Scottish borderland poetry, which I think involved a lot of time finding people who'd already collected them and then rewriting them so they were "better." (And he invented clan tartan, or at least the codification thereof.)

On the same note as Heine, it's apparently interesting which stories are printed in "complete" Grimm Fairy Tales, depending on the politics of the day.

[trobadora]

otherwise the post will be over by the time I've explained about Sturm und Drang, Klassik, Vormärz und Biedermeier in addition to Romantik

Ahahaha, aka the bane of my existence during my time at uni. (You could say Romanticism in the German sense was my main fandom at the time. I don't have anything against Goethe at all, but I developed a definite twitch at Goethe being called a Romantic. I think I'm still not over it. *g*)

[selenak]

I hear you. It would make Goethe twitch, too, of course. :) I remember the first time I read some English critic refer to Goethe, even if it was in the capacity of his writing "The Sorrows of Young Werther" as a Romantic, and I basically howled in protest.

[trobadora]

Not to mention the poor Romantics themselves! Twitchiness for EVERYONE. *g* (I would totally have howled with you.)

(Also, any scholarship that folds all of those different and defining-themselves-against-the-other literary movements and eras into the same term had better be very careful about otherwise paying attention to the differences, because if not, it's rendering itself utterly worthless. Just my not-so-humble opinion.)

[taelle]

However, as opposed to modern day anthropologists, all those German writers didn't exactly "collect", as in, hunt down songs and stories and transcribe them. It would be more accurately to say that a great many of them tried their hands and, well, writing their own.

I've been told by a lit scholar friend that Alexander Pushkin in Russia did both - as in, genuinely transcribed songs (as a Russian nobleman he was a bit more used to contact with actual peasants, I guess) and then, sending the collected materials to an anthropologist friend, added in a letter "BTW, I loved this so much I tried writing some, so six songs in this collection are mine, guess which". Nobody still knows which.

[moon_custafer]

Related: Tor.com has an article up on "Snow-White and Rose-Red":
https://www.tor.com/2018/01/25/creating-a-tale-of-sisterhood-snow-white-and-rose-red/

[msilverstar]

I've read the whole tiny states of of Germany history, but it occurs to me that there may not have been A Country but there was certainly A Language Family that was not clearly related as opposed to, say, Romantic, Polish or Hungarian. How much did that play in the unification vs. Napoleon?

[selenak]

Ah, that's another tricky matter. Just consider that even today, you have German as the language of both Germany and Austria, one of the three official languages of Switzerland, and of course it's still spoken in the regions that in history sometimes belonged to France, sometimes to a German state, like Alsace, aka the Elsass, or Southern Tyrolia (today in Italy). One of the most important of Napoleon's marshals, Michel Ney, hailed from Saarlouis (which is in the Saarland; the Saarland like Alsace switched between France and Germany throughout history but today is German) and was fluent in German, which was helpful to him when he negotiating with Bavarians (who became Napoleon's allies, as opposed to the Prussians, who were enemies).

As mentioned in my post, pre-Napoleon, the Holy Roman Empire of German Nationality, to give its full medieval title, nominally still existed. Which meant that the Emperor, who since centuries had been always a Habsburg, i.e. Austrian), was officially the liege lord of all the German princes. This, however, had not stopped the Thirty Years War which was mainly carried out on German-speaking soil and depleted those territories of two thirds of their population, and thereafter the authority of the Emperor in the Protestant principalities was very titular indeed. And then, some generations later, you had the scenario where Prussia as the up and coming power among the German principalities conducted a war against the Empress Maria Theresia (with Frederick II. not recognizing her as Empress, which is why he referred to her as "The Queen of Hungary" only; the excuse for this was that the Salic law made it impossible for women to inherit the crown), and powers like Russia and France siding with Austria while the other German principalities basically checked who was geographically closer and more scary, the Prussians or the Austrians, and allied themselves accordingly.

Certainly the shock of the French Revolution, the emerging idea of the nation-state and then later French occupation (and/or domination, depending on whether you were a defeated or an allied state) galvanized, among many other things, the attempt to establish a national identity based on a shared language and culture. And leaving aside that some of that cultural patriotism and "fight against the French invaders" feelings would later lead to disastrous 19th century nationalism, the question of whether a hypothetical German state should include Austria or not, and if it included Austria, wouldn't it then also include a lot of non-German-speaking people such as the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Poles, all of whom were part of the Austrian Empire, was never solved to anyone's satisfaction.

This is Heinrich Heine, poking fun on the post Napoleon climate in the German states, with their censorship, restrictions, Prussia as the now unquestioned dominating power and, well, the debates about whether there could be a unified Germany based on a cultural identity, in a passage from "Germany: A Winter's Tale" (Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen):

A passenger who stood by me,
Took the time to explain
That this was the Prussian “ Zollverein”,
The mighty customs chain.

The Zollverein, he explained,
Will be our people’s foundation;
It will change the divided fatherland
Into a united nation.

It will give us the external unity,
A unity that is real and material;
The Censor gives us the unity of spirit,
In reality, the most ideal.

He gives us internal unity,
Unity in thought and in feelings;
We need a united Germany to rule
Our outward and inward dealings.

[msilverstar]

Fascinating! The Customs Union concept goes back that far!